With Tariffs, Trump Wants To Make Hollywood Great Again

May 05, 2025

President Trump’s planned 100% tariff on films produced overseas weighed on entertainment company stocks early Monday, though details remain scant on how the administration intends to implement the policy.
Shares in Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount were down 2% or more in morning trading.
Trump said in a Truth Social post Sunday night that he had authorized the new tariff on films produced overseas. He called it a response to tax incentives that have lured a substantial number of Hollywood productions outside the U.S.
Films made by American studios are often shot in the United Kingdom and Canada, including this year’s highest-grossing film, “A Minecraft Movie.”
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” the president wrote. He called international filmmaking incentives “a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
Hollywood studio executives scrambled Sunday night to determine what the announcement would mean for their business. Executives said they were given no prior warning about the tariff plan and no information about how it might work.
It is unclear how such a tariff would work because movies aren’t physical goods that move through ports like most items subject to tariffs. The Trump administration would need to determine how to value a movie to apply the tariffs, as well as what the threshold would be to classify it as an import.
If other countries imposed reciprocal tariffs, it could devastate Hollywood studios, since most big-budget event films earn the majority of their revenue overseas.
Trump said he authorized the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% tariff on movies made abroad.
“We’re on it,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted on X on Sunday.
The U.S. movie industry had a $15.3 billion trade surplus in 2023 and generated a positive balance of trade with every major foreign market, according to a report from the Motion Picture Association, an industry trade group.
Some of summer’s biggest productions including “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” and “Jurassic World Rebirth” were made primarily or entirely outside the U.S.

Alexander Larmer has his doubts in The Spectator:

The problem, as so often with Trump’s Truth Social postings, is that ideology and practicality have run up against one another. The reason why many big-budget and successful movies – from Minecraft to Star Wars – are filmed outside the United States is simply because foreign governments offer favorable tax breaks on US-financed productions, reasoning that the costs of offering these breaks is outweighed by the money put into the economy when the Hollywood circus comes to town. Of course, there are still blockbusters filmed in America (Sinners was a product of Louisiana), but countries such as Canada, New Zealand and, especially, the United Kingdom offer world-class production and post-production facilities that have meant that they have been the natural centers that filmmakers have gravitated towards for decades now.
This has left Los Angeles, a city traditionally dependent on the film industry, bereft of studio dollars, and although television production has partly filled the gaps, the absence of $250 million behemoths filmed locally is noted. That most all-American of summer blockbusters, James Gunn’s Superman, was produced and shot in Cleveland and Atlanta, but also in Norway, making its categorization tricky, and Thunderbolts*, a rare Marvel movie not to be filmed primarily in the United Kingdom, set up camp in Georgia.
These films would, at least, be spared Trump’s tariff demands. But if they are to be implemented, it spells potential chaos for the industry. Gavin Newsom has been quick to suggest that Trump has no authority to introduce such tariffs – it has been announced by his communications team that, “We believe [Trump] has no authority to impose tariffs under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, since tariffs are not listed as a remedy under that law” – and it may be that this initiative founders before it begins. But if it does not, a severely beleaguered industry could be in existential trouble.

More details here:

And a palette cleanser:

The Right’s Divide Over Pronatalism

Robert VerBruggen in City Journal.

The Right’s “pronatalist” movement brings attention to a serious problem confronting modern civilization. Birthrates in America and throughout the developed world have dropped well below the approximately 2.1 births per woman required to sustain a population through natural growth.
At the same time, efforts to address this issue have revealed deep divisions within America’s evolving conservative coalition. Most notably, pro-life conservatives and the tech Right each propose their own, sometimes conflicting, solutions. Still, a handful of ideas—if framed as broad investments in children’s well-being and long-term economic vitality—could transcend these divides and even gain support beyond the fractured Right.
Frustratingly, many of the factors behind America’s declining fertility are signs of progress. Teen births and births to unmarried women have declined. Economic growth has brought more fulfilling careers and leisure options, making parenthood a tougher sell. People are also waiting longer to marry, often becoming more mature in the process.
What government policies could help address the problem? That’s where things get interesting, controversial—and occasionally a bit strange. The most straightforward approach would be a modest increase to the Child Tax Credit, which offers parents a flat tax refund per child. A recent New York Times article reported that the White House has been rounding up its own set of fertility-boosting ideas. Possibilities range from a $5,000 “baby bonus,” paid at birth, to awarding medals to mothers with at least six kids, to government-sponsored menstrual-cycle education.
Even the pro-natalists themselves are not fully aligned on these proposals. In fact, they come from such varied backgrounds that each faction can seem like a separate movement entirely.
The most notable divide is between traditional, pro-life religious conservatives—who emphasize marital stability and often oppose in vitro fertilization—and the more tech-oriented, futurist wing of the movement, exemplified by Elon Musk. Musk has at least 14 children by several women, some conceived through IVF. He reportedly has expressed particular concern about lower fertility among the higher-educated.
Both factions want more American babies, but they have different visions of who would have those babies, and how. A religious conservative might back subsidies for married couples to have children naturally and be more willing to weather the political backlash that could come from excluding single parents. A tech-bro pronatalist, by contrast, might favor subsidies for IVF and daycare, viewing marriage as largely irrelevant. And that’s before accounting for other divisions on the right over whether—and how aggressively—the state should intervene.
Pronatalism gets expensive when it involves subsidizing parents. Studies vary wildly in estimating how much of a subsidy translates to how many extra babies, and different methods of subsidizing parenthood likely yield different results. But for back-of-the-envelope purposes, it seems fair to say that it takes at least $100,000 in spending, and possibly much more, to produce one additional birth.
Why so much? Babies are expensive and time-consuming, and it takes real money to change a couple’s decision to take on such a major responsibility. Moreover, these subsidies—whether baby bonuses, tax credits over a child’s life, or childcare support—often go to people who would have had children anyway. Take a $1,000 baby bonus that boosts births by 1 percent. In that case, the government ends up spending $101,000 for every additional birth: $100,000 to the 100 families who were already planning to have a child, plus $1,000 to the one family the policy actually moved.
Bringing the fertility rate up to 2.1 from its 2023 level of about 1.6 would require roughly 1 million more births. That would cost $100 billion annually if each new birth costs a hundred grand—on top of our existing family benefits, including the Child Tax Credit, which already costs about that much. If more money is needed to affect these decisions—especially for families with higher incomes—costs will rise accordingly.

Joan Didion, O.G. Tradwife

Anika Jade Levy in UnHerd:

Like Andy Warhol, Didion saw something in American culture before the culture saw it in itself. She was ahead of her time, a sort of proto-trad-wife — a breadwinner masquerading as a beauty queen. Didion would have married into an affluent single-income household had that been her ambition, devoting herself to motherhood and family life, writing in her spare time. But, as Anolik keenly observes, Didion wanted both “the democratic fame of a popular hack and the aristocratic grandeur of an acknowledged literary genius.”
Like the tradwives that came after her, she could not suppress her careerism, nor could she suppress her appetite for fame and attention. Contemporary conservative influencers monetise the performance of motherhood and housekeeping, but Didion carved out the archetype when it still possessed an aura of newness, rejecting the burgeoning counterculture, conforming to an Old World model of femininity and making it look cool. She’s rarely credited for her supreme contribution to the phenomenon that is the socially conservative It Girl. Every time she denounced the spirit of the age — the Sexual Revolution, the women’s movement, almost every aspect of the Sixties — her star rose higher.
But Didion continually failed to live up to her traditional aspirations, even in her fantasies. She told Dr. MacKinnon: “I keep hearing that small girls imagine themselves as brides, princesses in wedding dresses. I never had: my earliest picture of myself being ‘married’ was getting a divorce, leaving a courthouse in a South-American city wearing dark sunglasses and getting my picture taken.” Indeed, at no point did she encourage her daughter, Quintana, to date or consider marriage. She spent the bulk of these therapeutic sessions bemoaning Quintana’s unwillingness to seize the opportunities Didion found for her in photography. She continually expressed frustration that Quintana’s focus seems to be on “leaving her job rather than going somewhere specific”.
It apparently didn’t occur to Didion that work might not provide the same salvation for Quintana as it did for her and Dunne. Status was Didion’s prescription for alcoholism and depression. Superficiality was her prized maternal wisdom. She told her doctor, “I had said repeatedly over the past few years — when Quintana expressed unhappiness or hopelessness about her situation — I had tried to explain that she had to make a decision to be happy. That there was an actual benefit to putting on a happy face”. Over the course of a few-dozen sessions, the author cobbled together an impression of Quintana’s well-being based on her enthusiasm for her professional life and her capacity to manage basic daily tasks. In one of her first sessions, Didion expressed confusion at Quintana’s backslide into addiction, saying, “She had seemed fine, a blizzard of efficiency — I had even today gotten a check for medical reimbursement, with the paperwork all efficiently highlighted, ready for filing”. And that’s what the Didion estate has delivered with Notes: efficient paperwork, ready for filing.

✍️Feature

New Yorker: Bill Burr Doesn’t Want to Talk Politics

🌐 Foreign

🏛️ Domestic

📊 2028

🗞️ Media

💻 Tech

Politico: Crypto Regulation Talks in the Senate

🧬 Health

Politico: Senators reveal bipartisan plan to lower drug costs

✝️ Religion

🏈Sports

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

🪶Quote

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”

— Joan Didion

The Transom