Hollywood Under Tariffs - Trump’s War Against the Cinema of the World

Donald Trump has once again put an idea into the world that can hardly be surpassed in absurdity. In an angry post on his platform Truth Social, he declared that the movie business had been “stolen from Hollywood and the United States.” The solution? A one hundred percent import tariff on all films produced outside the US. In other words, Trump wants to impose a tax on global cinema that, logically speaking, must come to nothing. Because how exactly do you tax something that no longer arrives in shipping ports? Films today do not cross the Atlantic in reels of celluloid but in data streams. Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, Arte, BBC - they broadcast in seconds via servers, satellites, and fiber-optic cables. There is no customs barrier one must pass digitally, no containers to stop, and no physical goods to stamp. Trump’s announcement seems like an attempt to stop the wind with a barrier.

Even less clear is what legal basis such a tariff could rest upon. In his trade wars against China or the EU, Trump had relied on national security law or on the narrative of an “economic emergency” due to trade deficits. But while cars or steel could, with a great deal of political will, be forced under the label of “security interest,” it is difficult to declare a French art film or a Korean series a threat to national defense. An Oscar winner from Mexico is not a tank rolling across American borders. What remains is yet another piece of evidence of Trump’s view of culture as property. For him, cinema is not global art but an American monopoly that must be defended like a piece of land or an industrial facility. The fact that it was precisely the openness to international impulses that once made Hollywood great - from European exiles in the 1930s to Italian directors in the 1960s and to global co-productions of the present - does not fit into this logic. In Trump’s world every foreign image is a threat, every script from outside a theft.

One could laugh about all of this if it were not so symptomatic. The President of the United States declares the world a customs territory in which culture must dance only to his tune. In truth, however, the global successes of films like “Parasite” or “Everything Everywhere All at Once” show that art does not think in borders and that diversity is not theft but enrichment. Trump, however, sells people the illusion that one can freeze an industry that has long since become boundless with tariffs.

A president who wants to tax imagination - that sounds like bad satire, but it is bitter reality. And it reveals a dangerous pattern: where Trump has no answers, he resorts to punitive tariffs, as if the world could be ordered with ever higher walls. But culture knows no wall, no customs house, no gate at which it could be stopped. It finds its way - even past a president who believes he can expropriate the cinema of the world with a stroke of his pen.