Taxation of the Mind

Tariffs on foreign films: stupid, but meaningfully evil.

This per President Bob Roberts, er, sorry, Donald Trump: tariffs on foreign films. It’s a very, very stupid idea from a very, very stupid man. But let’s talk about it.

On one hand, this is pretty obvious and on-brand for Trump: he’s obsessed with tariffs as a magical solution to every issue (whether real or wholly imagined), and anything “foreign” makes him absolutely crap his pants. On the other hand, this is absolutely insane nonsense that serves only to stoke flames and stroke egos. This is the post:

The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated. This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda! Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately being the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!

Random capitalization? Check. Confident yet meaningless bluster? Check. Rampant Xenophobia? Check. Defiant misunderstanding with potentially disastrous consequences? Checkmate.

I’m sure we all agree that Trump’s own body of work — appearances in films like Home Alone 2, Zoolander, and Ghosts Can’t Do It — are the stuff of cinema legend on par with Orson Welles. And even if we don’t agree that, maybe pretending will make him stop.

Speaking of Orson Welles, let’s all laugh at Trump stumbling his way through a review of Citizen Kane. The clip seems to come from an abandoned Errol Morris project.

To be clear, Trump learned nothing from Citizen Kane, because that would require him to be capable of learning or growth. Trump comes across less like an appreciator of the film and more like a grade-schooler fudging a book report, which is a decent encapsulation of his approach to the presidency.

I could speculate that Trump’s idea of great cinema, indeed of “MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA”, amounts to white conservative Gone with the Wind fantasies, but I don’t have to. Trump said, in response to Parasite’s Oscar win in 2020: “Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind back, please?” In Trump’s sickeningly nativist, isolationist brain, the threat posed by films “that are produced in Foreign Lands” is not dissimilar from the threat posed by immigrants themselves; it’s the ultimate culture war extension of Trump’s dangerous fearmongering over immigration.

While it seems wrong to place any threats to foreign films in the same category as the cruel terror that Trump and his allies are wreaking on real people, with lives being needlessly destroyed, there’s connective tissue there. Trump and his white nationalist cohort are desperate to control the narrative and the culture. They hate the extent to which they don’t have the hearts and minds of cultural institutions and heavyweights.

They hate when movies like Parasite win Oscars. They hate when Lin-Manuel Miranda pulls Hamilton from the Kennedy Center. They hate when actually talented artists don’t agree with or put up with their hateful bigotry, and when real people reject their bigoted attempts at art. I could go into the reasons why MAGA doesn’t make good art, but suffice it to say that rampant ideological insanity does not lend itself to creative achievements.

So the only recourse left to MAGA types is to tax, cut funding, censor, and retaliate.
While the administration disappearing protestors is the extreme end of this practice, elsewhere on the spectrum falls Trump’s feverish desires to tax the human mind. Because true art is about expanding our experiences and worldview, not shrinking them, and MAGA hates that. Trump would much rather we live in a Gone with the Wind remake, but we can’t let that happen.

So, support your local art house theater today! Watch a foreign film and tell that guy to fuck off.