Tangle - Trump proposes 100% tariff on films.

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he will authorize the Department of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative to institute a 100% tariff on movies produced in foreign countries. “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!,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!”Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.Take the survey: What do you think of Trump’s proposed tariff? Let us know!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer, Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. And welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are gonna be talking about the Hollywood tariffs. I don't really know what else to call them.

They're tariffs on foreign films. So I guess not really Hollywood tariffs, but tariffs related to Hollywood and the entertainment industry. We're gonna break down exactly what happened, share some views from the Hollywood and the entertainment industry. We're going to break down exactly what happened, share some views from the left and the right. And today, I'm in a special section, some views from industry leaders on this topic,

and then I'm going to give my take. It is Wednesday, May 7th, a beautiful day here in Philadelphia. And with that, I'm going to send it over to John for today's main topic. Thanks Isaac. And welcome everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, president Donald Trump announced the United States would halt its strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, claiming that the group told the U S that they don't want to fight anymore.

Number two, president Trump hosted hosted Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the White House, where the leaders said they would continue discussing a new trade relationship. Carney also pushed back on Trump's recent allusions to Canada becoming the 51st state, saying the country won't be for sale ever. 3. The Supreme Court permitted the Trump administration to enforce its ban on transgendered troops serving in the military, while an appeals court hears a challenge to the order and the high court deliberates whether to take up the case.

4. India fired missiles into Pakistan, targeting several locations it said were linked to militants who carried out last month's mass shooting in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. Pakistan said at least 26 people were killed in the strikes, and its prime minister called the bombings an act of war. At number five, the Trump administration reportedly plans to transport a group of immigrants to Libya on a U.S. military plane, which could depart as soon as Wednesday. and I said to a couple of people, what do you think? I've done some very strong research over the last week and we're making very few movies now.

Hollywood is being destroyed. Now you have an incompetent, grossly incompetent governor that allows that to happen. So I'm not just blaming other nations, but other nations, a lot of them, have stolen our movie industry. And I'm saying, if you're not willing to make a movie inside the United States and we should have a tariff on movies that come in and

Not only that governments are actually giving big money. I mean is supporting them financially so that's sort of a threat to our country in a sense and It's been a very popular thing. I can tell you what movie movie makers love it On Sunday President Donald Trump announced that he will authorize the Department of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative to Institute a 100% tariff on movies produced in foreign countries 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 USA 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," Trump posted on Truth Social. "'We want movies made in America again.' "'We're on it,' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted on X later that evening. The U.S. film and TV industry provides an estimated 2.3 million direct and indirect jobs according to the latest Motion Picture Association economic impact report from 2023, accounting for a $15.3 billion trade surplus with other countries. However, Hollywood television and movie production has declined in recent years, as wildfires,

COVID work stoppages, increased permitting fees, and a 148-day writer strike have caused production costs to increase in California. Before his inauguration in January, Trump asked actors John Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone to address these challenges as special ambassadors to the entertainment industry. Voight said the plan he presented to the president calls for tariffs in certain limited circumstances, as well as incentives for domestic-made movies. In response to President Trump's tariff announcement, California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed

a $7.5 billion tax credit program to incentivize more domestic production in the film and TV industry. America continues to be a film powerhouse, and California is all in to bring more production here, Newsom said. Building on our own successful state program, we're eager to partner with the Trump administration to further strengthen domestic production and make America film again. The Trump administration has not responded to Newsom's offer, which is broadly representative of an approach

favored by industry professionals in Newsom's home state. Foreign governments have also offered tax credits and rebates to productions to their countries, capturing a greater portion of the estimated $248 billion global content production market in 2025. Film executives are uncertain about how a tariff on a digital good would be collected, if it would be applied to co-produced films, and how the plan could circumvent a World

Trade Organization moratorium on taxation of digital trade. "'Nobody knows how the proposal would work, and I don't suspect we will for a while,' said one high-level film industry executive. "'Is it on domestically funded foreign productions? Is it on foreign-funded ones? Is the tariff on film revenues or on film costs on those projects, or both?' In a statement on Monday, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said, no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President,

and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President,

and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and former U.S. President, and then Isaac's take. We'll be right back after this quick break.

All right, first up, let's start with what the right is saying. The right is mixed on the proposal, with some arguing it will help revitalize the film industry. Others say Hollywood's problems are of its own making and Trump shouldn't try to bail them out. In Red State, Jennifer Oliver O'Connell said, Trump looks to launch the golden age of Hollywood. Before President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he named actor-writer-producer Sylvester Stallone, director-producer-actor Mel Gibson, and actor John Voight as special envoys to Hollywood. This wasn't merely a symbolic gesture, and now Trump has taken it a step further.

On Sunday, the president once again took to Truth Social to announce the second phase of this plan to make Hollywood great again," O'Connell wrote. Regulation, local restrictions, and the high cost of doing business in Los Angeles have driven Hollywood filmmakers out of the state of California, and some of them take the additional risk of filming overseas in order to get the job done. Just as Georgia and South Carolina have built incentives to attract film production to their borders, Trump is attempting to use tariffs as an incentive to keep film production within the borders of the United States, O'Connell said.

The entertainment industry continues to wane, with fewer box office draws and streaming services removing the exclusivity of watching a film on the big screen. We'll see how industry regulars weigh in on this latest Trump move to try to change this. In The American Spectator, Paul Kengoor asked, Why is Trump protecting Hollywood? Modern Hollywood's values are antithetical to what has made America great. Its values certainly run contrary to those of Trump's supporters. The reality is that because of the leftist takeover of Tinseltown, conservative filmmakers have been forced to go abroad to make movies independently and have been blacklisted by the Hollywood left,"

Kangor wrote. There's something that President Trump particularly needs to know. Another major reason for American filmmakers bolting Hollywood for greener pastures is that the taxes in California are so outrageous that the environment for making films there is cost prohibitive. I know this from personal experience. Our 2024 Reagan movie was filmed in Oklahoma. It had to be made in Oklahoma because it could not be financially made in California. The tax rates busted the budget. We had to go to another state," Ken Gore said. That enormous tax burden was created by Democrats in California, politicians and their voters.

Donald Trump's movie tariff idea gets those Democrats who despise him off the hook. They will have no incentive to change their behavior. Hollywood's liberal filmmakers and actors who complain about the high taxes on their movies will continue to do what they do, vote for the liberal politicians who slap them with the high taxes. Alright that is what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. The left criticizes the tariffs, but argue they're unlikely to be implemented. Some say Trump's justification for the move is legally dubious.

In CNN, Alison Morrow said Trump's Hollywood tariff threat is already unraveling. As we've come to expect with Trump 2.0, it's not clear whether the president is serious. John Voight, who serves as one of Trump's Hollywood ambassadors, said Monday that he met with Trump recently to discuss certain tax provisions that can help the industry, some provisions that can be extended and others that could be revived or instituted. But that sounds like mostly incentives, not tariffs, Marrow wrote. If he's serious about foreign movie tariffs, though, Trump would be opening a new front in a war that he has no real plan to win, and he'd be admitting to the world that

his love of tariffs is not, as he's long claimed, tied to some deep concern about trade imbalances, but rather a desire to wield an economic cudgel. Movies are not goods that travel in and out of ports. They're intellectual property that fall under the service's economy. To tax a movie like a good, the administration would have to clearly define what a movie's value is and determine how much overseas production would classify a project as an import, Marrow said. The goods and services distinction matters a great deal, because for all of Trump's

outrage over the fact that America buys more goods from overseas than it sells, the U.S. exports far more services than it imports. In fact, the U.S. is the biggest exporter of services in the world. That gives our trade partners leverage they could use against us. In Politico, Ankush Cardori suggested the terrorists are more than just political theater. Hollywood immediately panned the idea and portrayed it as an existential threat to the U.S. film and TV industry. By early afternoon today on the East Coast, the an existential threat to the U.S. film and TV industry. By early afternoon today on the East Coast, the White House seemed to back off.

Trump's threats, however, may prove to be more than just political theater, Cardori wrote. That's because the president's claim that there's some sort of national security threat to Hollywood underscored the unprecedented legal position that the administration has taken to support the bulk of Trump's proposed tariff regime across all sectors. To support his tariffs, Trump had already declared emergencies concerning the opioid crisis, illegal immigration, and, much more broadly, trade deficits. Many independent experts generally reject these claims, Cardore said.

But the notion that there might be a national security threat resulting from filmmakers producing their movies overseas seemed almost designed to draw attention to the novelty and expansiveness of the administration's legal position. In fact, the Trump administration's position would effectively provide the president with carte blanche to institute tariffs anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat. Alright, that is it for what the right and the left are saying, which brings us to what the entertainment industry is saying. Some industry writers say that the tariffs risk significant retaliation from other countries.

Others suggest Trump has no clear means to implement the duties. In Bloomberg, Lucas Shaw wrote about how the tariffs could impact Hollywood. It's not clear if he plans to tax movies that are shot overseas and finished in the U.S. That covers a lot of current Hollywood output. It's also not clear if he plans to tax TV shows made overseas for international audiences but available in the U.S., aka much of Netflix's catalog, Shaw said. Studios are producing more projects in countries such as Canada, New Zealand, and the UK because it's cheaper to do so.

Many countries offer lucrative incentives and more favorable labor conditions. The cost of producing in the US spiked recently after domestic labor unions negotiated better terms for their members. The soaring cost of production is also why many shoots have left Los Angeles for markets like Georgia and New Mexico. The risk of any tariffs on foreign production is that they increase the likelihood that other countries retaliate. While a lot of physical production has moved abroad, the U.S. entertainment industry has a positive trade balance with every market in the world,

according to the Motion Picture Association, Shaw wrote. The business exports more than three times as much as it imports, the trade group says. No foreign language film ranked among the 50 highest-grossing movies in the U.S. last year. The 10 highest-grossing movies in the world last year were all released by U.S. studios. In Vulture, Chris Lee asked, how would foreign movie tariffs even work? Studio executives, agents, and producers groused that the tariff plan was ill-conceived, lacking in details, and overall shitty for business.

Arriving just days before what can often be a bustling acquisitions marketplace at the Cannes Film Festival, studio chieftains hastily organized war rooms to discuss implications surrounding the tariffs and ponder potential courses of action. Independent producers and sales agents agonized over what many of them see as an existential threat to their business, Lee said. Call it the fix for runaway production, that is, the catch-all term for movie and TV projects intended for U.S. release that are filmed outside the country, that nobody in Hollywood wants.

Any C-suite studio executive will tell you, import taxes are a kind of theoretical impossibility given the highly interconnected international nature of modern movie making. Take this summer's Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning. While nominally a Hollywood production made by an American studio, Paramount, using American Cruise and showcasing the poster boy for American movie stardom, Tom Cruise, the movie is specifically plotted around international intrigue and was shot around the world, Lee said.

In the absence of clear standards regarding what gets tariffed and how, the knock-on effect for globetrotting franchises such as James Bond and The Fast and the Furious would be devastating. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for some opinions from the left and the right and some industry leaders, which brings us to my take.

Imagine for a moment that you were the president. You have run on a specific brand of economic nationalism that prioritizes building out the American workforce and protecting famously American industries. You're looking out at the vast landscape of things that used to be dominated by America and thinking, how can I bring those back? Real American patriots,

they might not appreciate your methods, but you have a hard time not appreciating all the excitement. You're activating the kind of nostalgia that makes reopening Alcatraz and dumping federal dollars into coal mining feel innovative. You also happen to love tariffs. I mean, really, really, really love tariffs.

Now imagine you your Oscar-winning actor, John Voight. The president, the man with American nostalgia coursing through his veins and apparently unlimited power to irrevocably alter American industries with the stroke of a pen. He wants your help. You've been nicknamed special ambassador to Hollywood tasked with reinvigorating an industry that for all kinds of complicated reasons has been struggling to make money or maintain employment. You take this new role seriously. You spend months meeting with the stakeholders in the entertainment industry, the executives, studios, streamers, unions, guilds, every imaginable person you can gathering

Intel on the best path forward. You draft a plan. You take that plan to Mar-a-Lago, the Hollywood-esque nickname, Winter White House, and you pitch him on it. In the meeting, you mention all the various ways the president can help Hollywood, and you make passing mention of tariffs. The president hears one of his favorite words, and before you know it, a social media post promising 100% tariffs on movies

has upended the entire industry. He's also dynamited your plans so much so that you were compelled to release the entire thing publicly, just to make it clear that your months of planning and executing did not result in one simple trick to save Hollywood. Is that what happened here? It kind of seems like that's what happened here.

Here's the Hollywood Reporter, quote, "'Voight's plan involves a combination of federal tax incentives, tax code changes, co-production plan involves a combination of federal tax incentives, tax code changes, co-production treaties and infrastructure subsidies for theater owners, production and post-production companies, according to a press release sent Monday by a representative for Voight and his business partner, Stephen Paul. The release made only a brief mention of tariffs, which Trump in a Sunday social media post said he would apply to productions produced outside the United States.

Voight's plan involves tariffs in certain limited circumstances. The details from Voight come after a tumultuous 24 hours in which Trump announced a 100% tariff on films produced outside the U.S. before the White House walked that back a bit Monday morning." Shares of Netflix, Disney, and other media properties fell on the news, which is that good? Are they the bad guys? I suppose they are, but they are also the biggest players in the space right now, the ones actually making stuff and employing people. So I don't know if it's a good sign that there is a negative market reaction to something that's supposed

to help their industry. For whatever it's worth, I'm not even sure what any of this could even mean. Trump is right that the entertainment industry is struggling. He went to the industry and asked them what they needed. And guess what? They said they needed more money, tax incentives, subsidies, some other subsidies, and maybe a little more sprinkle of subsidies.

I don't think we should be surprised by that. If Trump decided to bring back any industry to its golden age and then he asked industry leaders what he could do for them, most union heads, executives, and seasoned employees would come back and say, could you please cut taxes and write some checks? That's the rational self-interested thing for them to say. It's also unsurprising that the tariffs president heard the industry's woes and decided the medicine they needed was a dose of tariffs. Still, I'm making assumptions about how this happened instead of giving my opinion on the

policy mostly because I have no idea how a tariff on movies would even work or if there are currently tariffs on movies at all. Trump responded to an industry asking him for tax incentives and subsidies by basically telling them where they can and can't shoot movies, then giving them a thumbs up and then walking it back. It's kind of like passing judgment on a policy to bring back newspapers by taxing people with websites. Can you even do that? How?

Here's something from Wired, quote, Tariffs, as Trump deploys them, are meant to make importing so financially unappealing that companies make their products in the U.S. Movies, however, aren't cars or iPhones. They don't come over on ships and get taxed at the port. Would the tariffs apply to foreign films acquired by U.S. distributors? If a U.S. studio makes a film but shoots a handful of scenes overseas, does that count? Would TV shows be included?

Would new movies shot abroad, like the forthcoming Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning, find themselves getting a hefty bill if the tariffs went into effect down the line? Answers have not been forthcoming. In a Monday LinkedIn post, cinema analyst David Hancock wrote that, "'It's quite hard to see what the U.S. government can actually tariff.

Frequently, films are digital files, and the rights to them are often split between creators, financiers, and other entities. This line of inquiry raises the essential question here. Even taking Trump's argument that tariffs are the best way to help the industry, how would they even be enforced? How much of a film would need to be shot in the US to avoid the duty? Would it apply to all parts of the production process? It's hard to seriously consider the proposal when the president seems not to have accounted

for any practical considerations of the move. I don't know the right solution to the film industry's problems, but I suspect I'm not the only one tired of the approach Trump is prescribing. Obviously, I'm a bit out of my lane on this one, so in case you can't tell, I'm having a little fun today, but I do know Hollywood is genuinely struggling.

And a lot of people with much more subject expertise than me have spilled a lot of ink about how to fix it. Some more pointed than others. The most compelling pieces I've read have focused on reforming streaming services, business models, reducing production costs and cutting regulations here in the U S and in California specifically. Few of them include tariffs at all. Even Voight didn't see them as a critical part of his plan.

And, just for the record, Hollywood has a massive trade surplus in the entertainment industry that this plan now threatens. Trump, as has been the case for weeks now, seems to be invigorated by all this. Gaining steam with every announcement and pen stroke, raucously cheering as he watches the room tilt in every economic sector. To his credit, he does earnestly seem to want to help the industry, but if the plan is to just do more tariffs

than to borrow one of Trump's phrases, the cure will be worse than the problem itself. We'll be right back after this quick break. itself. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right. That is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one is from Donna in Columbus, Ohio. Donna said, my verdict is still out on Tangle's approach to the news.

I don't think you were doing America any favors by pitting left and right against each other every day. It just makes each side hate each other a little more. I usually skip down to the your take section because I got pissed off when I read the side of the aisle that I disagree with. Do you think it is healthy for America to put left and right against each other every day?

Okay, so other than why do you count social security as part of the federal budget, some version of this question is probably the one we get the most from readers. Historically, our answer has been some version of this. We are representing a spectrum that already exists. Each side has spectrums within it we want to include, and we trust our readers to be able to confront their own biases individually. We present the arguments, not pit them against each other. However, your point is always stuck in the back of our heads. We are the people who are trying to break down partisan barriers

and encourage you to listen to arguments and perspectives different from your own. Aren't we working against our mission by telling you what the left and right are saying? Why not give you the arguments for and against or the people who are optimistic and pessimistic or anything else depending on the day? Wouldn't that help us better achieve our mission?

It is frankly a very good point and it's one we've never really been able to argue away. So we're constantly evaluating our approach to this format. For instance, you may have noticed today that we featured a, what the entertainment industry is saying section, which is part of this process of us trying new things. We are always willing to make a change if it makes sense.

So you can look out for some different headers in our summary sections in the next few weeks. Lastly, we're also always willing to stop something new if it doesn't make sense. A new approach would also have its drawbacks too. We want to be careful not to both sides an issue by giving you a pro and con when a 50-50 split isn't representative of the spectrum of opinions. We also recognize that there is utility in knowing what the consensus on the left and the right actually is, and that it's also a healthy thing for people to see the quote unquote other side

making good arguments or having diversity of opinion, which is one big reason we have so far stuck to the format we have. Still, don't be shy to reach out like this if you have any feedback for us as we tinker with that summary section in our podcast. All right, that is it for today's questions answered. I'm gonna send it back to John for the rest of the pod and I'll see you guys tomorrow.

Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac. Here's your under the radar story for today, folks. The final unresolved election from 2024 may be coming to an end. On Monday, a federal judge directed the North Carolina Elections Board to certify the results of the state's Supreme Court election, in which Democrat Allison Riggs defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin in a race that was decided by less than 1,000 votes.

The decision follows rulings by state appeals courts that questioned the validity of thousands of ballots from overseas military personnel and their family members who did not meet ID documentation requirements when they voted, as well as absentee voters who checked a box on their ballot indicating that they have never lived in the United States. However, U.S. District Judge Richard Myers, who was appointed by President Trump in 2019, found that invalidating those ballots six months after the election would violate voters' equal protection rights. found that invalidating those ballots six months after the election would violate voters' equal protection rights. Myers delayed his order for seven days to give Griffin the opportunity to appeal the

decision. Fox News has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. Alright next up is our numbers section. The total value of exports from the U.S. film and TV industry in 2023 was $22.6 billion according to the Motion Picture Association. The total trade surplus for the industry in 2023 was $15.3 billion. The percentage of the total U.S. trade surplus in services attributable to the film and television industry in 2023 is 6%. The percent change in the number of shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area between

Q4 2023 and Q4 2024 is plus 6.2%. The percent change in the number of shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area between 2019 and 2024 was minus 31.3 percent. The U.S. share of global film and TV production spending in 2024 was 45 percent. The percent change in U.S. film and television production spending from 2021 to 2024 was minus 28 percent. And the United Kingdom and Canada's share of global film and television production spending in 2024, respectively, was 19% and 18%. And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. When an English woman faced an ultimatum from her ex-partner, me or the animals, she chose

the animals. Now, 90-year-old Barbie Keele has rescued approximately 10,000, dedicating 54 years of her life to her 12-acre animal rescue sanctuary, which runs entirely on donations and volunteer work. Currently, Keele looks after more than 600 animals. Some days, I'm shattered. It's hard work," she said. But then, I get a little nose boop, or a face face peers up at me and I remember why I'm doing

this. My animals come first and always will. Good News Network has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. Alright everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, please go to retangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace.

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was Editors and Engineers by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will K. Back and associate editors Hunter Kaspersen, Audrey Morehead, Bailey Saul, Lindsey Knuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Dying 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership,

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