The blunders from the Trump Administration just keep coming. At least they serve as cautionary tales for other would-be economic autocrats.
“I’m not looking to hurt the industry,” Trump whined. “I’m looking to help.”
This will sound familiar to anyone who has tried to fix their car or bake a cake or build a project in the garage, when their eight-year-old walks in, grabs a screwdriver or a knife and starts poking at your work-in-progress. Even if it wasn’t going well to start with, this isn’t going to help.
Unlike with an eight-year-old, you can’t kick Trump out, or take him by the hand and try to teach him. Trump cannot be taught. Trump knows better than anyone and everyone.
In his own eyes, the guy who grabs women by the business can be pope. (The New York Times announced that a pope had been elected; then said that he was American… leaving readers in jittery anticipation for confirmation that it wasn’t the Don.)
In his own eyes, he would be better than Jerome Powell at running the Federal Reserve Bank. To quote Trump directly: “’Too Late’ Jerome Powell is a FOOL, who doesn’t have a clue.”
This after Powell announced that the Federal Open Market Committee had defied Trump, who had demanded lower interest rates, and kept interest rates unchanged, while warning of rising unemployment and inflation risks and uncertainty about the impact and extent of tariffs.
Trump does not like to be thwarted, and gets very rude about it, too.
National Security threat
The industry he was trying to help in the quotation above is the American film industry. And if he has to tell an industry that he’s trying to help them, not hurt them, then he’s probably hurting them.
Trump, who governs by declaring spurious emergencies, then issuing executive orders to bypass Congress, and announcing his unilateral brainfarts on Truth Social, said: “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 begin 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!”
It is true that the film industry in the US has been having a hard time of it. And it is true that that is a National Security threat.
No, wait. That last part is not true. That last part is insane. Even if Hollywood shut down entirely, that would not constitute a “National Security threat”.
Movie industry
The pandemic hit the movie industry hard, with US box office revenues collapsing from $11 billion to $2 billion. In China, a single film can gross that much. Revenues have only recovered to about the $8 billion mark since then.
Andrew Donaldson, writing on PoliticsWeb, makes the excellent point that a proximate cause for declining Hollywood revenues is simply that they haven’t made great movies for the longest time. They’re trying to appeal to a lowest common denominator, playing to mindless, distracted audiences who like endless sequels of superhero movies with cheap humour and stylish action.
“One thing about [the great movies of the past] was that you could talk about them for hours after leaving the cinema,” he writes. “They provoked discussion and debate in a way that today’s dross could only ever dream of.”
Other analyses point out that consumer preferences are changing, with home television eating into movie theatre revenues. Major production houses are consolidating, while streaming services are proliferating, making it hard for consumers to access the full spectrum of available content without paying for half a dozen subscription services.
Even if they do, these subscription revenues make up for only some of the lost theatre ticket revenue. The consequence is that fewer original productions get made by fewer studios, and sold into an over-saturated streaming market locked in a price war to counter shrinking audiences.
Quality and cost
Trying to kill two birds with one stone, mostly American production companies seek out great-looking locations around the world where they can also enjoy low production costs or helpful subsidies from countries trying to market themselves as attractive destinations for both business and tourists.
Trump appears to believe that Hollywood’s search for greener pastures with lower costs is threatening Hollywood. He is determined to bring back all that foreign production nonsense, restricting access to glorious locations and increasing costs for the studios.
You can see why he needs to explain that this is supposed to help, not hurt, the industry.
Country of origin
There is no good way to track where a movie or TV production is made. Many are made in multiple locations around the world. Many are made by American movie studies, abroad. Many are filmed partially abroad, but cut and edited in the US.
According to Stephen Follows, about one third of movies on IMDb list their country of origin as the US. India comes in a distant second place, with 10%, followed by the UK at 7% and Germany at 5%.
If you consider Hollywood studios alone, however, almost 90% of titles they produce are produced in America, and that is up from less than 70% in 2013.
There is no generally accepted framework for assigning a national origin to a film, other than pointing to where the movie studio is domiciled.
Would Trump consider James Bond movies to be American films? One wonders, since all of them made extensive use of famous or exotic foreign locations.
The movie industry is based on a global supply chain, because that raises quality and reduces costs.
But Trump sees that as a problem, and promises in shouty capital letters that this is a National Security threat that he will fix. The man is unhinged.
His intervention will likely deny production locations like South Africa some revenue, which he will surely view as a win, but it will raise the costs of American films. Making movies more expensive to make is not going to save the film industry, except in Trump’s very confused noggin.
Dolls and pencils
Perhaps he has a similar view on movies as he has on children’s toys and stationery.
“All I’m saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls,” Trump told reporters, according to CNBC. “She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.”
He made the same point on multiple occasions, saying that fewer dolls or pencils at higher prices are not a big deal.
Perhaps people should also be happy with fewer movies or TV shows, at higher prices. That will surely make Hollywood great again.
In just 100 days, Trump has not only broken his own record from 2017 to achieve the lowest 100-day job approval rating since World War II, but also embraced, enthusiastically, degrowth ideology – the notion that humanity can be happy with much less.
As Reason magazine puts it: “Trump’s tariffs aren’t just bad economics – they’re a rejection of abundance, prosperity, and capitalism itself.”
Greta Thunberg will be delighted with how Trump 2.0 is turning out.
[Image: Sunset for Hollywood? Yes, if it’s up to Trump. https://www.flickr.com/photos/villamon/4423409390]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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