“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” Donald Trump posted Sunday on Truth Social. America’s cultural elite would agree with that statement. It (OK, “we”) would even agree that globalization, and especially China—Trump’s favorite bad guy—are a big part of the problem. But slapping a 100 percent tariff on movies “produced in Foreign Lands,” as Trump is suggesting (a White House statement on Monday afternoon stated that “no final decisions have been made”), would make it harder, rather than easier, to find anything decent to watch on Saturday night. This puts the Hollywood tariff in the same culture-war category as revoking Harvard’s tax exemption, zeroing out the National Endowment for the Humanities, Trump’s hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, and evisceration of the National Science Foundation.

Hollywood’s problem is most assuredly not any kind of trade imbalance. The Motion Picture Association reported last fall that the movie business generated a $7 billion trade surplus in 2022, the most recent year for which data were available. That’s the main reason not to put tariffs on foreign production. Tariffs are supposed to address trade imbalances.

The economic problem with Hollywood is management’s global search........

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