Weekly Commentary: Trump Foreign Film Duty - Terrifying Farce
Dr. Aaron Lerner 9 May 2025

When President Trump announced plans to apply a 100% duty on foreign films,
anyone with a modicum of understanding of duties knew it was a farce.

It isn't just that movies don't go through U.S. Customs.

They are now imported electronically into the USA as digital files.

I'm not even going into the technical side that the USA is a party to
international agreements which provide that duties cannot be applied to such
digital files.

There isn't even a "price" for a movie for calculating duty.

So we have the President of the United States of America announcing
something absurd.

No one around him corrects him.

Are they all so profoundly clueless?

And if he is surrounded by clueless people, certainly someone working for
these people must actually know something about how the customs duty system
operates.

And they either kept this to themselves or told the people above them, and
those people close to President Trump opted not to share this information
with the Commander in Chief.

To be clear: the farcical proposal isn't what's bothering me.

What's terrifying me is the thought that the very same incredible
cluelessness - and apparent lack of interest in not being clueless before
doing something - could also apply to critical matters which impact our very
survival.

With an extremely heavy heart, we have seen in recent days that even the
best and brightest on the Trump team decline to differ with the boss.

We had Secretary of State Rubio and even VP Vance giving a succinct
one-sentence (5-second) explanation why Iran cannot be allowed to enrich
uranium.

And yet Mr. Trump says he doesn't know if Iran will be prohibited from
enriching uranium.

This was followed by dead silence.

And in the case of the American surrender to the Houthis, we have many
people on the Trump team who certainly know better chiming in in an Amen
chorus praising this dangerous development.

At least we know the situation before we entered into some arrangement which
hinged on American reliability.

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