Donald Trump wasn’t having a great weekend PR-wise on May 4. In a “Meet the Press” interview, he reiterated to Kristen Welker that American girls don’t need so many dolls (or pencils), and answered “I don’t know” when asked if his job was to support the Constitution. Even a social media “Star Wars” meme from his staff went sideways, depicting him as a Sith Lord. Needless to say, his critics were not kind.
Yet if Trump has a genius for anything, it’s his ability to change the subject — to turn the audience’s focus in another direction in the way a magician does. And with a few random but apparently poorly thought-out social media posts later that day, about imposing tariffs on movies made outside the U.S. and reopening Alcatraz as a prison, he accomplished exactly that, whatever the real goal was.
In the chaos that followed, Hollywood received a pronounced taste of what it’s like being pulled into Trump’s media circus, and the uncertainty that comes from dealing with a president of the United States who appears to tweet first and think about consequences and logistics later.
To ardent Trump supporters, it’s all part of a master plan, the often-invoked “art of the deal.” To less sympathetic ears, Trump often sounds like a philosophy student who didn’t bother to do the reading, trying to wing his way through a final exam. Or to cast him in the cinematic terms in which biographer Tim O’Brien has said Trump sees himself, like Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” he appears to be “making this up as I go.”
Perhaps more than anything, these two examples of Trump winging it reveal how suggestible the current president is in terms of being influenced by the last voice he hears — or, perhaps, the latest thing he sees.
Despite having the formidable intelligence of the U.S. government at his disposal, Trump seemingly reacts based on his most recent meeting or dinner companions at Mar-a-Lago — in the case of the film tariff proposal, one of his anointed “ambassadors to Hollywood” and full-throated supporter, Jon Voight.
As for the sudden interest in Alcatraz, the Hollywood Reporter fairly persuasively connected the dots to Trump’s local PBS station running the 1979 Clint Eastwood thriller “Escape From Alcatraz,” which would be ironic given both the platform (he’s watching public TV while trying to dismantle it?) and title, inasmuch as the movie hinges on the time a prisoner held on “The Rock” might have gotten away.
“CNN NewsNight” host Abby Phillip framed the film-tariff threat as “a question about Trump’s decision-making,” noting how based on the example of Voight and others, “The last person to whisper in his ear gets, apparently, an executive order.”
Up the cable dial, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell seemed to get it right when he pointedly dismissed the movie-tariff idea as something “that will never happen” — especially given that Trump subsequently admitted he hadn’t done any due diligence in terms of consulting with key constituencies.
While Hollywood might express understandable concern, O’Donnell said, “It is a complete waste of your time to even think about that very, very stupid statement.”
By then, though, the damage had been done, as studio executives, and the news outlets devoted to covering them, scrambled to grasp the feasibility of what had been proposed, becoming the latest bystanders to take an unscheduled ride aboard the Trump train, a dizzying spin on the carousel of craziness.
What would the film tariffs mean? How would they or could they be implemented? Were they even legal? What would actually qualify as “foreign” for these purposes? And did Voight really say, again, that Trump is the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln?
Within days, Trump and the rest of the world seemed to have moved on to other matters — Trump’s latest insults to Canada (and the new prime minister’s responses), the conflict between India and Pakistan, electing the first American Pope, trying to negotiate actual trade deals (and retreating in the standoff with China), accepting a $400 million presidential jet from Qatar — making the fleeting frenzy over film tariffs feel, with the benefit of hindsight, like some kind of weird dream.
At first blush, Trump’s tweets can easily look like a form of calculated distraction — more reminiscent of“The Prestige” than “Escape From Alcatraz,” intended to get the audience focusing their attention elsewhere. Yet that might be giving him too much credit, considering how quickly the administration backtracked on the tariff talk, and how fast the topic of reopening Alcatraz sank into the sunset.
Trying to discern Trump’s motivations occupies a lot of time, but the simplest explanations are often the best, and more than anything, he seems to suffer from what can best be described as verbal incontinence.
It’s difficult, frankly, to get the media and those swept up in such two-day controversies to recognize that, since there’s scant precedent for a president of the United States whose pronouncements have to be viewed with this level of skepticism. Many CEOs, moreover, have made the calculated decision that there’s little to be gained by commenting and running the risk of antagonizing the White House.
Instead, executives engaged in a private strategizing session, since it would be corporate malpractice not to plan for the possibility of something that might dramatically impact their business. Although there’s no assurance when — or even if — Trump will circle back to the idea. With any luck (at least from Hollywood’s perspective), “foreign film tariffs” could become the new “Infrastructure Week,” which, as CNN noted, turned into a recurring joke from the first Trump administration.
Not that the passing of one fabricated crisis won’t be followed by others. After all, what will Trump come up with the next time he dines with one of his “Hollywood ambassadors,” Mel Gibson or Sylvester Stallone? Tune in next week to find out.
To be fair, journalists are understandably programmed to chase stories, and the loonier they sound, the better they are. With Trump, though, the press and the interested parties might want to consider a variation on another old saw — namely, if something this president says sounds too good (or bad, or just plain bonkers) to be true, that’s probably because it is.