I am not MAGA, but I am also not a TDS zombie either. I am one of those people in the middle that evaluates the statement and actions one at a time and honestly, I think politics would be a lot better if more people would behave this way. Not everything that Trump does is good, and not everything that he does is bad either. Just like any politician that has ever existed, there is going to be a thing or two that is going to rub you the wrong way no matter where you stand. This idea that just because you are on the same "side" as someone somehow means that everything the do is good is a bunch of tribal nonsense.
Something that my liberal friends maybe don't understand is that a big part of the reason why a lot of people tend to "agree" with the Don isn't because they even bothered to look into what he is talking about but simply because of the fact that every publication picks apart every little thing that he does and spins it as negative a light as they possibly can. No matter what the guy does, they find fault with it and blow that up as much as possible. I can't point to exactly when this started, but for me it was the Koi pond in Japan where they tried to make it look like Trump was being disrespectful to the Japanese people but in reality they had intentionally not shown the part of the footage that showed Japan's leader doing the exact same thing Donald did moments before. It was remarkable to me how quickly that fake news caught on and even once the other footage was shown that the people who were pretending to be outraged by his fish pond behavior either didn't see the updated footage, or chose to stay in their cognitive dissonance bubble.
There are some things that need no misinformation to see the strange or crazy in it though, and recently a message was put out there that Trump sent out across I presume it was Truth Social at least initially.
Even though I voted for the guy twice, I can stand back and say that these are just ramblings. I mean, think of how complicated this could be to actually enforce. So, let's say it is Game of Thrones, a great deal of that was not filmed in USA and couldn't possibly have been. Is that going to have a 100% tariff on it? And let's say we were going to impose such a tax, 100% of what? This isn't a television or a sprocket or something like that, how would putting a tariff on something like this even be possible?
I realize that people go to certain parts of the world to film because maybe the nature is better or the scenery is more appropriate for what they are trying to film but there are also incentives offered by certain places, like Canada or Australia, where a film can be made cheaper than it can be in USA. The company that make the film is still American for the most part, is it not?
I'm not the smartest man on the planet, but I am also not a dope. This is an attempt to go after Gavin Newsome, obviously.
But at the same time it is kind of funny to me that the media is NOT going after this one with the same fury that they would almost anything else that the man says. I'm not going to try to dig into why that is but perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the same companies that own most entertainment, also have their fingers in the news business as well and their relative silence about this issue is curious, that is for sure.
What would have tariffs thrown on them exactly: Films? series? tv-shows? What about films that make a few scenes in New Zealand because that's the only place with that sort of topography but the rest of the film is done in Georgia... is that one hit with a tariff at a percentage of how much was filmed in New Zealand?
It is just a mind-boggling strange thing to say and to me I think that it might just be a promise that can't possibly be enforced meant to rally nationalism and also to make Gavin Newsome sweat a bit.
Plus there is also the potential for rather extreme blowback. Many of the films that are American manage to make back their excessively huge budgets almost entirely because of the Asian market, so this is mean to target China, well China has a wonderful way of fighting back.
I was surprised to find that Adam Schiff, who I know very little about other than the fact that his face creeps me out, seems to be in favor of some sort of pro-USA film legislation.
Obviously a staunch opponent of everything-related-to-Trump is not going to say he is in favor of anything Orange Man says, but he wasn't opposed to it, basically.
To me this is one of those things that I really feel it would have been better if the President had kept it to himself because I think only really low-brain individuals are going to look at this Tweet or Truth or whatever we are calling these things now and say "yeah, that sounds like a wonderful and easy-to-implement idea!"
What say ye?