The New Yorker:

By Kyle Chayka

Contrary to his image as a gilt-bedecked billionaire, Donald Trump seems poised to reign over a period of American austerity. In the name of fixing the economy and jumpstarting home-soil industries, the President may raise consumer prices, while cutting down on accessible imports and agitating for a more nationalistic, even localized, culture. It’s not just smartphones that he thinks should be manufactured in the U.S. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, he announced an effort to impose a hundred-per-cent tariff on “any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” (Intermittent capitalization is the President’s own.) Hollywood filmmaking abroad is un-American, it seems. He wrote, “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”

It’s unclear what qualifies as acceptable film production; perhaps Dennis Quaid’s laudatory 2024 bio-pic, “Reagan.” Elsewhere, Trump has been hinting at consumerist cutbacks: “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of thirty dolls,” he said during a recent Cabinet meeting. Apple juice, largely imported from China, is also set to become costlier. These public broadsides have hinted at Trump’s vision of a different American materialism: more Cybertrucks, less French wine. The image that jumps to mind is something akin to Taylor Sheridan’s latest, glamorously conservative television series, “Landman,” a portrait of brinksman oil entrepreneurship in Texas starring Billy Bob Thornton, including constant sponsored placement of Michelob Ultra beer. Big cars, bigger trucks, two-dimensional women, recalcitrant men. Or perhaps it’s the kind of film available on the Trump Media and Technology Group’s streaming service, which includes a “documentary” about lizard-like aliens.

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