The Memory Palace

The latest tremors to shake American policymaking struck Sunday night in the form of two presidential posts on Truth Social. As interesting to me as the content was the timing: They were published just 23 minutes apart.

The first ordered the Bureau of Prisons “to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.” The second ordered the Commerce Department and the U.S. trade representative to impose “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

Politico columnist Jonathan Martin described the posts as examples of “Big Red Button’ism,” calling the Alcatraz idea “the platonic ideal of a ‘Trump smash big red pop-culture button that sounds cool on paper and apply to politics’ bit … down to the Austin Powers moment when he rolls up to Fisherman’s Wharf and personally approves the very tough and nasty sharks to stock in the bay.”

True enough—but why was the big red button smashed for these two wildly different topics, which arrived like bolts from the blue? Neither had been a priority for the president or anyone else until Sunday.

My hand to God, the most likely explanation I can think of is that maybe Trump was watching Escape From Alcatraz on Air Force One and it sent him into yet another reverie about the America of his youth. Remember when we sent convicts to Alcatraz? Remember when we shot movies in U.S. locations like Alcatraz? Why don’t we do that anymore?

So he decided in that moment that we should do it again. The nice thing about being king in a country whose legislature has effectively dissolved itself is that you can tap out a few sentences on your phone and know that the world will receive them like royal decrees.

And the world has. Hollywood and its foreign counterparts are “reeling” today from Sunday’s post, with studio executives reportedly convening emergency calls to plot a way forward financially. Billions of dollars and countless jobs here and abroad will turn on a random thought that the president had, one which he may or may not lift a finger to follow through on.

Different as they are, what unites the two directives he announced is that there plainly wasn’t a moment’s thought devoted to the policy pros and cons of either. They’re best understood as dim impulses driven by the conviction that making America great necessarily requires making it more like it used to be culturally and that blunt-force executive power is the proper tool for doing so.

Not unlike a movie producer, Trump has a fantasy and the resources required—he thinks—to bring it to life. We’re all living in a demented baby boomer’s endless nostalgia trip.

Rock(s) in his head.

The kindest thing one can say about converting Alcatraz back to a prison from the popular tourist attraction it’s become is that doing so might steer the president away from one of his most sinister proposals.

Recently he fantasized about sending not just migrant gang members but American citizens to Nayib Bukele’s dungeon in El Salvador. If restoring Alcatraz to austere glory scratches his itch to perform ruthlessness toward the enemies of law and order, that’s preferable to him exiling people to foreign gulags. At least the prisoners would be on American soil, and lawyers would be only a ferry ride away.

But it’s a stupid idea in every other respect, starting with the cost. “Bringing the [crumbling] facility up to modern-day standards would require massive investments at a time when the Bureau of Prisons has been shuttering prisons for similar infrastructure issues,” the Associated Press noted of Trump’s plan. Literally everything needed to sustain a population on the island would have to be brought in by boat. Why go to all that trouble?

“Because it’s an island,” some would say. “There’s no escape.” But America already has plenty of inescapable supermax prisons to house the worst of the worst; the feds famously operate one in Florence, Colorado, for notorious offenders like the late “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski. (It’s known colloquially as “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.”) There’s been no rash of prison breaks in America, especially at ultrasecure facilities, that might plausibly require a new super-supermax facility surrounded by water. Even if there were, there’s no reason to choose Alcatraz instead of some other island to host it.

More broadly: Does anyone except Trump think that the most urgent problem with America’s prison system is that … it’s too soft?

The AP piece linked above ticks through numerous crises that have bedeviled the Bureau of Prisons in recent years, from abusive behavior by staff to warehousing immigrants amid a budget crunch to the mysterious death in custody of Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein. Instead of addressing any of that, the president wants to turn the “toughness” dial up to 11 in case the next Unabomber somehow isn’t deterred from blowing people up by the prospect of spending his life in Florence but is deterred by the prospect of spending it in San Francisco Bay.

Stupid. Although not as stupid as wanting to tariff foreign-made movies.

Movie mystery.

The Alcatraz plan at least has the virtue of clarity: The president wants to build a prison at a specific location. Whereas no one, possibly including Trump himself, seems to have the faintest idea what he means when he says he wants to tax “Movies.”

How would the value of a motion picture be assessed? Sonny Bunch, who writes regularly about film for The Bulwark, is mystified. “Is it a tariff on the entire budget of the movie?” he wondered. “Is it a tariff on the tax rebates secured from other nations? Is it a tariff on every ticket sold?”

Would a film be treated as “American-made” if some of the production work happens here and some happens abroad, as is often the case? Would it depend on whether scenes are filmed overseas, or how many? What about post-production work, like special effects? Are television shows “movies” for tariff purposes?

What about streaming? It’s easy enough to tax physical media on which films are recorded, like Blu-rays and DVDs, but that’s not the way most people watch movies anymore. (Whether our nostalgia-addled 78-year-old president understands that is anyone’s guess.) Platforms like Netflix tend “to produce locally and exploit globally, including in the core U.S. market,” one expert told Deadline. “Would a foreign-shot production ever see the light of day in America? Would it be taken off U.S. streaming services?” 

An administration intent on rolling out a policy this complicated and significant would normally have answers to obvious questions like these ready to go, and would have read in industry players before announcing it. In this case, “executives said they were given no prior warning about the tariff plan and no information about how it might work,” per the Wall Street Journal. They found out about when you and I did, when the president smashed the big red button.

Simply put, the new tariffs appear to have been cooked up more haphazardly and imposed more rashly than “Liberation Day” was, which is really saying something.

But the new policy isn’t merely a logistical nightmare. For the White House, it’s a strategic debacle in the making.

Surplus, not deficit.

For starters, there’s no trade deficit in this case.

“The U.S. movie industry had a $15.3 billion trade surplus in 2023 and generated a positive balance of trade with every major foreign market,” the Motion Picture Association told the Journal. By taxing foreign productions anyway, Trump is inviting retaliatory tariffs that will make filmmaking abroad more expensive for big American studios and potentially infeasible for smaller production companies. “Simply, it would destroy the independent sector” and the jobs that sector provides, one company spokesman warned Deadline of the new policy. 

Whether domestic studios might end up losing access to lucrative foreign box offices, where big-budget films make most of their money, is anyone’s guess. If that were to happen, the industry would shrink and America’s ability to project cultural “soft power” overseas would weaken further—a Trump specialty since he assumed office in January. That’s a lot of pain for the U.S. to absorb in the name of solving a trade imbalance that’s, er, in our favor.

Expanding the trade war on imported goods to things like film production also carries extreme risk for the United States by dragging services into the fray. We’re the largest exporter of services in the world, you know, and we routinely run trade surpluses in that sector with other countries. If the retaliatory tit-for-tat spreads from filmmaking to other services, American suppliers stand to lose more than their international counterparts do. 

Tariffing movies also exposes the legal absurdity of Trump’s tariff powers, which were granted by Congress to the president so that he can respond nimbly to “emergencies.” As silly as the emergency rationale for his Liberation Day tariffs was, i.e. that trade deficits are a national security threat per se, the idea that foreign films require sudden presidential intervention is his most ridiculous power grab yet. The best Trump could do to bootstrap a nat-sec rationale in Sunday’s Truth Social post was to claim that the American film industry is being “devastated” by production tax incentives offered by nations acting in concert and that this somehow involves “messaging and propaganda!” 

But the film industry isn’t being devastated. Domestic revenue is up nearly 16 percent since this time last year, soft ground from which to cry “emergency.” And since when is he concerned about propaganda from abroad? For one thing, he’s already (illegally) extended the deadline for China to offload its social-media spy app, TikTok, and promised as recently as yesterday to extend it again if need be. For another, the right-wing critique of Hollywood has always been that American leftists are using the entertainment industry to propagandize the country. The threat has never been from the dissolute French or communist Chinese, but from George Clooney. Tariffing foreign-made films won’t do a thing to solve that “emergency.”

There’s not a lick of sense in any of this. If the White House is keen to incentivize filmmaking in America, it could have just, er, incentivized it by promoting more generous tax breaks for production companies. 

How did we get here?

A politics of nostalgia.

I think it’s a product of how Trump views his role as president.

He’s not in office to solve momentous kitchen-table problems like how to prevent entitlements from Chernobyl-ing America’s fiscal stability or how to make groceries cheaper, a subject in which he’s shown next to no interest since the election was called on November 5. And lord knows he’s not there to uphold the Constitution or to faithfully carry out the laws, especially if doing so would undermine his own interests. The thought seems never to have occurred to him, frankly.

I sense that Trump views his job as “fixing the culture” and nine out of 10 times that “fix” calls for doing things the way America used to do them, or at least the way his nostalgia-drenched memory recalls America doing them. “A laundry list of old Boomer crap” is how one Twitter pal described the impetus behind his policy choices lately—romanticizing lost factory jobs, complaining about foreign films and kids having too many toys, reminiscing about the military glories of yesteryear. His cultural nostalgia is informed by two core beliefs, that the country was better when it was “tougher” and that it’s been weakened by foreign influences of every variety. Immigrants, trade, entertainment from abroad, it’s all “poisoning the blood.”

Alcatraz is an almost too perfect example of the first theme. No other island will do and no other supermax facility will suffice because other facilities and other islands can’t scratch the same nostalgia itch. “The island serves as a veritable time machine to a bygone era of corrections,” the AP noted, using precisely the right metaphor. Almost by definition, nothing that modern America does can be as “tough” as the America of the president’s memory. If we want to build the harshest, most punishing possible facility in which to hold the country’s worst miscreants, we must re-create the prison that captured young Donald Trump’s imagination.

He said it himself in his Truth Social post: “The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.” It’s a symbol. What it symbolizes isn’t law and order but rather the sort of ruthlessness toward undesirables that the president grew up equating with “toughness.” There’s no problem in Trump’s America that can’t be solved by being just a little more sadistic to those who deserve it, the moral foundation on which great countries are supposedly built.

Turning a tourist attraction back into the foreboding maximum-security prison it used to be is a metaphor for his entire presidency, really.

Tariffing movies is a nice illustration of the other current in his nostalgia, one that pines for an America less tainted by foreign influence. To a man of Trump’s age and nationalist disposition, I imagine that Hollywood fills the same formidable niche culturally as U.S. Steel filled industrially. They’re both not so much businesses as “symbols” of postwar American power and dominance and so both require special protection to keep them from being corrupted by parasitic foreigners. When Donald Trump was a kid and America was in its heyday, American films were in their heyday too—and they were mostly made in America. If the country is to be made great again, the same thing will need to happen.

The fact that the film industry and the American services sector more broadly each run trade surpluses gives the game away. The new tariff policy isn’t chiefly an economic project to repatriate jobs or to “save” billions of dollars, which is Trump-speak for eliminating a trade deficit. It’s a cultural project designed to purify a pillar of American identity. This is an administration that now frames its trade policy in terms of undoing “the spiritual degradation of the working class,” to borrow a nifty new bit of Marxist lingo from America’s treasury secretary. A gassy nostalgic sense of national greatness, not material abundance, is its highest priority.

Not every Trump policy position is driven by nostalgia. No right-leaning child of the Cold War has ever been as soft on Russia as he is, for instance, and he’s conspicuously less likely than trad bros with “RETVRN” in their social media bios to grumble about the difficulty of building a white-picket-fence family in modern America. But those exceptions are easily explained. The president views Russia as a model of the merciless old-school “toughness” that the United States should emulate, and he never seemed to have much use for family values relative to the simple joys of bedding models as a rich Manhattan playboy.

His isn’t a moral nostalgia but closer to the opposite. Ruthlessness toward bad behavior, not moral exhortation towards good behavior, is his M.O.

No one voted for that, you might say, but I think quite a lot of people did. I suspect the president does too. When he was asked recently about voters saying that they didn’t sign up for a global trade war by reelecting him, he answered, “Well, they did sign up for it, actually. And this is what I campaigned on.” He did—just like he campaigned on behaving ruthlessly as president toward his and the country’s enemies, particularly the foreign elements. As random as Sunday night’s posts may have seemed, they’re both perfectly in keeping with that. Promises made, promises kept.