WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to slap tariffs on foreign-made films and launch a new bond program for studios to boost Los Angeles’ movie-making dominance.
“I’m going to be putting tariffs on movies from outside of the country — if they’re made in Canada, if they’re made in all these places, because Los Angeles has lost the movie industry,” Trump told The California Post Friday in the Oval Office.
“And so I’m going to put tariffs on and we’re going to be doing bonds, some bonds, some low-interest bonds, for the movie industry. We’ll bring it back.”
Trump threatened in September to impose a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, but he has not yet done so. His bond plan could help studios finance work — though he did not detail how it would work.
“I know a lot of people in that industry,” Trump added. “And they said, ‘We are dying not to go to Canada, not to go to Australia, not to go to places that take 20 hours on an airplane. … We would love to do it in Los Angeles,’ and I’ll be getting that.”
Trump added: “I want to bring the movie business back to Los Angeles in particular.”
The president, who hosted 14 seasons of the New York-filmed show “The Apprentice” on NBC between 2004 and 2015, bemoaned the current state of the entertainment industry.
Trump said he might watch the Oscars, due to be hosted by Conan O’Brien, in March, but that “it would be nice to have it the way it used to be, so glamorous.”
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“I used to love the Oscars,” Trump said. “You know, after they started hitting me — they had that moron Robert De Niro and others — and their ratings went down the tubes.”
