President Trump is on shaky legal ground if he follows through on a plan to impose a 100% tariff on films produced “in foreign lands.” Experts agree that the pledge is legally dubious and also faces logistical hurdles.
“How on earth are they going to enforce this?” asks Schuyler Moore, a partner at Greenberg Glusker. “The whole thing is a goofball — I can’t imagine how they’re going to do this in practice.”
Since his tariff spree began in February, Trump has relied on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives him broad authority to regulate international trade in times of national emergency.
But the law includes specific allowances — called the Berman amendments — for the free flow of informational materials, including films.
“The 1994 amendment made crystal clear that the president did not have the power under [IEEPA] to stop the flow of foreign audiovisual media,” says Anupam Chander, a Georgetown University law professor.
The issue came up in 2020, when Trump sought to use IEEPA to ban TikTok. A federal judge granted an injunction, finding that the ban violated the Berman amendments. Congress had to pass a separate law explicitly authorizing the TikTok ban.
“There’s nothing in the law that allows him to bar movies instead of short videos,” Chander says.
The White House has not spelled out the legal authority Trump would use to tariff foreign-made films. Less than 24 hours after announcing the decision in a post on Truth Social, the president was already tempering his tone. The administration has said that “no final decisions” have been made on the issue, and Trump will hold industry meetings before moving ahead.
Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, says that IEEPA is the “most legally risky path,” due to the Berman amendments. But she says that Trump could seek to impose tariffs on foreign films under Section 301, which is meant to combat unfair trade practices, or Section 232, which allows for tariffs in cases of national security.
“If I were advising him, I think he could do it with 301,” Kilcrease says. “To me, it’s the most clear legal basis.”
However, she noted it would take several months of investigation to authorize such tariffs.
“I see a lot of challenges here,” says Marney Cheek, an attorney who specializes in international trade at Covington & Burling. “This is not a place where we’ve imposed tariffs in the past, so there’s not a clear road map.”
In his initial message, Trump alluded to national security concerns, saying foreign-made films pose an issue of “messaging and propaganda.” But runaway production has been a concern since the 1950s, so it would be hard to cast it as an emergent threat.
“It’s pretty far out there to suggest this is a security risk,” says Steven Bank, a law professor at UCLA. “It’d be hard to imagine it standing up in court on a national security basis.”
If Trump moves forward, a movie studio or other injured party could seek an injunction to block the tariffs. Even if they were allowed to go into effect, there are practical questions about what transactions would be affected. Tariffs are typically imposed on goods; films are services, which are transmitted digitally and not through ports of entry. Other countries have placed quotas on importation of Hollywood films, or imposed a ticket tax at theaters on foreign films.
Rep. Howard Berman, a Democrat from Los Angeles, was a champion of Hollywood over 15 terms in office. He offered his initial IEEPA amendment in 1988, after the government seized books and magazines from embargoed countries.
“The fact that we disapprove of the government of a particular country ought not to inhibit our dialogue with the people who suffer under those governments,” Berman said at the time. “We are strongest and most influential when we embody the freedoms to which others aspire.”
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