The White House already appears to be walking back Donald Trump’s plan to place 100% tariffs on films made outside the United States.

The president, who received a Razzie award for his role in the widely panned 1990 rom-com “Ghosts Can’t Do It,” isn’t known for high-minded musings on the state of cinema. But in a rant posted to his social media account on Sunday, Trump declared that the tariffs would be necessary to save the country’s film industry.

The announcement was met with a mix of confusion and concernand a White House official said Monday that it’s not a done deal.

In a statement to The Hollywood ReporterWhite House spokesperson Kush Desai said: “Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again.”

Along with that, Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that “we’re going to meet with the industry” to discuss the plan and “make sure they’re happy with it, because we’re all about jobs.”

In a separate report, The Hollywood Reporter highlighted several unanswered questions — such as whether the tariffs would be applied retroactively to films that have already been produced; whether they would be applied to streaming platforms that produce series, like Netflix; whether and how foreign nations might retaliate; and whether tariffs would actually bring more film production back to the U.S.

On that last point, The Hollywood Reporter seems to think it’s unlikely:

To bring film production back to the U.S., encouraging Congress to pass a law with federal incentives for film studios seems like a far less disruptive and destructive option, especially considering that such tariffs aren’t guaranteed to bring production stateside. All of this raises the question of whether Trump is merely floating tariffs on the film industry to force its executives to plead with him for tariff exemptions — much like executives in other industries have done.

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

Article II, Section 8 of the Constitution states that before the start of a presidential term, the president “shall take” the oath of officeincluding a promise to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Four months ago, Donald Trump raised his right hand and for the second time swore that oath. On Sunday, he seemed to take it back.

Once presidents are in office, it can be hard to determine if their conduct violates the oath. But in Trump’s extraordinary interview with NBC’s Kristen Welkerthere was less opacity.

During a part of the interview dealing with his handling of immigration and his summary deportations of people to El Salvador, Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. In an ironic twist, his waffling about his constitutional duties came the same day his former vice president, Mike Pence, received an award honoring his fidelity to the Constitution.

As is his custom, Trump shifted responsibility to an underling.

Trump’s uncertainty about the oath he’d sworn followed similar uncertainty about the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding the Alien Enemies Act, when it unanimously reminded the administration that even people in the U.S. illegally have a right to due process of law. When Welker pressed him about whether “everyone who’s here, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process,” the president again equivocated.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer,” Trump said. “It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.”

As is his custom, Trump shifted responsibility to an underling. “I’m relying on the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi,” he told Welker. “Because I’m not involved in the legality or the illegality. I have lawyers to do that … And they’re not viewing the decision the way you said it. They don’t view it that way at all. They think it’s a totally different decision.”

But the language of the court’s Alien Enemies Act ruling and the Constitution could not be clearer.

As the Supreme Court observed (in part quoting earlier rulings), it is “‘well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law’ in the context of removal proceedings….So, the detainees are entitled to notice and opportunity to be heard ‘appropriate to the nature of the case.’”

The Fifth Amendment says that “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” That the Constitution uses the word “person,” not citizen, means that it applies to everyone. A president who respects his oath of office would not need anyone to explain that.

The true threat to the country as we know it is a president who fancies himself a king.

Oath or no oath, none of that seems to matter to the president. As he told Welker, “If the courts don’t allow us to take people out, if we had to have a court case every single — think of it. Every single person, we have millions of people. If you have millions of court cases, figure two weeks a court case, it would be 300 years.”

Recycling his campaign rhetoric, he went on, “Many people have been killed, maimed, badly hurt by illegal immigrants that came over that are from prisons and from jails and from mental institutions. And they’re hurting our people. And if we don’t get them out, we’re not going to have a country for long.”

But the true threat to the U.S. as we know it is a president who fancies himself a king and can’t fathom that his first responsibility is to always uphold the Constitution. As Lawfare’s Ben Wittes and Quinta Jurecic wrote in 2017“The presidential oath is actually the glue that holds together many of our system’s functional assumptions about the presidency and the institutional reactions to it among actors from judges to bureaucrats to the press. When large enough numbers of people within these systems doubt a president’s oath, those assumptions cease operating. They do so without anyone’s ever announcing. … They just stop working — or they work a lot less well.”

Because the Constitution lacks a specific standard for whether a president has recanted the oath, it would be difficult for the courts to step in at this particular juncture. But George Washington, in his second inaugural speech, highlighted a different remedy if such a breakdown occurs. Washington assigned the ultimate responsibility to the people and their elected representatives for holding a president to the oath of office.

Referring to “this Oath,” Washington said, “if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly, or knowingly, the injunction thereof, I may…be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony.”

Sunday may have been the first day in American history that a president has ever expressed doubt about an obligation to uphold the Constitution. In our time, as in Washington’s, when a president expresses uncertainty about his constitutional duties, it is up to all of us to set him straight.

Austin’s saps

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.

This is an adapted excerpt from the May 4 episode of “Velshi.”

Chaos and turbulence have been hallmarks of the early days of Donald Trump’s second administration, but it seems the president has landed on his messaging strategy. In a recent interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker, Trump clarified who he thinks should get the credit for things that are going well and who should get the blame for things that are going poorly.

Mahdawi spoke to the president directly, telling Trump, “I am not afraid of you.”

Following disappointing economic numbers, which Trump tried to pin on his predecessor, Joe Biden, Welker asked the president when would it become the “Trump economy.”

“It partially is right now,” Trump said. “And I really mean this. I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy because he’s done a terrible job. He did a terrible job on everything.”

The president is being remarkably transparent there, admitting to a core part of Trumpian dogma: Whatever he does is good and right, and whatever his perceived political enemies do is bad and wrong.

It’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to fight the disinformation that comes from Trump and his acolytes, and why my colleague Rachel Maddow has always urged us all, when it comes to Trump, to watch what he does and not what he says.

One of the most impactful things Trump has done in his first 100 days back in power is to cut a path of retribution designed to scare political opponents, lawyers, former government officials, schools and universities, and even just regular people away from speaking up.

But it’s also important to acknowledge the flip side of Trump’s first 100 days: The first 100 days of a new resistance that’s been building.

The courage to stand up against an emboldened second Trump administration seemed in short supply in the earliest days. But we are seeing it more and more, and, as we know, courage is contagious.

There are people like Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and legal permanent resident, whom the federal government is trying to deport on national security grounds due to his participation in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Addressing a crowd after a judge ordered his release from a federal immigration detention facility where he was held for weeks, Mahdawi spoke to the president directly, telling Trump, “I am not afraid of you.”

While multiple schools have given in to Trump’s demands, and others appeared to be deer caught in headlights, unsure of what to do, some in higher education are starting to fight back. Harvard University seems poised to be in the most powerful position, with its massive financial resources and backing. The university is suing the government after it froze $2.2 billion in federal funding for failing to meet a list of the administration’s demands. Trump now says he is revoking the school’s tax-exempt status as well because it’s “what they deserve!”

But this newfound fight isn’t just focused on elite East Coast institutions. The Washington Post reports there is a burgeoning movement among the faculty and student senates at more than half a dozen schools that have passed resolutions urging their leaders to join a NATO-like pact, which would allow them to share attorneys and pool financial resources should Trump target one of its members.

Jackson went on to urge her colleagues in the room to show “raw courage” to dispense justice without fear.

There are also judges across the country, and across the ideological spectrum, who continue to do their jobs in the face of Trump and his administration’s unrelenting public attacks.

Those attacks drew a strong and highly unusual public condemnation from a Supreme Court justice on Thursday. Without mentioning Trump by name, but saying she was addressing the “elephant in the room,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told a conference for judges, “The attacks are not random. They seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity. The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.”

Jackson went on to urge her colleagues in the room to show “raw courage” to dispense justice without fear, and told them that “history will vindicate your service.”