Trump, Catalan-language cinema, and anti-European self-loathing

The Trump administration report that justifies the imposition of the tariffs we've been talking about all the time it day It includes cinema in Catalan, Basque, and Galician in its list of trade barriers.The report was prepared by the US government's Department of Commerce and is titled precisely that, Foreign trade barriers, although it could also have been titled Memorial of grievances, given that—as could not be otherwise—Trump also practices victimhood and whining, and he does so in his own pachydermic way. Regarding the issue at hand, there is a paragraph in the report in question instills these drops of rat poison against linguistic diversity: "Every three days that a film from a non-EU country is shown, another one from the language in the Spanish language must be shown." In favor of the report's authors, we note the use of the construction "official language of Spain other than Spanish" to refer to Catalan, Basque, and Galician, instead of "co-official language," as many media outlets around us insist on repeating.

What the report doesn't mention (because the authors ignore it, or more likely, deliberately forget it) is that the European measures don't so much seek to discriminate against US film production as to protect European cinema from the abuses of the North American industry over European distributors and exhibitors. The "if you want the Hollywood success of the moment, you must also take—and must show—x more titles that you probably didn't want or weren't interested in, but that you are forced to." As for movie theaters (but we can extrapolate this to the rest of economic activities), Trump's famous tariffs and protectionist measures don't so much seek to compensate for alleged European excesses at the expense of US interests, but rather to maintain an economic hegemony that, by extension, is also cultural.

This is not a trivial fact and serves to remind the mini-Trumpists running around of something that is, on the other hand, obvious: that, in the way Trump and his entourage see the world, Catalan is a search for the eye, a nuisance that must be eliminated – exactly the same as any minority: they are the ones with intolerance to what anus. As there has to be everything, we have not only an extreme right that enthusiastically applauds Trump's challenges (while blaming everything on immigrants and some other of the "dictatorships" they see everywhere, such as the woke) but also combative opinion-makers who are captivated by the US president's displays of raw power, and who are subsequently caught in a fit of anti-European self-loathing. Ultimately, they reason, Trump is right, and Europe is a mess. They would do well to ask themselves what Catalonia would have been like within a Spanish state that had not been part of the European Union.