Trump's Tariffs Extend to Islands Where Penguins Are the Only Residents

On April 2 (maybe so no one would think it was an April Fool's joke), Donald Trump announced that the United States would be imposing sweeping tariffs on many countries around the world. These tariffs are going to have a major impact on the global economy and may cost Americans thousands of dollars a year.

Trump has argued that all of this pain will be worth it because of the new economy that it will eventually build. Some have begun to suspect, though, that this plan is not super well thought out. Why do they think that? Well maybe it's in part because Trump has imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands. Here's what we know about the penguin islands that Trump put tariffs on.

Yes. Trump has imposed tariffs on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, uninhabited islands near Antarctica where only penguins live. The territories are technically a part of Australia but are incredibly hard to access, as you can only get to them via a two-week boat voyage from Australia. According to The Guardian, it's been nearly a decade since a single human being visited the islands.

The islands were one of several territories of Australia's to be listed separately in Trump's list, and Trump apparently plans to impose a 10 percent tariff on all imports from the island. To be super clear, though, there are no imports from the island. Penguins don't make manufactured goods or services; they are penguins, and they are thankfully going to remain blissfully unaware of the new tax that has been levied against them.

It's unclear how or why these uninhabited islands wound up as part of Trump's broader tariff agenda, but they were one of several Australian territories that got swept up in the tariffs. Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Christmas Island, and Norfolk Island were all part of the tariffs as well, and while these islands do have inhabitants, none of them are significant trading partners with the United States.

In the minutes after Trump first announced his wide-ranging tariffs, experts were scrambling both to understand what the tariffs were and to understand how the administration had come up with the numbers to support them. The story of Heard and McDonald Islands being swept up in them is just a smaller microcosm of the confusing way in which these tariffs were implemented.

There are plenty of economists who don't think that tariffs make sense regardless of how they're implemented. Almost all experts agree, though, that these arbitrary tariffs that seem like they were set through the use of a dartboard are not likely to create good feelings in the global economy.

The stock market dropped precipitously in the aftermath of the tariff announcement, and now, many are bracing for what this might mean for the economy in the long term. In the short term, you're likely to see plenty of memes about taxing penguins on your various feeds.