Last week’s Trump tariff announcements resulted in taxes being imposed on the tiny and remote Heard and McDonald Islands, a group of uninhabited volcanic islands near Antarctica. The group of of islands covered in glaciers is only home to penguins, who ultimately got swept into the US president’s base 10% tariff decision.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands form an external territory of Australia. Included among the remotest places on Earth, they are only accessible via a two-week boat voyage from Perth. According to the Guardian, they were are believed to have been last visited by people nearly 10 years ago. Despite the outposts’ isolated status as “external territories” of Australia, they somehow gained a separate mention in Trump’s tariff list. The decision eventually sounded the alarm over the possibility of the tariff impositions being an AI hallucination.

Nevertheless, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stood his ground when asked about the sweeping tariffs that even red-flagged fears of a repeat of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash crisis.

ALSO READ

Why Trump imposed tariffs on penguin islands?

CBS News posed the much-contested question, raising concerns about a penguins being taxed. “Why are the Heard and McDonald Islands, which don’t export to the United States and are quite literally inhabited by penguins, why do they face a 10% tariff? Did You use AI to generate this?”

The CBS anchor’s valid inquiry into the matter brought about Howard Lutnick’s vehement denial of artificial intelligence being used to formulate the tariff regime draft. “No. No, the idea — look, the idea is that there are no countries left off,” he said, making an argument for no territory being off topic. And so, the sound reason behind the penguins tax? “If you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us.”

He added, “The President know that, he’s tired of it, and he’s going to fix that.” As the CBS anchor pressed ahead, Lutnick held on to his position on the matter, saying, “These ridiculous loopholes. And now what he’s trying to say is, I’m going to fix the trade deficit of the United States of America. It’s a national security issue.”

ALSO READ

Further stressing on how Trump is “tired of getting ripped off by the rest of the world,” Lutnick said, “We need to make medicine. We need to make semiconductors. We need to make ships. We need to have steel and aluminum. Come on, we need the greatness of America to actually be built in America.”

US trade with uninhabited islands

Probing trade connections with the island solely inhabited by penguins, the Guardian reported that while the territory has a fishery, neither are any building in sight nor human habitation. Even then, the World Bank’s export data stated that the US imported products worth US $1.4 million from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022. While nearly all of these made for “machinery and electrical” imports, it remains unclear what these products were. In the five years preceding the 2022 data, imports from the islands penguins call their home ranged from US $15,000 to US $325,000 per year.