Has anyone informed them how much they need to cough up?

Donald Trump’s obsession with tariffs has reached a level of absurdity that would be hilarious — if it weren’t about draining Americans' wallets.

Case in point: Trump is throwing tariffs around like confetti, targeting countries far and wide — including, bizarrely, remote Antarctic islands where the only economic activity involves penguins waddling around on glaciers.

During his self-proclaimed “Liberation Day” celebration in the White House’s Rose Garden on 2 April — because nothing screams “liberation” like new taxes on American consumers — Trump gleefully rolled out his latest tariff plan.

YouTube printscreen

Tariffs for more than half of the planet

The damage? A staggering 50% tariff on imports from Lesotho (a tiny African state), 49% on Cambodia, 34% on China, 32% on Taiwan and Switzerland, 26% on South Korea, and 24% on Japan.

A total of 60 countries on all continents are affected by the new tariffs. 

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The European Union countries were hit with a 20% tariff and — just for fun — a 17% tariff was imposed on goods from Israel, a staunch U.S. ally that is literally worshipping the American president for his support against Islamic armed groups.

Also hit with tariffs? Diego Garcia, a tiny Indian Ocean island home to a U.S.-U.K. military base (because taxing your own military makes total sense), and Norfolk Island, a sleepy Pacific outpost that somehow ended up with a 29% tariff.

Credit: The Guardian

Meanwhile, Australia itself only got slapped with a 10% tax. Understandably, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was baffled.

“I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States,” Albanese said diplomatically, before essentially shrugging and accepting the madness.

Norfolk Island’s total exports to the U.S. in 2022 amounted to a mere $270,000. Not quite an economic powerhouse, clearly.

Someone, tell the penguins the U.S. wants them to pay

But wait — there’s more.

The tariff list includes an eyebrow-raising tax on goods from Heard and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Australian territory occupied only by penguins, who surely have no idea that they are now subject to Trump’s trade war and have liability towards the U.S.

Credit: Getty Images

No tariffs for Moscow, Minsk or Pyongyang

Meanwhile, his good buddy Vladimir Putin gets a free pass for Russia, along with Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus and Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. When questioned, the White House claimed trade with Russia was already “effectively zero” due to sanctions (it isn’t), but this mysterious reasoning didn’t stop Trump from slapping a 10% tariff on Iran.

Trump thinks trade deficit can be healed with tariffs

Trump, in his usual style, insisted these are simply “reciprocal tariffs,” as if that makes them sound reasonable. According to him, he's just fighting back against other countries’ unfair trade policies.

The only problem? The numbers on his giant chart don’t match any known tariff data. Economists scratching their heads over this mess believe Trump might have pulled these figures from thin air.

More to read:
Think tank predicts new Trump tariffs will generate $500-billion annual blows to US economy

If you’re wondering what this means for the average American household, University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers has bad news: Trump’s new tariffs amount to an extra $5,000 tax on American families.

Wolfers didn’t hold back in a social media post, calling the tariffs “monstrously destructive, incoherent, ill-informed” and based on “fabrications, imagined wrongs, discredited theories, and ignorance of decades of evidence.”

James Surowiecki of The Atlantic generously described the whole thing as “extraordinary nonsense.”

The real tragedy is that these tariffs will hurt working-class Americans the most. But don’t worry — Trump calls this whole mess “a declaration of economic independence.”

The stock market disagrees. Following Trump’s announcement, global markets went into a tailspin, with the Dow Jones losing 400 points and the S&P 500 plunging more than 3% in after-hours trading, and trillions of dollars vanishing into nowhere, according to MarketWatch.

Credit: Investopedia

The effective U.S. tariff rate has just jumped from 2.5% to 22%, Fitch says. Trump’s broad imposition of trade barriers marks the reversal of a free-trade ideology pursued with almost religious zeal by the Republican Party over the last generation.

Watch the whole ceremony on YouTube but don’t bother to express your feelings in comments – the White House deactivated this feature.