Trump's Tariffs: America Launches Trade War With Penguins, Not Putin
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The president's new tariffs hit economic allies and Arctic waterfowl, but not Russia for some reason
By Tim Dickinson
Tim Dickinson
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View all posts by Tim Dickinson April 2, 2025 President Donald Trump holds up a chart while speaking during a trade announcement event in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Donald Trump's obsession with tariffs has taken a dark turn, one that might be comedic gold if it weren't about to cost Americans so much hard-earned cash.
To wit: Trump is placing tariffs on countries around the globe — including even remote Antarctic islands inhabited only by penguins — while exempting the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin.
During his so-called "Liberation Day" ceremony at the Rose Garden, Trump unveiled a scheme to impose new tariffs — that is, taxes paid by American consumers — on imported goods.
The new tariffs range from a baseline of 10 percent to a high of 50 percent on goods imported from Lesotho, and 49 percent on goods from Cambodia. Americans will pay a new tariff of 34 percent on products from China and 20 percent on goods from the European Union, as well as a surprising 17 percent tariff levied on imports from staunch U.S. ally Israel.
In his ceremony, Trump claimed these new taxes are "reciprocal tariffs" — alleging that he is merely responding to tariffs and other trade barriers already imposed on American goods exported to foreign countries.
But the "tariff" percentage numbers that Trump presented (on a large chart that he hugged in the windy April weather) do not bear any direct relation to actual tariffs these countries levy. Instead, economics scribes trying to puzzle out the White House's numbers theorize that they represent each country's trade deficit with the United States, divided by the value of that country's exports to the U.S. — a metric that the Atlantic contributor James Surowiecki called "extraordinary nonsense."
Even weirder, Trump announced the imposition of a significant tariff on the uninhabited Australian territory Heard and McDonald Islands — a remote outpost populated only by penguins and other Antarctic wildlife. Trump also tariffed the Indian Ocean island territory of Diego Garcia, famously home to a military installation jointly run by the U.S. and the United Kingdom. At the same time, Trump is not levying any new tariffs on Russia, nor reportedly on Cuba, Belarus, or North Korea. (The White House told NOTUS that trade is already effectively at zero with Russia due to sanctions; however such logic didn't prevent Trump from imposing a new 10 percent tariff on Iran.)
The University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers estimates that Trump's tariffs will function like a new flat tax on American consumers, costing the average household about $5,000 a year. In a post on Bluesky, Wolfers described the new regime in unvarnished terms as: "Monstrously destructive, incoherent, ill-informed tariffs based on fabrications, imagined wrongs, discredited theories, and ignorance of decades of evidence." The "real tragedy," Wolfers added, is that the tariffs "will hurt working Americans more than anyone else."
Trump called his new tariffs "a declaration of economic independence" and alleged they would lead to greater American prosperity. The markets, however, are reacting with shock at Trump's instigation of a volatile global trade war, immediately shedding trillions in value, with the S&P 500 plunging more than 3 percent in after-hours trading.
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. The Fitch ratings agency calculates that Trump is raising the effective U.S. tariff rate from 2.5 percent to 22 percent.
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Trump Launches Trade War With Penguins, Not Putin
"This is a game changer, not only for the U.S. economy but for the global economy," said the agency's head of U.S. economic research Olu Sonola. "Many countries will likely end up in a recession. You can throw most forecasts out the door, if this tariff rate stays on for an extended period of time."
While broad, Trump's tariff power is not absolute, and limited by the legislative branch. The GOP-run Congress, in other words, could put an end to this madness at any time. If only it had a spine.
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So, why no tariffs on Russia?