Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tried Sunday to defend the Trump administration slapping tariffs on islands populated only by penguins by suggesting that ships could stop there in order to dodge duties.
“The idea is that there are no countries left off’’ President Trump’s tariff list, Lutnick told CBS’s “Face the Nation’’ when asked whether the 10% levies targeting the remote Heard and McDonald islands in the remote Indian Ocean were a mistake, or even AI-generated.
“What happens is, if you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us,’’ he claimed. “Any country. Like, we had tariffs — the president put tariffs on China, right, in 2018 — and then what China started doing is they started going through other countries to America,’’ Lutnick said.
“They just built through other countries, through America. And so the president knows that, he’s tired of it, and he’s going to fix that,” the commerce chief said. “So basically he said, ‘Look, I can’t let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them.’ “
Moderator Margaret Brennan responded by dead-panning, “Through the Heard Islands’’ — which are several thousand miles off the coast of Australia, covered in glaciers and believed to have last been visited by a human nearly a decade ago
Lutnick contended that Trump is trying to ensure “the end of those loopholes — these ridiculous loopholes.”
The trade minister of Australia, which includes the islands in its territory, has said the US tariffs are “clearly a mistake.”
Trump’s sweeping tariffs are devastating Wall Street and threatening a global economic decline.
Lutnick told CBS News Sunday that about 50 nations have already reached out to the US to discuss the tariffs but that nothing is stopping their implementation, at least at the moment.