Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Sunday defended President Trump’s tariffs even against uninhabited islands, saying they are intended to guard against loopholes.
In an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” moderator Margaret Brennan asked why uninhabited territories, like the Heard and McDonald Islands, were included on the list that Trump displayed in the Rose Garden, noting they “don't export to the United States and are quite literally inhabited by penguins.”
“Why do they face a 10 percent tariff? Did you use AI to generate this?” Brennan added.
“No. No,” Lutnick said. “Look, the idea is that there are no countries left off.”
“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 continued.
He pointed to China’s response to Trump’s tariffs in 2018 as an example, saying, “They just built through other countries, through America.”
“The President knows that. He's tired of it, and he's going to fix that,” Lutnick 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,’ so he ended those loopholes, 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. 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.’ And he's tired of getting ripped off by the rest of the world.”
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