Markets are tumbling, but at least the tariff memes are gold

Donald Trump's so-called "Liberation Day" means that tariffs are suddenly everywhere. That means tariff memes are also everywhere.

The US president on Wednesday signed an executive order imposing a 10% baseline tariff on all countries, taking effect Saturday, and adding reciprocal tariffs.

Global markets plummeted on the news.

But if there's one thing you can count on amid any turmoil — financial or otherwise — it's that some people will always have a sense of humor about it, even if it's a little dark. So, social media users have been expressing their economic fears and anxieties the modern way: with memes.

Here are some of the best ones:

Enjoy, for example, the picture showing Trump yelling, "Pay the tariffs!" at a group of penguins.

Trump's tariffs include the Australian territory of the Heard Island and McDonald Islands — a pair of sub-Antarctic remote islands uninhabited by humans but home to penguins, sea birds, and seals.

The meme refers to one that originated in 2017, in which Trump appeared as if he was yelling at an 11-year-old boy who had asked to mow the White House lawn.

Another meme shows Marvel superhero Wolverine lying in bed, looking longingly at a Studio Ghibli-fied picture of former US Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin and his wife, Louise Linton, holding a sheet of new $1 bills. Mnuchin was Treasury Secretary during Trump's first term in office.

@jdcmedlock / X

Users of OpenAI's ChatGPT have recently started a trend of using the AI chatbot to turn regular photos into pictures in the distinctive style of Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind films like "Spirited Away" and "Howl's Moving Castle."

In the original photo in 2017, Mnuchin was at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C., to see the first run of $1 bills featuring his signature. At the time, the image of the chicly dressed couple posing with money quickly drew comparisons to James Bond-esque villains, but the new image makes it seem like the person who posted it might have preferred that to today's market chaos.

A different meme shows Patrick Schwarzenegger as Saxon Ratliff in season 3 of "The White Lotus," a zeitgeisty — and heavily memeified — HBO show. He plays a toxic finance bro on a family vacation.

"Look, the prices of goods going up and my portfolio going down isn't necessarily a bad thing, because I love working and that just means I need to grind even harder now," the person captioned the photo.

And who could forget the famous "Arrested Development" meme of rich matriarch Lucille Bluth estimating a banana costs $10? The joke is supposed to highlight how wealthy and out-of-touch Bluth is, but "unironically this is what's happening in America right now," one person wrote on X.

"Just got off the phone with my financial advisor, he just told me my 401k is now a 400k," a different person tweeted, alongside a photo of late comedian and actor Rodney Dangerfield.

And finally, one user tweeted an image of a stock heatmap almost entirely red with a superimposed image of Vice President JD Vance asking, "Have you said thank you once?"

Vance was photoshopped to appear to have a larger face, which has been a trending meme in recent weeks. The question is a reference to Trump and Vance's contentious meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February. In that meeting, Vance chastised Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit and asked him, "Have you said thank you once?" regarding American aid to the country, which Russia invaded in 2022.