AUSTIN FIDO

I DON’T know who will be the next prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, but they'll have a tough job making sense of a world hell-bent on declining into nonsense.

Much of that nonsense comes from one man: Donald Trump erratically bullying his way to a global recession, using an approach that geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan has dubbed “the fire hose of chaos.” As of April 16, Zeihan notes, the Trump administration had announced 95 tariff policies in 45 days – and that number has doubtless gone up since.

Trump says he wants new trade deals, but the daily wheel-and-come-again tariffs have left America’s trading partners baffled about what any deal might look like (and, more importantly, whether the US will honour it for longer than a round of golf).

Things aren’t going well domestically for America either. Trump appointed Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to root out wasteful public sector spending. Musk’s campaign has mostly seen the US lay off cadres of food-safety experts, people attending to the country’s national parks, and chunks of the crew trying to counter America’s bird flu epidemic (mostly rehired because “whoops” – breathtaking efficiency from a department of efficiency).

Musk has efficiently cratered his own business interests. Tesla’s sales dropped 20 per cent and profits plummeted 70 per cent in just the first quarter of 2025. He’s also done a good job of filleting the IRS. In March, the Washington Post reported US tax revenue could drop by up to ten per cent thanks to DOGE’s cutbacks. That’s not a tax cut, it’s a cut in the country’s ability to collect tax – a reduction in government efficiency, if you will.

Cutting taxes or even trashing national parks can be a legitimate policy, of course. But we were told the American system relied on checks, balances, and the delicate interplay of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. To shut down the IRS, you should elect representatives to pursue that policy through legislation. The last time one guy treated the US tax system like his personal plaything, the country had a revolution to make sure it never happened again. And yet, almost 250 years later, America is governed by fiat. How did it get into this mess?

I think the flaw is embedded in the US Constitution. By late 18th-century standards, it’s a remarkable document. It established a government predicated on immutable individual freedoms channelled into democratically elected representation, not a divine right to rule.

But there’s also a crisis of imagination in the US Constitution. It’s a system to control and constrain a monarch, not eliminate it. The king becomes a president, elected rather than appointed by God, but fundamentally, the US Constitution perceives a state with a single leader who outweighs everyone else in government.

When he doesn’t like the law, Trump can dismiss judges as unelected “activists” and ignore rulings. His current use of tariffs is based in part on declaring an emergency he’s claiming as ju