Tariffs, executive orders and the dangerous neighbour

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/02/2025 (241 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Here we go again.

On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump officially brought in a 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminum imports into the United States. The next shoe comes later this week, when Trump has promised reciprocal tariffs on any country that has tariffs on American products.

This from a president who publicly says he’s intent on making Canada the 51st state and claims he can economically flatten our country with “the stroke of a pen.”

You might be among those who say that Trump is simply bringing his business skills to bear on government. But you’d be better off looking at it differently — in terms of how Trump’s behaviour would be interpreted if it was any other president acting that way.

Simply put: what do you do if your new neighbour suddenly acts as if they are unhinged?

In the past few weeks, Trump has stated he would “own” a redeveloped Gaza and that Palestinians would not have a right to return there. He’s planning to sign an executive order weakening enforcement of legislation that prevents U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials to land business.

He’s ordered the U.S. Mint to get rid of the penny — he’s set up a “Faith Office” in the White House to address Christian issues in a country that used to pride itself on the principle of the separation of church and state.

Another executive order claims that white South African farmers are refugees, and are welcome in America. Yet another established Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which is shuttering the federal agency that protects consumers from gouging by financial institutions. Another executive order allows a return of plastic straws. He’s ordered that toilets and dishwashers be allowed to use more water.

Trump claimed he would remove the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and in future, he would personally select performers for the centre. (He later put someone else in charge of doing the actual work at the centre.) Ordered that a “National Garden of American Heroes” of “historically important Americans” would be built “as expeditiously as possible.” That the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the “Gulf of America.”

So much of that could be done by simple legislation — Republicans, after all, control the House of Congress and the Senate.

But that would destroy the show, and the show is clearly the thing.

The problem is that “the show” ignores a fundamental part of the structure of American governance — the country’s constitution. There’s a reason why the American constitution shares power between the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judiciary — to provide meaningful controls, and clear responsibilities, to each of the three branches.

And that’s what makes Monday’s message from Vice-President JD Vance, echoed by Trump himself, so frightening — that American judges have no right to question edicts from the president.

“Judges,” Vance said, “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Judges are, of course, absolutely allowed to determine that the executive has exceeded the legitimacy of its power. The judiciary obviously should be able to rule that an executive order violates the American constitution.

And yet, no one in or outside the United States seems willing to take action when the vice-president says judges can’t enforce the law over a president’s actions.

A president who’s our new and dangerous neighbour.

So here we go again indeed. And probably, again and again and again.

The United States of America, which fought so hard to escape a king, appears to have surrendered to one.