[This article by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay was also published by Global Research. You can read it here.]
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” —Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th President of the United States, 1861-1865.
“I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me: ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” —George W. Bush (1946- ), American President, 2001-2009, (in George Bush: God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq’, The Guardian, Oct. 7. 2005).
“I really do believe we have ‘God on our side’,” —Donald Trump (1946- ), (in a speech to the ‘Evangelicals for Trump Coalition’, on January 3, 2020
“The 1929 Great Depression was so wide, so deep, and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and U.S. unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilizing it by discharging five functions:
(1) Maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods [basic necessities];
(2) providing countercyclical, or at least stable, long-term lending;
(3) policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates;
(4) ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies;
(5) acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in financial crisis.”
—Charles Kindleberger (1910-2003), American economic historian and author of The Great Depression 1929-1939, (1973)
***
The United States radical government of real estate mogul Donald Trump, in office since just a few weeks, is full of plutocratic oligarchs, and it is led by a deeply flawed president who is convinced that he has all the knowledge in the world all by himself. He seems to believe that his country should not import or export any product and live isolated in economic autarky.
An Unhinged President
The last two weeks of January will go down in history as presenting the most questionable and unhinged behavior of any newly elected American president.
Never before, indeed, has such a flurry of dictatorial presidential decrees come from the Oval Office, some in violation of existing laws adopted by the US Congress and of the US constitutional system of checks and balances, as if the US government had suddenly become the business of a single individual. Add to that Donald Trump’s bizarre and increasingly inflammatory statements and rhetoric on a variety of topics, most of which are rarely, if ever, based on evidence, studies or sound analyses.
As far as economic issues are concerned, one has the impression that the new Trump 2.0 administration seems to have abandoned all intention and responsibility for stabilizing the international economy; he is instead promoting improvised, irrational and destabilizing policies.
In addition, many countries and even some international institutions, created after World War II under American leadership, have been the target of insults, threats and demagogic attacks by President Donald Trump. This raises many important questions.
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I. Many specialists have become concerned about the mental state of the American president and his disruptive influence on things to come
The paramount issue is Mr. Trump’s mental state. One of the first people to express fears about Donald Trump’s mental state and personality disorders is Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and his niece. On many occasions and even in a book, she has attempted to warn her fellow Americans about her uncle’s unstable mental condition.
Already on November 29, 2016, in an open letter to then President Barack Obama, three professors of psychiatry at Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford universities, had come to a similar conclusion regarding Donald Trump’s symptoms of psychosis. Their conclusion was that Donald Trump was exhibiting “widely reported symptoms of mental instability, including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality,” and this “lead them to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office of president.”
Other mental specialists have since raised alarms and documented here and here, and in books, about how Donald Trump’s unstable mental state and personality disorder, (i.e. his desire for domination, his grandiose sense of self-importance, his lack of conscience and empathy and his absence of guilt, shame or remorse, etc.), could be a danger for the United States and for the world.
[N.B.: Such character traits and behaviors are among the main symptoms of those individuals suffering from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, according to the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Only about 1% of a large population displays symptoms of the mental disease of psychopathy or of sociopathy.]
Moreover, according to former FBI director, James Comey, Donald Trump also seems to have the mentality of a gangster and of a con man, with a mind filled with malice and wickedness, ready to violate any law, treaty, practice or convention to advance his personal interests. It is important to remember that Donald Trump was criminally convicted on May 30, 2024, and will go down in history as the only individual with a criminal record before occupying the White House.
Trump is also known for having encouraged violence by his cult of extreme followers, especially by the raging mob of insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol building, on January 6, 2021, in order to overthrow the results of the November 2020 presidential election.
As a matter of fact, a more than 800-page report on the insurrection against the U.S. Capitol building just released by U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith, on Tuesday, January 14, concluded that
“Donald Trump engaged in an ‘unprecedented criminal effort’ to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election… and the evidence would have been enough to convict Trump at trial.”
One can also notice Trump’s cavalier betrayal of his oath of office to the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, one of his first acts once back in power was to grant a complete pardon, commuting the prison sentences, or vowing to dismiss the cases of more than 1,500 violent rioters, some of them convicted of seditious conspiracy, including individuals convicted of assaulting police officers. He did not consider the fact that the January 6 insurrection caused more than 100 injuries and several deaths of policemen.
II. Trump’s gratuitous insults, threats and attacks against several countries
A second source of concern is the increasing aggressiveness in Donald Trump’s remarks. Indeed, President Trump 2.0 has multiplied threats, insults and gratuitous attacks against a large number of countries, including Panama, Mexico, Cuba, Columbia, Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia, China, Iran, etc. The list is getting longer on a daily basis.
This is most counter productive to world peace and prosperity. It would be much more useful to the world if he could better assume his great political responsibilities, instead of adopting the imperialist posture of another century.
III. Donald Trump’s tricks to profit financially from his office
A third issue is about President Trump’s seemingly lack of judgement with his recent launching of speculative meme crypto ‘currencies’ for his organization and for his immediate family. Not only have we seen the issuance of his own commemorative $TRUMP crypto token on the Solana blockchain, but also one for his wife, a $MELANIA token and even another one for his daughter Ivanka (who has publicly denounced the operation).
Such crypto memecoins have no real intrinsic value. Their owners can only make money if they sell them to someone else at a higher price than they bought them. That is tantamount to a Ponzi scheme.
Nevertheless, such instruments are financial speculative gimmicks that could, in theory, earn Trump millions of dollars by abusing the credulity of some of his followers. It is also possible that they are in violation of an article of the American Constitution, which prohibits a president from enriching himself personally as a consequence of his position or of his policies (Art. II, sec. 1, par. 7).
IV. The longtime economic and defense cooperation between Canada and the United States is at risk
Donald Trump seems to have developed a special animosity towards Canada and its government. Indeed, the neighboring country of Canada has recently been the target of insults, threats and attacks from President Trump.
This may come as a surprise because Canada is a member of the British Commonwealth, besides being a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in 1949. Moreover, since 1957, Canada and the United States are partners in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) agreement, whose function is to defend North American air sovereignty.
In addition, Canada is part of the 1989 Canada – United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States, which was expanded to include Mexico in 1994, under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This latest agreement was renegotiated in 2019-2020 at the request of President Trump 1.0, and is known as the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement of 2020 (USMCA). It came into force on July 1, 2020. A review of the agreement is scheduled every six years, with such a review on line for next year, in 2026.
[Image: Outgoing Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sign the agreement during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 30, 2018. (Public Domain)]
Nevertheless and without any trilateral consultation, President Trump has threatened to unilaterally impose 25% tariffs on American imports of goods and services from Canada and from Mexico, claiming that the US borders with these countries are not well enough controlled against illegal immigrants and the drug trade (fentanyl) entering the US. (Trump has gone even further in proposing that Canada annex itself to the United States!)
If these ill-advised, self-destructive tariff policies were to be applied, they would destroy the mutually beneficial and longstanding industrial cooperation between Canada and the United States. For instance, there has been such a close cooperation in the automobile sector since 1965. The same applies to the energy sector (oil, gas, electricity) and resource sector (iron ore, steel, aluminum, etc.).
It is difficult not to agree with a Wall Street journal editorial, which said that a trade war against Canada and Mexico would be “the dumbest trade war in history”. Moreover, it would be brought about in total intellectual confusion.
Nevertheless, that is precisely what Donald Trump did on Saturday, February 1st, (while relying on an obscure 1977 statute about a state of national emergency), when he hit Mexico and Canada with a unilateral 25% import tax on most American imports from these two countries, to be applied as of Tuesday, February 4, 2025. —In so doing, the US government violated the renewed trade agreement between the three countries, an agreement that President Trump himself signed in 2020.
However, to show how improvised, arbitrary and chaotic things can be, President Trump announced on Monday February 3rd that tarifs on US imports from Mexico and Canada would be postponed for 30 days.
Such a delay, however, will have a cost, namely the one of maintaining uncertainty and vulnerability for Mexican and Canadian companies. This could have negative consequences for their investments and exports.
Conclusions
Something is definitively wrong and worrying about US President Donald Trump. His mental state is questionable considering his behavior and his erratic, reckless and delusional statements.
He has made gratuitous insults, threats and attacks against many countries, including close allies, and would seem to have no hesitation in provoking an international trade war. Moreover, his rhetoric seems to get more and more violent as time goes by.
Such pronouncements and threats could be very disruptive politically and economically to international relations. This could lead to a drop in international trade, throw many economies into a severe economic recession, and possibly be a repetition of the policy mistakes of 1929-1939, which led to an economic depression.
President Trump would be well advised to refrain from creating havoc in the world. He should tone down his insults, threats and attacks against other sovereign countries and against international institutions.
In this day and age, when the threat of a nuclear conflict still exists and is indeed very present, it is no time to yield to impulsive actions and to adopt improvised policies. It is a time for cooler heads and for rationality to prevail, with the aim of making the world more peaceful and more prosperous for all.
*
International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals “The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” of the book about geopolitics “The New American Empire“, and the recent book, in French, “La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018“. He was Minister of Trade and Industry (1976-79) in the Lévesque government. He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University. Please visit Dr Tremblay’s site or email to a friend here.
Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles
by Rodrigue Tremblay, Preface by Paul Kurtz
Publisher: Prometheus (April 27, 2010)
Hardcover: 300 pages
ISBN-10: 1616141727
ISBN-13: 978-1616141721
Humanists have long contended that morality is a strictly human concern and should be independent of religious creeds and dogma. This principle was clearly articulated in the two Humanist Manifestos issued in the mid-twentieth century and in Humanist Manifesto 2000, which appeared at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Now this code for global ethics further elaborates ten humanist principles designed for a world community that is growing ever closer together. In the face of the obvious challenges to international stability-from nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, economic turmoil, and reactionary and sometimes violent religious movements-a code based on the “natural dignity and inherent worth of all human beings” is needed more than ever. In separate chapters the author delves into the issues surrounding these ten humanist principles: preserving individual dignity and equality, respecting life and property, tolerance, sharing, preventing domination of others, eliminating superstition, conserving the natural environment, resolving differences cooperatively without resort to violence or war, political and economic democracy, and providing for universal education. This forward-looking, optimistic, and eminently reasonable discussion of humanist ideals makes an important contribution to laying the foundations for a just and peaceable global community.
Wait a minute.
They do this on Trump but not Biden or Pelosi?
I don't cheer for the DemoCRIPS or RepubliBLOODS but most presidents suffer from narcissism and disconnect from reality. Also, there are sociopathic traits that work well in business and politics to get into the top...
I can't think of a better way to sabotage what might have been a timely, well reasoned expose of DJT's betrayal of the MAGA base than citing as an authority James Comey. And then resurrecting the completely debunked J6 PsyOp, is as shameful as any of the whoppers Trump has spewed. It's playing to the cheap seats, and that's not who reads your substack.