U.S. President Donald Trump is fanning the flames of yet another trade war by calling Japan “spoiled” and threatening to hike tariffs to 35%.
Yet for all that’s been written about Trump’s tariffs, the more enduring challenge is the centralization of economic decision-making in the office of the president, the repercussions of which could outlast the Trump presidency.
The central government of the United States is defined by its separation of powers, where authority is not concentrated in a single actor but divided between an executive branch, legislative branch and a judicial branch, with each branch providing oversight over the others through a system of checks and balances. The concern about the dangers of centralized authority was fresh in the minds of the authors of the U.S. Constitution who had just achieved independence from what they saw as an example of the capricious, centralized power that they wanted to avoid, and so they consciously created a system of government that was designed to prevent that from happening in the United States.
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