N.B.: Below is an excerpt (part 1 of 3) of my upcoming talk this weekend at the 2025 South-North Exchange on Theory, Culture, and Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad de México (UACM). The theme of this year’s meeting is “New scenarios in the dispute of rights: authoritarianism, polarization, and democracy.”

Is President Donald J. Trump carrying out an autogolpe or “self-coup” in order to assume full dictatorial powers during his remaining time in office? After all, like the great Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in the 1930s and 40s, Trump has for all practical purposes been ruling by decree since he re-assumed the office of president in January of this year. As of today, for example (see here), Trump has signed no less than 157 executive orders (#14147 through #14303) during the first few months of his second term, but which one of these 157 decrees is the most dangerous or legally dubious one? For me, it’s the first round of tariffs he announced on 1 Feb. 2025, when he signed Executive Order #14193 (“Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across our Northern Border“). Let me explain:

Although this presidential decree attempted to impose an across-the-board tariff of 25% on nearly all goods imported into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico (I say “attempted” because Trump soon backed down), the tariffs themselves are not (from a purely legal perspective) what I found most objectionable about this executive order. No, what I found even more worrisome was that Trump’s decree purported to abrogate a standing treaty, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Although President Trump backed down (he postponed the enforcement of the tariffs against Canada and Mexico on two separate occasions and then removed those tariffs altogether from his “Liberation Day” decree on 2 April), his initial instinct was to use the pretext of an emergency (drug smuggling) to effectively abrogate an entire treaty in all but name!

Next, I will explain why President Trump’s attempt to annul the USMCA and his subsequent rounds of worldwide tariffs remind me of a deep puzzle in constitutional law known as Gödel’s Loophole, a supposed “inner contradiction” in the U.S. Constitution that was discovered by the logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel …