Decoding Trump’s chaos: What science tells us about how Canada — and the world — should respond

For Canadians still reliving the Toronto Blue Jays’ emotional 2025 World Series run , Donald Trump’s latest attacks have supplied hits of high drama and true patriot love.

And just as baseball is 90 per cent mental ( the other half physical, according to malapropism icon Yogi Berra ), trade wars aren’t purely economic.

In only the past two weeks, the U.S. president has torpedoed a trade deal , threatened Canada’s economic and cultural sovereignty, called Canada’s leadership dishonest ( and worse ) and ordered a change to the name of a lake that’s older than America itself .

Read more: Trump’s Lake Ontario bluster: Why treating his sovereignty threats as a joke is dangerous These sudden developments make the world seem dangerous and unpredictable.

Yet while the Trump administration continues to attack science by cutting research funds and promoting Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine lies , it’s nonetheless science that helps us understand the unconscious motivations driving Trump’s erratic behaviour — and how to respond.

Why have other countries given in? It’s important to delve into why only Canada and China have so far stood up to the Trump administration’s bullying.

Two principles can explain this seemingly irrational passivity.

The first is what’s known as loss aversion .

Although the monetary value is the same, studies show that people fear losing a dollar more than they like gaining a dollar.

Psychologically, losing something feels twice as painful as gaining the exact same thing.

The threatened loss of jobs becomes unacceptable, so countries settle for less punitive tariffs: although the current American administration is an unreliable partner in terms of trade deals , a 25 per cent tariff is bad while a 50 per cent one is worse.

If all of this seems chaotic, it’s by design.

While I’m not suggesting the Trump administration is intentionally random in its attacks on allies like Canada and the European Union , unpredictability itself is a weapon — and a second reason so many countries have acquiesced to Trump’s demands.