I remember my daughter at six. Those tiny fingers of hers—Lord, how they worked!—arranging Easter chocolates into meticulous piles across our sun-splashed kitchen table, each foil-wrapped square a miniature monument to her hunger and ingenuity. The light caught those crinkled wrappers just so, transforming cocoa and sugar into something more than sweetness—something sacred, almost sacramental. Lines of concentration etched themselves across her furrowed brow and button nose, as if she were solving equations that only children and economists dare to attempt

She was all concentration. All purpose. All judgment.

Or perhaps none of these things—just hunger wearing the mask of order.

The chocolate distribution wasn't exactly democratic—when has allocation ever been? One modest pile for her grandfather, another for me, but smaller. And then—here's where meritocracy meets original sin—a landslide of sweetness claimed for herself. When her grandfather raised an eyebrow (that ancient semaphore of this is how systems collapse), she glanced up with the serene certainty of central bankers adjusting interest rates: "I want it more than you do, oupa."

The words hung there—sticky, irreducible. Want as currency. Want as calculus. Want as the first and last argument of kings and children. His eyebrow didn't lower. The mountain didn't shrink. Somewhere between finger-painting and early-childood logic, her oupa was just another competitor in a zero-sum game.

Her logic wrapped around itself like a snake swallowing its tail—perfect in its circularity, a liturgy of want disguised as generosity. Perhaps what struck me most—though the words remained unformed, caught somewhere between throat and tongue—was how her desire wasn't hidden but sanctified through the very act of giving. Her sharing carried its own commission, a tax collected in advance, a transparent sleight of hand that fooled no one yet held us captive like a familiar psalm whose meaning has long since separated from its music.

Don't we all, in our fractured economies of desire, create elaborate cathedrals to house and consecrate what we dare not name as greed?

This memory returns to me now as I watch Trump's tariff formula unfold—a strange economic exegesis that divides the U.S. trade deficit with a country by their total imports, then halves the resulting percentage to determine what justice apparently requires. The numbers arrive like revelation scratched in sand: 50% for Lesotho, 49% for Cambodia, 48% for Laos, and 47% for Madagascar. What pierces me is that these percentages fall like artillery shells on nations where a single week's American grocery bill might feed a family for months. Trump's kitchen table calculations emerge from a child-like logic that claims to target dragons but will surely crush sparrows.

"It's such a disaster," says Deborah Elms of the Hinrich Foundation, her words hanging in the air like smoke after fire. "Tariffs of nearly 50% overnight will be impossible to manage." For nations like Madagascar and Laos—places where the day's bread depends on yesterday's labour and tomorrow remains perpetually uncertain—these tariffs promise not abstract "economic setbacks" but flesh-and-blood devastation. The theological crack widens: a policy baptised in fairness systematically crucifies the very people whose feet scripture commands us to wash.

Trump transforms justice into colourful piles that can be counted, seen, handled—a prosperity gospel without the inconvenience of gospel. A world where fairness apparently lives in ledgers rather than lives, where righteousness can be calculated between golf swings. Just as my little girl's justification concealed her simple hunger for more sweets, Trump's formula seems to mask a deeper, more primal appetite—the disordered desire to arrange the world's chocolates into piles that make America's mountain appear righteous rather than rapacious. It's self-justification as alchemy, isn't it?

This is humanity’s oldest trick.

Self-justification, when distilled to its raw essence, performs a perverse alchemy—transforming the hammer into the nail, the boot into the neck it stands upon. In the catechism of these tariffs, Trump recasts Goliath as David, the leviathan as the minnow, a liturgy of inversions that would make even Orwell's head spin. "Look at Cambodia, 97%," he intones at the White House, drawing laughter—that most treacherous form of assent—as he names this nation of ghosts and killing fields. Here, where the average person subsists on less each day than the cost of the bottled water served at his rallies, where history's wounds still weep, Trump finds his Goliath. This same country he portrays as America's tormentor, as if we're meant to believe a well-fed tourist is being victimised by a malnourished local who dared to gather crumbs from his discarded plate. It's a parable of power so inverted, so grotesque in its implications, that one wonders if it's not a cosmic joke—except the punchline lands not in laughter, but in the hollow eyes of those who will bear its cost.

In the garden of Eden, as the story goes, when God questioned Adam about why he had eaten the forbidden fruit, the man quickly spun a tale of self-justification that sounds suspiciously like modern foreign policy: "The woman you gave me, she gave me the fruit from the tree"—blame shifting as ancient as dirt itself. And Eve? She followed suit with the practiced ease of a press secretary constructing her own exoneration: "The serpent tricked me." Both of them, naked in more ways than flesh, performed humanity's first self-justifying ritual while their stomachs still digested the evidence—their hunger for divinity poorly concealed behind this elaborate choreography where desire becomes righteousness through the alchemy of explanation. The fruit was eaten, the self-justification offered, and the pattern established: first comes wanting, then comes the narrative that transforms our wanting into necessity or virtue.

Adam's tongue split the blame like fruit:
God, Eve, the serpent—all guilty but him.
What is innocence but the shadow of guilt?
What is guilt but a mirror we refuse to clean?

As the theologian Ted Peters explains, this self-justification arrives not before but after our concupiscence—that ravenous, disordered hunger for what was never meant to be ours—like makeup hastily applied to cover bruises. Our greed consumes first; our justifications arrive second, desperately trying to dress naked avarice in the respectable clothes of necessity or fairness. We frantically draw "the line between good and evil so that we can place ourselves on the good side"—a gerrymandering of morality that would make partisan mapmakers blush—not to establish truth but to disguise our lust for more. It's not about true confession, but rather a desperate mathematics—a frantic calculation to balance moral ledgers while our fingers remain sticky with the sweetness we've already stolen and our eyes scan the horizon for what else we might claim. Perhaps it's our oldest technology, this concupiscent abacus of the heart, designed not to count accurately but to make our excessive appetites appear as righteous hunger.

The Old Testament prophets recognised the deceptiveness of the human heart, seeing it through our elaborate disguises for greed. They named it idolatry—not the obvious worship of carved images that makes for dramatic sermons, but the more subtle, more the human adoration of our own moral exceptionalism that sanctifies our appetites while condemning others' hunger. "The heart is devious above all else," Jeremiah tells us, his ancient voice cutting through our modern justifications like a knife through butter, exposing the concupiscence we've dressed in Sunday clothes. "It is perverse—who can understand it?" In our desperate need to justify our lust for what belongs to others—whether in trade policies that plunder poor nations or chocolate distribution that favours our own pile—we construct elaborate self-justification systems that perform the same magic trick of deceit: they transform our insatiable greed into righteous entitlement and transmute others' legitimate needs into moral failure. The idol we truly worship isn't golden; it's the reflection of our desires recast as divine right.

Many dissect Trump's tariffs as the long-awaited scratch of an insatiable itch—a compulsion masquerading as strategy, like a man setting fire to his own house to feel the warmth of the flames.

Others see them as the inevitable byproduct of a psyche allergic to error, that alchemises every misstep into gilded triumph with the fervour of a carnival barker turning sawdust into gold. A disappearing act where the vanished rabbit is reality itself, and the applause he demands is the sound of our collective disbelief dissolving into complicity.

And maybe it is that.

But what if we’re witnessing something simpler, more primal: a case of moral development arrested mid-stride, preserved like a prehistoric mosquito in amber, its DNA frozen in the moment it last drew blood? What if these policies—which flay Cambodian garment workers while swaddling America in victimhood’s moth-eaten shroud—represent not corruption but congenital stasis? A 78-year-old man wielding the moral arithmetic of my chocolate-hoarding six-year-old, but with nuclear footballs substituted for foil-wrapped eggs. The chocolate mountains that once sprawled across my kitchen table now loom like megaliths over entire nations, their logic—“I want it more than you do”—draped in the threadbare vestments of fairness, a toddler’s tantrum elevated to statecraft.

Trump’s tariff formula mirrors my daughter’s confectionery calculus with uncanny precision. Where her fingers danced—one for grandad, one for mum, three for me—his algorithm grinds: deficits divided by imports, halved, sanctified. Spreadsheets replaced the abacus, but the moral mathematics is unchanged—a calculator cannot compute empathy.

James Fowler’s stages of faith development, grafted onto Kohlberg’s moral framework, dissect Trump’s tariff logic like surgeons mapping a malignancy. Kohlberg’s early stages—punishment as catechism, transaction as communion—find their echo in Fowler’s “mythic-literal” stage, where adults clutch concrete symbols like life rafts in a sea of ambiguity. Here, God becomes a celestial scorekeeper, trade a zero-sum crusade.

Both theorists expose the rot when adult power marries childhood reasoning. Kohlberg’s “pre-conventional” morality—justice as eye-for-eye barter—resurfaces in Trump’s threats to withhold disaster aid from “disloyal” states, or his “gold card” immigration policy auctioning passports like backstage passes. Fowler’s parallel stage consecrates these impulses as sacred myth, baptising self-interest in rivers of divine mandate. The result? Trade becomes jihad, tariffs transmute into communion wafers dispensed at a last supper of grievance. When myth ossifies, the cost is tallied not in percentages but in the weight of empty stomachs—a toll paid by those prostrate before the altar of certainty while nuance burns like heresy at the stake.

Consider Lesotho’s impossible equation: a nation whose entire GDP—$2 billion, barely enough to fuel America’s war machines for 72 hours—now faces 50% tariffs on diamonds. Not due to malice, but because its statistical shadow trips a wire in Trump’s formula. This calculus, so precise in its percentages, remains blind to the screaming obvious: how could citizens surviving on £1.50 per day “cheat” America by purchasing just $3 of its goods annually? Poverty isn’t strategy; desperation isn’t larceny.

Their hunger is invisible in the ledger’s light—
their poverty erased by arithmetic.
We measure justice in percentages,
not pain, and mercy drowns in the margins.

The formula counts only what glints—the deficit—but not what festers in darkness: the chronic deprivation that renders such deficits as inevitable as tides. This is transductive reasoning, says Jean Piaget, developmental psychology’s reluctant prophet. A child believes his nap summons afternoon, mistaking correlation for causation. Most outgrow this phase; some fossilize. Trump’s tariff policy breathes this arrested logic: if America haemorrhages red ink trading with Lesotho, it’s because Lesotho siphoned the blood—never mind that Lesotho mines diamonds America cannot grow, that poverty dictates consumption. It’s not mere economic illiteracy; it’s spiritual cataract—a refusal to see beyond cause-and-effect into the tangled vines of interdependence.

A nap becomes the cause of afternoon—
a diamond becomes the cause of despair.
What child sees the stars but not their fire?
What king counts only what his hands can hold?

There’s comfort in such simplicity, isn’t there? In a world reeling with nuance, mythic-literal leadership offers the clarity of a sledgehammer—a strongman who reduces globalisation’s labyrinth into the stark geometry of a child dividing sweets.

Jesus rejected the “eye for an eye” morality calcifying the hearts of his era’s religious arbiters—men who confused justice with symmetry, righteousness with balanced books.

These leaders, clutching their moral abacuses, mirrored today’s policymakers tallying tariffs like sins in a ledger. Their compulsion to demand precisely calibrated retribution—a tooth extracted for a tooth, a tariff levied for a deficit—betrayed souls shackled to scarcity, incapable of glimpsing relationships beyond transaction. “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye,’” Jesus tells the crowd, dust from the road still clinging to his sandals, “but I say to you, do not resist an evildoer.” This isn’t passive surrender; it’s emancipation from the prison of perfect reciprocity. The ledger itself, he implies, is the jailer.

What unsettles Jesus—what should unsettle us—is the adult’s refusal to outgrow this brutal arithmetic. When myth hardens into dogma and law curdles into vengeance, the consequences cease to be theoretical.

Jesus’ parables dissolve rather than resolve. The Good Samaritan. The Prodigal Son. The Workers in the Vineyard. Each undermines mythic-literal expectations like acid on parchment, revealing the chasm between divine reality and our childish facsimiles. The kingdom he proclaims thrives in that gap—where certainties crumble into holy questions, where moral mathematics drowns in the river of mystery. The world the ledger-keepers see does not exist. Thank God. For in its place glimmers something infinitely more terrifying and beautiful—a realm where grace incinerates calculation, where mercy dynamites our spreadsheets, where the God who is and isn’t there walks the razor’s edge between presence and absence, inviting us to trade our toy-store ethics for the wildfire of love.

The Christian response must navigate a narrow ridge: rejecting destructive systems without mirroring their logic. Consider Jesus’ dance with Roman imperial economics—rendering unto Caesar a coin stamped with the emperor’s face, then dismantling Caesar’s transactional worldview through stories of a kingdom where the last become first. Today’s believers might similarly comply with tariff laws while subverting their punitive DNA through Christian solidarity.

This could involve providing scholarships for children in Madagascar whose futures are threatened by tariffs, or investing in coffee cooperatives in Laos that bypass exploitative trade frameworks. It could also mean advocating for policies that prioritize human dignity over profit margins, or partnering with Cambodian non-profit organizations to rebuild what punitive duties have eroded. Historically, Christians have crossed borders not with contracts, but with care - founding hospitals in plague-stricken slums and schools in war-torn villages, not as acts of dominance, but as expressions of love for the marginalised.

Such actions echo the core of Jesus’ mission: centring those the system excludes. To follow him means rejecting metrics that equate worth with productivity. Instead, it demands embodying a kingdom where debts dissolve like mist, where mercy outweighs merit, where justice springs not from retribution but reconciliation.

The father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son abandons conventional notions of fairness, rushing with urgency—his robes hiked, dignity set aside—to embrace his wayward child, while the account book lies forgotten in the dirt. The divine Parent that Jesus reveals operates through radical asymmetry, showering blessings indiscriminately on the righteous and unrighteous alike. This is a fairness that transcends rigid formulas, a justice that outgrows our childish craving for mathematical vindication.

In trade policy, this might mean crafting agreements that acknowledge historical wounds and developmental chasms—asymmetrical arrangements favoring the vulnerable. Not economic naivety, but relationships rooted in the gritty reality of interdependence. Not rejecting reciprocity, but transfiguring it from punitive tit-for-tat to generative exchange.

When Jesus dismantled the “eye for an eye” logic, he wasn’t abandoning justice but deepening it—recognising true restoration blooms not through meticulously measured punishment but the agonising labour of reconciliation. It’s the difference between a surgeon suturing a wound and a child slapping a Band-Aid on a haemorrhage.

A Prayer for Liberation:
God of the uncalculated night,
shatter our gilded calves of "fairness."
Where we hoard, let us become vessels,
Where we tally, make us tremble.
When we meet the child-tyrants—
(in others, in ourselves)—
grind our percentages to dust,
that we might at last taste
the bitter sacrament of enough.