Given how this president is now wielding tariffs, it’s time to take away President Donald Trump’s BB guns.

We’ve been consistent in our view that the substantial increases to date under Trump in duties paid by importers are economically counterproductive and ultimately raise costs for American consumers. But the president’s tariff saber-rattling of late has gone well past the rationales that animated most of his trade warfare of last year and shifted into the utterly indefensible realm of settling personal scores and attempting to gain leverage in his obsession with making Greenland part of the U.S.

Trump’s dealings with the rest of the world as president are no different than his past actions as a businessman. He doesn’t believe in deals that can be defined as win-wins. He is ever in search of points of leverage he can use to compel other nations (and states and cities for that matter) — whether ostensibly friendly or not — to agree to things against their will.

Chief among those levers is the power he’s asserted to impose tariffs of any amount, for any reason and for any duration, on goods made outside the U.S. and sold to American consumers. Trump typically makes such threats via social media, which is ridiculous in and of itself.

The most recent example was his post threatening tariffs on a group of European nations he perceived as standing in the way of his demand that the U.S. assume ownership of Greenland from Denmark and then offering to lift those tariffs if they accede.

In the face of adamant European opposition, Trump since has reiterated his demand, making his trip today to the annual economic confab taking place in Davos, Switzerland, particularly fraught.

The mild-mannered Danes are atypically furious. Protesters in Copenhagen are using Trump’s MAGA slogans against him, wearing red hats that say, “Make America Go Away.” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever likened Trump to the “Very Hungry Caterpillar” of children’s book fame. French President Emmanuel Macron decried the “new colonial approach” vis-a-vis Trump and Europe and argued forcefully against “passively accept(ing) the law of the strongest.” Other leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, openly stated their belief that Trump had brought about an end to the international order as we’ve known it for decades.

Trump supporters often make the case that his stances should not be taken at face value and are mere bluffs designed for negotiation. We suggest those supporters, growing fewer in number, open their minds and listen to what these European leaders said Tuesday and try to appreciate how much things have changed as Trump’s shtick has turned darker and yet more personal.

Meanwhile, Russia leader Vladimir Putin relishes the discord Trump is sowing in Europe as he continues to press his war in Ukraine. Trump’s fixation on adding Greenland to the U.S. map is making the world a more dangerous place and undermining our own interests. History has taught us the perilous threat an unstable Europe poses to the rest of the world.

We’ve learned now that Trump childishly linked his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize to his Greenland demands in a text to Norway’s prime minister. “Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize,” Trump wrote, he saw no reason to “think purely of peace.”

Norway, of course, has no say in who wins the prize; that’s up to a committee. It stuns us that so many Americans are willing, still, to sanction a president openly using his office to avenge his personal pique. Tariffs, conquests; all are subverted to this man’s ego.

Someone needs to curb the madness. If only there were an institution that could do so.

As it so happens, the Constitution of the United States of America gives us two such institutions. The executive is but one of three co-equal branches of government. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to levy tariffs, not the president. Yes, Congress has granted some of its tariff authority to the executive branch over the years. But not all, not by a long shot. And not as a tool of personal revenge.

Many of the Republicans who run both chambers on Capitol Hill would have called themselves free traders before Trump retook the White House. If they had the will, they could end this tariff craziness any time they wanted. Democrats surely would join in a veto-proof reassertion of congressional prerogative.

Alas, Trump’s continued hold over his party makes such an outcome but a fantasy.

That leaves the matter to the Supreme Court, which leads the other co-equal branch. The high court has a pair of cases before it that would invalidate the willy-nilly approach Trump has taken to tariffs as an unconstitutional overreach of executive power. During oral arguments late last year, a majority of justices appeared to side with the arguments made by plaintiffs in the case, which include Learning Resources, a Chicagoland-based maker of educational toys imported from China.

The court moves at its own speed, which can be frustrating, particularly to those with vested interests in the outcomes, which to our minds is every American in this matter. But few cases before the justices are as time-sensitive as this one. So the longer the court waits to issue its verdict, the longer Trump can use power he arguably doesn’t legitimately wield to destabilize the globe.

The high court’s next scheduled date for issuing opinions isn’t until Feb. 20, a month from now. We’d advise moving up that timetable.

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