The Empire of Trendsetter is a titanic, orderly nation, ruled by The Trendsetting Trendsetter with an iron fist, and remarkable for its keen interest in outer space, pith helmet sales, and suspicion of poets. The hard-nosed, cynical, humorless population of 24.129 billion Trendsetterians are ruled with an iron fist by the dictatorship government, which ensures that no-one outside the party gets too rich. In their personal lives, however, citizens are relatively unoppressed; it remains to be seen whether this is because the government genuinely cares about its people, or if it hasn't gotten around to stamping out civil rights yet.

The large, corrupt, well-organized government juggles the competing demands of Administration, Industry, and Defense. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Trendsetting Place. The average income tax rate is 94.8%.

The frighteningly efficient Trendsetterian economy, worth a remarkable 7,742 trillion Status Quos a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. However, for those in the know, there is an enormous, deeply entrenched, broadly diversified black market in Uranium Mining, Arms Manufacturing, Woodchip Exports, and Basket Weaving. The private sector mostly consists of enterprising ten-year-olds selling lemonade on the sidewalk, but the government is looking at stamping this out. Average income is an amazing 320,871 Status Quos, and evenly distributed, with the richest citizens earning only 2.2 times as much as the poorest.

Citizens are permitted to carry concealed handguns, the nation's industries are scrambling to switch to biodegradable plastics, the government extracts trade concessions from poor nations in exchange for humanitarian aid, and black gold is looking more brown these days. Crime is a problem, perhaps because of the country's complete lack of prisons. Trendsetter's national animal is the Trend, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its national religion is Trender.

Trendsetter is ranked 313,576^th in the world and 1^st in Trendsetter for Nicest Citizens, with 0.1 average smiles per day.