Not to mention, just like a real arms race... It's not the government officials who are really in danger, it's all of the common people, or in this case, programmers.
Why would I need to replace trim? Trim existed before the filing date of the application for patent. The patent does not cover trim. Why would one think that the patent does cover trim?
According to the text of the patent any method that removes leading or trailing space would fall under protection of this patent.
No, it wouldn't. The 2. Description of Related Art section states:
Currently, TRIM functions, available in SQL, are used to remove leading and/or trailing space characters from data being presented to a user.
Therefore, merely any method that removes leading or trailing space cannot be what is being claimed in the patent.