The following is from Decorum In the Whorehouse, Ben Bochner’s blog about the burlesque of democracy put on by The Deep State...
I'd like to re-iterate an idea I had a few weeks ago.
It's called "Trump Chess."
Trump Chess, in my hypothesis, is a type of game theory, in which the dominant player, because of an over-estimation of his or her own skills, starts seeing only the most obvious, aggressive moves on the chessboard - and is constantly surprised when these moves blow up in his or her face.
For instance, Trump says he is going to slap tariffs on Chinese goods coming into America.
Great move, Donald! The crowd loves it! All we gotta do is show them g**ks who's boss!
Of course, what's left out of the rip-roaring stump speech is that the Chinese will retaliate.
Like, maybe...by selling off the trillions of dollars in U.S. debt they're holding in Treasury Bills.
This would cause the value of the dollar to plummet and plunge the United States into depression.
How would Mr. Trump respond to such a likely scenario?
No one has any idea.
Especially him.
We'd just have to surmise, through the examples of his previous behavior - that he'd up the ante. Perhaps by calling the president of China “Squinty.”
So, let's see...maybe the Tough Guy in The White House orders cruise missiles to take out the military base the Chinese have been building in the South China Sea.
Surely this display of American firepower will cow the Chinese into submission.
Unless it doesn't - and they respond by...um...attacking Taiwan.
Etc., etc., on and on, tit for tat, yadda yadda yadda.
Til the Chinese take out San Francisco and we destroy Shanghai.
This is Trump Chess.
Also known as Cascading Stupidity.
Trump Chess has been played many times in world history.
One of the most recent examples is the war in Iraq. How many moves ahead was W thinking when he ordered the invasion?
Precisely: one.
The strategy of Shock and Awe was supposed to cow the Iraqi's into greeting American troops as "liberators" - in Dick Cheney's famous formulation, "with sweets and flowers."
Typical Trump Chess move.
And when it didn't work, it was followed by...wait for it...The Surge.
When Trump Chess is all you know how to play, you end up making one dick-fingered move after the next, til you finally get your ass kicked so bad you have to knock over the board and blame the whole mess on the dirty hippies who refused to fight.
What was the Viet Nam war but a giant game of Trump Chess?
The United States, through the pipe-smoking machinations of those two Trump Chess masters, John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, decided that the United States must impose its will on a backward country of barefoot rice farmers, because it was a domino in a "greater game" we were playing with China and the Soviet Union.
Classic Trump Chess. We got our asses kicked because nobody could be bothered to study the history of these "backward people" enough to realize that the Vietnamese had been hating the Chinese for thousands of years - way more than they could ever hate gum-chewing Americans - and the whole humiliating ass-whupping we took was completely unnecessary.
Except for that fine example of Trump Chess strategery that we had to prove how tough we were.
Napoleon was playing Trump Chess at Waterloo. Custer played Trump Chess at Little Big Horn. Stephen Curry got suckered into playing Trump Chess in the NBA finals against Cleveland.
And the British played a fine round of Trump Chess the other day when they voted to leave the European Union.
No one seemed to think through what it would actually mean to vote for a referendum mandating the exit from Europe.
But it must have felt good, pulling that lever!
I guess the phrase Make Britain Great Again seemed to make sense for a while there. I wonder if anybody thought to put it on a hat?
Trump Chess is played every day, all over the world, in situations great and small.
Tony Soprano was good at Trump Chess.
So was Meadow Soprano.
Trump Chess is what's being played when a wife-beater dares the woman he thinks is firmly under his thumb to "do something about it" - and she goes and gets his shotgun and blows his brains out.
Trump Chess was being played on the steps of he University of Alabama in 1962 when George Wallace declared, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
The Brits played Trump Chess in India. The French played Trump Chess in Algeria. South Africa played Trump Chess in its Apartheid State.
And Hitler...whoo-boy, perhaps the greatest Trump Chess Grand Master of them all....was playing Trump Chess....when he first looked in the mirror and started masturbating to his own mustache.
Have I made myself clear?
When you feel a sting on your arm and respond by whacking a hornet's nest with a stick, you are playing Trump Chess.
Trump Chess is Chump Chess.
It would be good if we all got that through our skulls before the election.
If we do, and Trump goes down to a nice, historic, humiliating defeat, leaving the Republican Party a Palinesque joke - maybe, just maybe, it might turn out that Barack Hussein Obama was playing 11-dimensional chess after all.
