By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, February 20, 2025
Donald Trump has said some pretty grotesque things about
Ukraine over the last 48 hours, but you don’t need to worry about it, because
it’s all just 4D chess. Everything Trump says is 4D chess, you see. Unless you
like it. If you like it, that’s what he really thinks, and he’s brave and
correct for saying it. If you don’t like it, it’s 4D chess and you need to
relax. Trump has to play 4D chess, you understand, because he’s the president.
Before he was the president, he also had to play 4D chess, because he wanted to
become the president, and because playing 4D chess is how you get to occupy the
chair.
Trump plays 4D chess on lots of different boards.
Sometimes, for example, he says that tariffs are excellent and
wealth-generating and that the United States should impose them so widely that
it is able to replace the income tax with them. At other times, he says that
tariffs are really bad, obviously, and that this is why he’s not imposing them,
but that he had to say they were good for a while to get other countries
to do the unrelated things that he wanted them to do. That’s classic 4D chess,
whichever way you look at it, and, unless you internalize that and recall it at
every juncture, you might end up confused by his behavior.
Most recently, Trump has been playing 4D chess with
Russia. Trump has said that there should be a settlement between Ukraine and
Russia — which, unless you’re a globalist warmonger who wants Americans to die
in a nuclear war, is obviously the correct and unassailable position to hold.
Yesterday, Trump went a little further and blamed Ukraine for having been
invaded in the first place. At first blush, this might have struck you as a
stupid declaration that was not necessary for the sustenance of even the most
coldly realist worldview, but, again, that’s because you don’t understand that
Trump is playing 4D chess. Any mistakes, excesses, reversals, or inexplicable
steps of which Trump looks guilty are just part of the beauty of the game.
Occasionally, Trump has been known to play 5D chess, and
even 6D chess, and there’s a rumor that he’s working on his 7D skills. This is
mostly a good thing, but it does make it quite difficult for the citizens of
the republic to judge him, as, over the years, they have become accustomed to
doing with their presidents. Historically, Americans were able to say that they
liked or disliked this or that part of the president’s conduct, and that, in
their estimation, he had got some policies right but erred with others. Now,
they cannot. Sometimes, this is because they are suffering from Derangement
Syndrome, which is a disease that only affects critics of this administration
and has never been seen before anywhere in the world. Most of the time, though,
it’s because Trump is playing chess in a whole host of complicated dimensions,
and because you, the lowly voter, are simply incapable of following along.
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