4D Chess

One very plausible, and perhaps even attractive explanation for why Trump is not engaging in mass arrests of Antifa is that they are helping him in many ways.  The people they are hurting, by and large, live in solidly, ridiculously, reflexively Blue States. If he comes busting in there with Federal agents, the Governors and Mayors who have been failing their citizens, who are betraying the trust given them, can blame Trump, and refocus all the bad on him, which the mass of their citizenry are only too happy to allow them to do.  None of them want to face the lunacy and destructiveness of their own.

So allowing the shit show to continue can only help Trump, and stopping it forcefully is, on balance, likely to hurt him politically.  Conservatives, of course, see how wrong and awful all this is, but the Left does not.  And if he can’t continue peeling moderates away from the hard core nutjobs, then he is not making progress in the cultural war of ideas.

It is sometimes said of Trump that he plays “3D chess”, by which is meant chess with added complications, making him some sort of complicated genius.  I think there is genius in him, but it is instinctual.  If he were the former kind of genius, it would show in his speech, and it doesn’t.  He struggles to get out, often, what seem to be clear sentiments and clear images in his head.

Rather, what he has across his lifetime had is a sense of where things are going, what the Big Picture will look like at some point in the future, and he intuitively finds ways of getting in tune with and benefiting from and often influencing for the better existing underlying but subtle patterns.

When one looks at a chess board, nothing ever changes, unless someone moves a piece.  You can replay to the last detail games that were played 100 years ago.

But in the real world, the “pieces” move themselves.  The whole thing is in constant flux and agitation.  Moves are made for you, and moves are made for your opponent.

Quite often, in such a situation, the best “move” is doing nothing, and waiting for your opponent to paint themselves into a corner, as the Left seems to be doing.  They could checkmate themselves without him lifting a finger.  As I believe it says in the Art of War “when your enemy is making mistakes, never interfere.”

This would be chess with a time component, a dynamic, mutable component.  This, I think he plays really, really well.  He’s not so much thinking 5 moves ahead as SEEING five moves ahead.  It’s an important difference.  His intellect is about what it appears to be.  But his intuition is vastly, vastly better than that of most people, and when tied to his confidence and pugnacity, the package presented is just what we need.  I wish he had Churchill’s eloquence, but I will settle for his willingness to fight, and for his instincts and vision.