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.