A Masterful Gambit, Mr. President!
The return of five-dimensional chess.
Over the past four months, media coverage of the President of the United States has essentially boiled down to one question: why is he doing this?
The easiest answer is that Donald Trump, a former real estate developer and reality TV show host, is very stupid. To expand on that: Donald Trump, a 78-year-old narcissist who has been handed near-absolute power over the most powerful nation in the world, has a lot of very bad ideas.
The other answer, of course, is that Mr. Trump is a genius. That he is playing the Grand Game with a mind so powerful it thinks in three dimensions, no, four dimensions, perhaps even five dimensions. The economy that just crashed? You fool. This was his plan all along.
You can pretty much choose one of these two answers and base your current understanding of the state of the world around it. Either you think that Donald Trump is an impulsive, reactionary tyrant who has been angry about foreign trade ever since a Japanese businessman outbid him for an antique piano in 1988, whose underlings used a snake-oil machine learning algorithm to devise a half-baked tariff scheme that immediately tanked the American economy, or you can be one of these guys.
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