Trump’s 4-D Chess Game

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Trump’s 4-D Chess Game: Since Taking Office, Trump’s Lifelong Study of Trump’s 4-D Chess Game: Since Taking Office, Trump’s Lifelong Study of Sun Tzu Has Paid OffHas Paid Off

By Paul Dowling

“Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”  – Sun Tzu

4-D Chess

An important element of the game of four-dimensional chess is getting the pieces to move themselves.  When it comes to politics – an arena of human behavior where so many unprincipled players are obsessed with control – an understanding of how to create, among those who are greedy for power, the incentives to act along certain behavioral lines is key.  The human obsession with power needs to be kept in mind if one is to motivate oppositional-defiant operatives embedded within a bureaucracy to drop their guards.  Getting enough quislings to do this will reveal the entire web of conspirators, as the less-guarded feel freer to communicate with their fellow backstabbers.

Appearance Versus Reality: An Example of 4-D Chess

During the early days of the Trump Administration, leaking was being perpetrated by bad actors at a level that was beyond intolerable.  This surreptitious threat to Trump’s presidency was so pervasive that 4-D chess became a logical approach to end the underhanded misconduct.

So, during the summer of 2017, Trump hired Anthony Scaramucci as White House Communications Director to “shake up” the White House.  According to the BBC, “Mr. Scaramucci . . . spent much of his 10 days in the job railing against government ‘leakers.’”  The BBC also reported that, after Scaramucci’s hiring, “Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and spokesman Sean Spicer both left their posts over his hiring.”  (Scaramucci was eventually dismissed by John Kelly upon his being appointed Trump’s new Chief of Staff, on July 31, 2020.)

Scaramucci had only been hired, however, to give the appearance that Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer were being sent into exile based upon his recommendation.  Priebus and Spicer were not, in reality, leakers being fired by Trump; just the opposite was true: Trump had decided on their leaving to make the most egregious leakers in the White House feel at ease, so they might become careless and expose themselves.  Priebus and Spicer had been hunting for leakers, so, as long as they were around, any leakers Trump may have been pursuing were certainly exercising an overabundance of caution.  With the cats away, the mice would play, reasoned Trump.  And that is exactly what occurred.  Faced with an environment devoid of known watchers, some leakers relaxed enough to begin communicating more with their Deep-State partners in crime without the vigilance they had previously observed.  Of course, these nefarious bureaucrats, along with their coconspirators, were put under surveillance until nearly the entire network of Deep-State collaborators was ultimately exposed.

Priebus and Spicer continued to praise President Trump subsequent to their departures, while Scaramucci, on the other hand, behaved quite differently.  To observers, it was obvious who was a friend and who was a foe.  In February of 2020 – after Trump was acquitted of any wrongdoing, in an illegitimate impeachment by the Democrats – Trump announced the dismissal of 70 Obama-holdovers from the National Security Council.  Were these leakers who had outed themselves after the ostensible firing of Priebus and Spicer?  It would seem so, since, right on the heels of these terminations, Trump almost immediately announced that Priebus and Spicer were to be given new roles in his administration.  Things are seldom what they seem, especially when it comes to President Trump.

Some of Trump’s Recent 4-D Chess Moves

President Trump has found it useful to leave many Deep-State moles in place until the last minute – keeping his friends close but his enemies closer, as it were – partially in order to give the appearance that he is unaware of the threats they pose, but also to give the Deep State a false sense of control.  Recently, the Trump Administration, according to Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, ordered Special Forces to seize a server from a facility of the Central Intelligence Agency in Frankfurt, Germany.  The server in question supposedly contained important data related to Joe Biden’s attempted theft of the 2020 presidential election.  Mark Esper, Trump’s defense secretary at the time, was fired just ahead of this crucial operation, removing an important chess piece from the game board, disabling the Deep State in the process by preventing the execution of any timely countermeasures to the raid.

There have been many calls for the president to fire Christopher Wray and Gina Haspel from the FBI and the CIA respectively, but the timing is perhaps not quite right for doing so.  Trump is wont to leave these game pieces in place until the time is right to remove them from the board.  There have also been complaints about Bill Barr, and Trump has even chimed in, answering a question about whether the president is happy with Barr’s performance by responding, “Ask me that in a number of weeks from now.”  However, as Sun Tzu teaches, “Appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak.”  Trump, a “lifelong student of Sun Tzu” has incorporated the art of deception into his modus operandi on an ongoing basis.  In the information war that Trump must fight daily, the president cannot afford to let on exactly how Barr might be engaged.  One thing that is known for sure about Barr’s recent activities is this: Barr appointed John Durham as a special counsel, on October 19, 2020, guaranteeing his continuance into the next presidential term while also expanding his power to file cases anywhere within the United States.  Revealed weeks later, this only goes to show that, just because nobody sees what Barr is doing, one cannot assume that the attorney general is not doing anything important to help the president.

When trying to guess what is on Trump’s mind, pay more attention to his actions than his words.  Trump constantly surprises Americans with his uncanny ability to think outside the box and to get things done – things which, up until his presidency, seemed not only improbable but impossible, to execute.  Trump’s bid for the presidency itself seemed highly unlikely to many, back in 2016, yet he was able to pull off a win against 16 Republican opponents who were all veteran politicos.  Can Trump get himself elected to a second term, by exposing Deep-State election fraud in legislative hearings and by overseeing Constitutional legal challenges that move him closer to assuming a second term?  Unlikely as the president’s chances may appear, patriotic Americans should take heart.  After all, President Donald J. Trump is a 4-D chess master.

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Paul Dowling

Paul Dowling has written about the Constitution, as well as articles for Independent Sentinel, American Thinker, Godfather Politics, Eagle Rising, and Conservative Notions.

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