by Mark Harvey
When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. ––Creighton Abrams
In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.
I like to think that President Biden played a bit of Kasparovian chess in delaying his withdrawal from the November election until after the Republican convention in Milwaukee. I don’t know if there’s any truth to my fantasy, but in many ways the timing was perfect. The entire Trump campaign was centered around defeating an aging president who was showing alarming signs of mental decline. Despite some real accomplishments like the passage of the infrastructure bill and multiple wins for conservation of the natural world, Biden appeared to be headed for defeat. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump galvanized an already cultish following and the Democratic Party was in the doldrums—vanquished and confused.
Oh what a difference a week makes!
At this writing, no one yet knows who the Democratic nominee will be now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, and frankly a lot of us aren’t that choosy as long as he or she has a pulse and beats Donald Trump in November. It appears that Kamala Harris will be chosen and money—the singular expression of enthusiasm in American politics—is rushing in like a storm. Harris raised more than $80 million in just 24 hours.
If Harris is the nominee, Trump has lost control of the board and must retool his vile attacks on Biden to vile attacks on Harris. That shouldn’t be hard for Trump as he’s very accomplished at insulting women and is a master of the racist dog whistle. But Trump can’t resist taking things too far and if history is any indication, he’ll take things too far in attacking Harris. To win the election, Trump needs at least a few women supporting him. There are close to 90 million registered female voters in the United States—the largest voting bloc. Women turn out to vote in high numbers and in 2020, close to 70% of registered women voted. Ninety percent of Black women voted for Biden in 2020. It doesn’t take a grandmaster to see where things could go badly wrong for Trump.
After Kasparov sacrificed his queen against Kramnik in 1994, he moved up the right side of the board with his two knights, advanced a pawn to give his bishops sweeping control of the diagonals, and then solidified protection of the few loose pieces. Still ahead based strictly on material points and the taking of Kasparov’s queen, Kramnik found himself in terrible position, backed up on his own ranks, outflanked on the files. He fought desperately to save his king, but by falling into the trap and being tempted by Kasparov’s unprotected queen, his floundering led nowhere.
The Trump campaign has feasted on Biden’s confusion during the last debate and mishaps during very public moments. They’ve tried to frame the race as the robust 78-year old versus the infirm 81-year old. The idea that in a country of some 330 million people our two nominees are both octogenarians (or nearly) is absurd and would make for a dumb comedy if it didn’t involve giving one of them the keys to a couple thousand deployable nuclear weapons. But who’s the old doddering man now? Who’s the guy with memory problems and incomplete sentences now? Harris looks like a veritable college freshwoman compared to Trump. With Biden out of the race, Trump looks like one of those old boxers—in hiked up shorts around a soft waist—who’s clinging to a past made of yellow power ties, throbbing disco music, wide lapels, and narrow minds. A past no one with much of an imagination wants to revisit.
Two of the featured guests at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee were Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan. If those two represent “Making America Great Again,” I’ll take a hard pass. The fakery of their carefully cultivated images fits hand in glove with everything Trump represents from his contrived show The Apprentice to his frozen steaks to his supposed business acumen. And returning to the theme of female voters, I have to wonder how many young women in America find either Kid Rock or Hulk Hogan remotely attractive. Who’s the genius in the Republican National Committee who said, “Gee, we need the female vote so why don’t we feature a guy who looks like he’s taken anabolic steroids for 40 years and would be tipped into road rage if dinner were served five minutes late.” That’s not toxic masculinity—that’s septic masculinity.
You can only take the chess metaphor so far in politics because chess has a purity you’ll never find in politics. The rules, sixty-four black and white squares, and sometimes the clock define the game. You can’t lie your way out of a nasty fork set up by a Magnussen or a Fischer and no political action committee can help you when you’re down a bishop or a rook. Most of the great players do try to psych out their opponents by arriving late to a game or making extravagant displays of running down the clock in speed chess. But ultimately a game’s outcome is determined by great tactics and great thinking. Would that it were so simple in politics.
A better metaphor for American politics might be a hybrid between pro wrestling and a greasy pig contest. If you didn’t grow up in a rural community and never had the childhood fun of trying to catch a pig covered in grease, you may be suffering some effects of residual neglect. Pigs are quick little animals, tubby, and impossibly slippery when coated in grease. So are some American presidential candidates—even without the grease. Despite a lifetime of stiffing contractors, financial fraud, hush money payouts, and egregious lying, Trump has managed to stay one thin slice of bacon in front of prosecutors and his past.
But nothing lasts forever. To borrow from the writer Rebecca Solnit, “The Thousand Year Reich did not last two decades; Idi Amin ruled for eight years; the Confederacy didn’t make it to kindergarten; Argentina’s Dirty War lasted six years.” One day all those red hats and that inane MAGA motto will be just a bad memory like the memory of a sour employee kept too long or an abusive boss suffered too long. And then we might experience that unbearable lightness of the country truly embracing the 21st century with modern thinking and modern plans. But we need to win this election with our best chess, plenty of money, and a hunger to get out of this tunnel.
I’ve never been to a Trump rally but I’ve seen a few on YouTube. The devotion of Christian evangelicals to a man who is most un-Christlike, borders on the occult. But give the man credit: he violates about every tenet taught by Jesus such as love your neighbor as yourself, forgive others who have wronged you, love your enemies, and repent for your sins—all the while drawing in crowds who think he’s the second coming of Christ. That sort of gullibility is where the pro-wrestling parallel comes in. The difference between an audience at a pro wrestling event and a Trump rally is that the pro-wrestling fans are more skeptical and better at critical thinking.
I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris back in 2020 because I didn’t think she was the strongest candidate at the time. But her candidacy this round couldn’t be much starker than option Trump. There are some American traditions I wouldn’t mind getting back to: a populous that reads more, civil conversations, less self-absorption, and less self-importance. But the thought of returning to a Hulk-Hogan-Kid-Rock America should scare every American into sending the Harris campaign every spare nickel in your piggy bank. The doddering octogenarian still in the race aint gonna make America great again. Take it from me: I chased greased pigs when I was a child and usually ended up covered in mud and empty handed.
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