WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump, once a casino owner and always a man in search of his next deal, is fond of a poker analogy when sizing up partners and adversaries.
“We have much bigger and better cards than they do,” he said of China last month. Compared with Canada, he said in June, “we have all the cards. We have every single one.” And most famously, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their Oval Office confrontation earlier this year: “You don’t have the cards.”
The phrase offers a window into the worldview of Trump, who has spent his second stint in the White House amassing cards to deploy in pursuit of his interests.
Seven months into his second term, he has accumulated presidential power that he has used against universities, media companies, law firms, and individuals he dislikes. A man who ran for president as an angry victim of a weaponized “deep state” is, in some ways, supercharging government power and training it on his opponents.
And the supporters who responded to his complaints about overzealous Democrats aren’t recoiling. They’re egging him on.
