Is Donald Trump Playing 27-Dimensional Chess?
January 28, 2026
I’ve never liked Karl Rove, but I’ve always respected his competence as a political strategist given his success in winning two presidential terms for an idiot like “W.”
Soon after his patron left the White House amid record-low approval ratings, Rove became a weekly columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Although I’ve almost never read any of the many hundreds of op-eds he subsequently published, I’ve usually glanced at the titles.
So his most recent piece “Is Trump Trying to Lose the Midterms?” caught my eye, and not only did I read it all the way through but I actually agreed with almost every word.
He opened his column by declaring that he found Trump’s behavior “mystifying.”
A year ago Tuesday, Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president. It’s been a year of rapid movement, controversy and upheaval. It’s also been utterly mystifying.
Why does the president keep doing things that are against his political self-interest?
He went on to note that the immigration issue had been a central reason for Trump’s 2024 victory, but the president seemed to be snatching a huge political defeat out of the jaws of victory:
On the lost-opportunity front, look no further than the president’s extraordinary achievement in securing the Southern border. He stopped the flood of illegal migrants. He was right. We didn’t need a new law, only a different president.
Yet Mr. Trump didn’t take a victory lap to publicize the success. If he had gone to the border, Hispanic and Democratic local officials would have thanked him for removing the tremendous burden on their hospitals, food pantries, social services and public safety. That image would have been powerful and lingered.
Instead, the White House has turned a major win into a major drag on the president’s approval: 58% of Americans and 66% of independents disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration in a Jan. 12 CNN/SRRS survey. The administration’s pledge to focus on expelling violent criminal aliens—“the worst of the worst”—was widely popular. But Team Trump misplayed its hand by going a good deal further. Dispatching Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Home Depots to grab day laborers, or to other places where otherwise law-abiding illegal aliens congregate, is unpopular. These expanded ICE sweeps are turning voters against Mr. Trump. In a Jan. 12 Quinnipiac University poll, 57% of all voters and 64% of independents disapproved of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws.
The Trump administration made the situation worse by describing Renee Good, the woman killed by an ICE agent earlier this month, as a “domestic terrorist” and fomenting further chaos in Minneapolis. In a Jan. 12 CNN/SRRS survey, 51% of Americans said ICE was making cities “less safe.”
A few weeks ago my own lengthy review of that issue had come to very similar conclusions:
- Donald Trump and His Immigration Policies
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 22, 2025 • 10,700 Words
Rove also sharply questioned Trump’s bizarre determination to acquire Greenland, with our president repeatedly declaring that if necessary he would invade and conquer that barren, frozen wasteland:
As puzzling as his mishandling of immigration is Mr. Trump’s insistence that for national security, Denmark must surrender Greenland. For weeks he made it sound as though he might even invade—clarifying only on Wednesday morning that he won’t go to war with a NATO ally. That he threatened so long to use force hasn’t endeared him to voters. Eighty-six percent of Americans oppose taking Greenland by force—including 68% of Republicans and 94% of independents, according to a Jan. 12 Quinnipiac poll. And they’re right to. An invasion would destroy NATO and gravely damage American trade and political ties. Only China and Russia would have profited.
What makes this still more confounding is that the U.S. already has a treaty allowing it to establish military bases in Greenland. Yet Mr. Trump has insisted America must own the land outright, which even without the possibility of war is a political loser. Quinnipiac found 55% of Americans oppose “trying to buy Greenland” while 37% support it.
But even more peculiar were Trump’s economic policies, especially his constantly changing tax rates on our three trillion dollars of imported goods and his attempts to eliminate the independence of the Federal Reserve. Most recently, his administration had begun a criminal prosecution of outgoing Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, whom Trump himself had previously appointed to that position.
That isn’t even the most unhinged moment from the first year of Trump 2.0. Remember “Liberation Day” last April? He levied tariffs willy-nilly, even on places with which we have trade surpluses or no trade. For months the president has attacked the Federal Reserve’s independence to set interest rates, roiling markets…He called voters’ affordability concerns a “hoax,” then moments later claimed he’d address them…On Saturday, he announced a 10% tariff on imports from European countries that criticized his threats to invade Greenland and warned he’d raise it to 25% if the Danes didn’t strike a deal by June 1. On Tuesday, he suggested he’d send Americans $2,000 “tariff rebate” checks without congressional approval.
In recent months, Trump had bombed and attacked some nine different countries, in each case without any Congressional approval. But Rove noted that he nonetheless seemed outraged that he hadn’t been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his actions:
Last Thursday, he accepted Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s gift of her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize medal as if he had earned it…And in a missive almost too over the top to believe, he recently tried to bully the Norwegian prime minister because the Norwegian Nobel Committee hadn’t awarded him the Peace Prize. Because of the perceived slight, Mr. Trump wrote, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”
Considering all these facts, I doubt that too many intelligent Americans would question Rove’s conclusion:
The Trump presidency wasn’t normal even in his first term, but something is different now. Americans are increasingly unnerved by the president’s rambling appearances and late-night screeds. Whether it’s age or advisers who can’t check his worst instincts, Mr. Trump is acting in ways no American president has. His downward spiral has led 58% of Americans and 66% of independents in the CNN/SRRS poll to describe his second term as “a failure.” If his team can’t turn things around, he’ll help defeat his party this fall and damage the country for years.
Rove’s appraisal of Trump’s presidency was hardly unique. Just a few days earlier the first two pages of the Journal‘s Weekend Review section had published “Is Trump Losing Joe Rogan, America’s Most Important Swing Voter?” As our country’s most popular podcaster, Rogan’s support had been a crucial element of Trump’s upset 2024 victory:
In February 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously lost Walter Cronkite when the renowned news anchor told Americans he could no longer accept the president’s assurances about the war in Vietnam.
This week, President Trump may have lost Joe Rogan for the prosecution of his own war—this one on immigration…
…As Cronkite was in his time, Rogan is now an essential barometer of national sentiment in a fractured and suspicious age…
The three-hour audience he provided Trump on the eve of the 2024 election, and his subsequent endorsement, is regarded by many as a pivotal moment in that contest. Certainly, Trump seemed to think so, inviting Rogan to the Oval Office.
Earlier this week, though, the podcaster recoiled when faced with the particulars of Trump’s signature campaign promise to undertake the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in American history. In particular, Rogan appeared shaken by the death of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman who was shot dead by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent under contested circumstances…
Later, Rogan would invoke the Nazis when describing the masked and militarized ICE agents roaming Minneapolis streets. “Are we really going to be the Gestapo? ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” he asked…
“He has a huge audience, and a lot of people listen to him, both directly and indirectly,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the left-leaning New America think tank, observed. “So when he says ‘enough with this ICE brutality!’ he is clarifying an uncertain and possibly ambiguous moment for many people, and coming down firmly on the side of civil liberties”…
Guests on “The Joe Rogan Experience” range from UFO enthusiasts, Hollywood A-listers and scientists to fellow comedians of varying degrees of fame. In one of his most famous episodes, he enticed billionaire Elon Musk to smoke a joint, provoking a noticeable dent in Tesla’s share price. Rogan’s podcast has also served as a breeding ground for a generation of younger stars, including Theo Von and Andrew Schulz, who popularized the “manosphere” and infused MAGA with youth and testosterone…
Rogan is a UFC commentator and Trump a fan. The UFC chief executive, Dana White, told Rolling Stone that he made it a mission to bring Rogan on board MAGA before the 2024 election.
Rogan’s Trump interview—which was released less than two weeks before Election Day—has been viewed 61 million times on YouTube, and prompted Democrats to lament how they lost the podcaster. When Trump celebrated victory, White joined him on stage and thanked “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan”…
Yet even before Rogan’s comments this week, there were signs that he was growing uneasy with the president’s maximalist second term. He questioned the snatch-and-grab operation to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, objected to the renaming of the Kennedy Center, accused the Trump administration of trying to “gaslight” people over the Jeffrey Epstein files and called out Trump for mocking Hollywood producer Rob Reiner after he and his wife were found dead in their home.
Immigration, though, may stand apart, as an issue that was the fulcrum of Trump’s campaign. In the president’s telling during his epic rallies, illegal immigrants are to blame for everything from housing shortages to rampant crime and economic decline. To often thunderous applause, the then-candidate promised to mount the largest deportation in American history.
So what changed for Rogan?
Part of it may be the video. The gruesome footage of Good’s killing has gone viral, like that of Floyd before her. It has also been accompanied by clips on social media of masked ICE agents who look as though they’re in a foreign war zone—not Minnesota.
“I mean, when people say it’s justifiable because the car hit him, it seemed like she was kind of turning the car away,” Rogan said, appearing to reject the administration’s attempt to portray Good as a domestic terrorist seeking to run over an ICE agent.
On Saturday morning the latest killing by ICE agents in Minneapolis claimed the life of a 37-year-old American citizen under circumstances that seemed even more outrageous and illegal, with all the facts laid out in a very convincing video by an experienced combat veteran:
As acclaimed journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in his own discussion of the incident, not only were the facts absolutely clear-cut in this particular case, but it was equally obvious that all the government officials were blatantly lying. Greenwald particularly condemned the “Israelization” of American society, in which anyone killed by the government is immediately denounced as “a domestic terrorist.”
One of the main excuses provided by Trump’s minions was that the victim had possessed a perfectly legal handgun for which he had a permit, a handgun that he had never touched let alone attempted to draw. For many decades conservatives had always expressed their fervent support for the Second Amendment, so Greenwald noted how strange it was that so many of them had now totally reversed their position on that issue.
Personally, I find it absolutely hilarious that huge numbers of dim-witted right-wingers have now loudly declared that government agents should be authorized to summarily execute any American citizen who exercises his legal right to own and carry a handgun.
Obviously, the video-recorded killings of American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis for employing their own constitutional rights represents only an extreme example of our current situation. Indeed, this is merely the visible tip of what is likely a very large submerged iceberg of other such crimes and illegalities.
Copyright © The Unz Review
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