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— Ivan the K ™☑️ (@ivanthek.bsky.social) June 17, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Donald Trump is a horrible negotiator. He has one move, and the only reason it works is because he is the beneficiary of an aristocratic American system where the rich and powerful can use their wealth to crush the little guy. Trump was born on third base, and he has a single unifying theory of negotiating that becomes far less effective the moment you get on anywhere near equal footing with your opponent: use your power and wealth to create maximum leverage for yourself ahead of negotiations (this is what his rotting brain thinks he’s doing with tariffs, when he’s really just shooting himself in the dick and calling it leverage).
But with Iran he is doing this. He’s ordered a ton of refueling tankers for planes conducting air strikes to go to the Middle East. He’s sent the aircraft carrier those tic-tac UFOs in the 2017 NYT article were interested in to support Israel’s war on Iran. He’s pointing a ton of American resources towards war, threatening war, and then seemingly trying to extract maximum concessions from Iran. In a vacuum, it’s not a bad tactic, but this kind of strategy Trump has pursued his entire life is one of diminishing returns. You cannot keep spamming the same button for 79 years and expect people to see every instance in the same light. I know this because I’ve seen many people try this strategy at the poker table and eventually lose everything.
I was born just in time for the Moneymaker poker revolution to hit me and my friends in high school, and the first time I sat down at a table and played Texas Hold’em, I was hooked. I’ve spent thousands of hours at poker tables in college dorms, casinos, and home games across the Western world at this point. I’ve seen a lot, enough to know there is a fairly common kind of person who plays poker just like Trump negotiates, and when they sit down at a table, your job is to get into as many hands with them as possible because whether they realize it or not, they are just dying to give their chips away.
Sure, they’re a pain in the ass to play with. You’ll bet a few big blinds and they’ll raise you a hundred big blinds and take down a pot worth fifteen big blinds, then pat themselves on the back as a supposed genius for being so unreasonable. But the more often they over bet, the less likely people are to think they have a strong hand. What works the first time does not work the tenth time because eventually people at the table see they are full of shit. This is a great way to bully weak players, but any strong player knows the best way to deal with a bully is to punch right back. They might scrap together a profit of fifty big blinds with their Trump-style poker strategy, but eventually someone will see their raise of a hundred big blinds and raise three hundred more, forcing them to actually consider how serious they want to be and whether their hand is any good, and now they’re down fifty big blinds. This is why you want to play as many hands as reasonably possible against these kinds of people, because you never know if this may be the time where they melt down and give away their whole stack.
This would be the absolute worst time to attack Iran. Israel’s air strikes were so effective they appear to have full control over Tehran’s airspace. Iran says the United States is not a target yet, they want to come to the negotiating table, and if they are willing to meet some of the United States’ terms on the nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo, that would be preferable to dropping a bunker buster from a B-2 on it and officially getting the United States in this war. Prior to Israel’s attack, Trump was trying to negotiate a deal with Iran similar to the one Obama made that Trump ripped up, while Israel is pushing for the US to join their pursuit of Iranian regime change (Israel isn’t even playing poker, they’re just flipping the table over, pointing a gun at everyone and demanding that people say they won).
Up until Israel’s government did what they do best and ruined everything for everyone, Trump seemed to want to negotiate with Iran. He is no dove, but he does understand how beneficial anti-war politics can be (also he’s a coward, so capital-W War undoubtedly spooks president bone spurs to a degree). Trump has a strong hand here, and it actually does kind of fit his strategy of applying maximum pressure ahead of a negotiation. We can only hope that again, Trump’s bluster will stop being credible at the edge of his lips, and all those weapons of war currently positioned for war will not be used.
But the fear is that Trump will overplay his hand and pull back after it’s too late (ie: his escalatory tariff on China his Treasury Secretary called an “embargo” that led to staggeringly empty ports on the west coast), and lead us into a new stage of this conflict where American troops stationed in the Middle East are considered fair game by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. That’s war war. And that’s where Trump’s insistence on always applying the most pressure possible can lead him to make major mistakes that kill thousands or even millions like his GOP predecessor did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen.
Poker takes a deft hand to play, and there’s a reason so many compare it to politics. People have varying degrees of leverage to use at their fingertips, and your credibility is intrinsic to how and when you deploy that leverage. The line between reality and politics is blurred, as the actors in the game are intentionally trying to tilt the playing field in their direction, in real or perceived ways. The famed quote from Rounders, “if you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker” is one of the truest things ever said about poker or politics. As someone who has spotted many suckers at the poker table including myself, looking at Trump, I know one when I see one. We better hope he’s the TACO kind to keep folding away his position every time he gets challenged, instead of the lunatic who gives it all away by doubling down on the fiction that their shitty hand can still be sold as a good one at a table where they’ve lost all credibility.
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