Shitting Your Pants and Calling It Chess

Magic Surrealism, Gaza, Deprogramming and the Perils of Wishing Reality Away

Introduction: When Chaos Is Rebranded as Genius

There is a style of politics that confuses disruption with insight, unpredictability with depth, and sheer force of personality with wisdom. Donald Trump has elevated this style into a governing philosophy. He presents chaos as strategy, impulsiveness as boldness, and the refusal to think things through as a kind of higher intelligence.

Anyone who insists on context, history, culture, or constraints is dismissed as “playing checkers,” while Trump, we are told, is playing chess.

But too often, what is described as chess is nothing more than knocking the board over, kicking the other player in the balls, and declaring victory while aides applaud the originality of the move.

This matters nowhere more dangerously than in Gaza.

Trump’s latest “peace vision” for Gaza has all the hallmarks of what might be called magic political surrealism: the belief that desire, spectacle, and willpower can substitute for cultural reality, institutional capacity, and human nature. It is politics as a parlour trick. Say it confidently enough, stage it grandly enough, and reality will eventually get the hint and comply.

It won’t.

The Nobel Prize Problem

Let us dispense with the polite fiction. Trump’s Gaza plan does not read like realpolitik. It reads like a vanity project. It bears the unmistakable scent of a man who believes history owes him a Nobel Peace Prize and is increasingly irritated that Norway hasn’t returned his calls.

This is not trivial psychology. Trump is famously manipulable through flattery. Appeal to his ego, and you can steer him. Appeal to his sense of grievance, and he will move mountains.

This has been a strength at times. It allowed him to punch through bureaucratic paralysis where others stalled endlessly. The Abraham Accords were real. The Iran strikes were decisive. Biden, by comparison, drifted.

But vanity-driven politics is dangerous when it collides with civilizational conflicts. Gaza is not a stalled infrastructure project. It is not a zoning dispute. It is not a misunderstood startup waiting for venture capital and better branding.

Wishing Doesn’t Make It So

Western policymakers persist in a sentimental fantasy: that everyone, everywhere, is basically the same as us. That deep down, all people just want to grill on weekends, send their kids to school, and complain about mortgage rates.

This projection is comforting—and often catastrophically wrong. It’s like gazing at your twenty-foot constrictor, raised from infancy, and assuring yourself that what you see in its eyes is love. It isn’t. It is not a human creature reasoning about affection or restraint. It is an animal living inside coils of muscle, and one day it may crush you for reasons you will never understand. Constriction is not a lapse in judgment; it is in its genes. It is not malice. It is nature.

Gaza is not simply poor. It is culturally and educationally saturated with genocidal ideology. From kindergarten textbooks to children’s television, Jew-hatred is normalised, glorified, and ritualised. It is a massive cult.

Martyrdom is not fringe; it is aspirational.

Support for Hamas violence remains high. That is not an Israeli talking point; it is documented reality.

You cannot rebuild a society while pretending its dominant beliefs are a misunderstanding.