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,…