DONALD TRUMP - 5D CHECKMATE?
Why Trump has lost the argument with reality
In this post I explore the crisis created by the war on Iran, what this means for Donald Trump, and how a strange mixture of fiction and reality remade and unmade America.
Why has the 5D chess player ‘s game ended in 5D checkmate - for him?
I look into the man who made Donald Trump, to see how the power of make belief propelled Trump and his America into a losing argument with reality.
THE THUCYDIDES TRAP
Donald Trump’s visit to meet the Chinese leader Xi Jinping took place amid the ongoing 2026 Iran War, a regime change operation supposed to be completed in days which is now in its third month - and with no end in sight.
The notable quote came from the Chinese leader - which was a gentle reminder of the “Thucydides trap”.
This is a reference to warlike Sparta’s conflict with the its upcoming rival power, Athens. The resulting Peloponnesian War recorded by Thucydides is now understood as a record of human folly at state level by both sides. The warning is an obvious parallel to the limits of military action and of strategic overreach.
Whilst in China, Trump secured no diplomatic breakthroughs, and this is not surprising - as he did not bring many diplomats.
A group of CEOs accompanied Trump, showing again how his administration has tried to replace diplomacy with financial incentives to resolve conflicts of national interest.
This failed in Gaza, as it failed with the Peace Board - with war devastating the Gulf and Arab states induced to join it on promises of regional economic development.
The attempt to induce an end to the Ukraine war with enticements into financial deals was met with frustration by the Russians, of course, with Gruenberg, Witkoff and Kushner’s offers of a stake in ventures such as those of Blackrock seen as an astonishing departure from reality.
It was an attempt to use moneymaking to solve the essential question of the war, which is where the borders of the West and Russia are to be drawn.
“Essentially,” wrote Alaistar Crooke in February this year,
“…this is the Trump-New York real-estate experience transferred to a real-life conflict – in which ‘blood’ usually represents the true currency invested in a conflict.
This approach underlines the West’s degradation into a nihilism that views sacrifices made by men and women in support of their country as a trifle to be bought out.”
The question of where the West ends and Russia begins is itself a result of the refusal to accept reality, and to act as if there were no limits to the power of US actions.
The 2014 coup, carried out by the US in Ukraine, is one event in a campaign dating back to 1952 to use US influence and military power to isolate and destabilise Russia.
The reason why “The borderlands” - which is what “The Ukraine” means - became a militarised question at all is because of a decades-long project to replace reality with a new world authored by the United States itself.
The refusal to recognise or respect reality is the general flaw here, because the financialised dealmaking frame excludes the very reason why the wars in Ukraine, in Gaza and in Iran are being fought as they are.
To the purely money-minded, conflict as an existential question for a people makes no business sense.
THE MENU DROPS DOWN
The failure here is also a strategic one for a US administration which sees war as a matter of choice, which in typical consumer fashion is selected from a menu of options.
The menu of reasons supplied for the war in Iran, as for those in Ukraine and Gaza, is written by the would-be authors of reality. The choices it offers are changed accordingly, and always in complete disregard of the people fighting and dying in them.
None of the options take any account of why people fight at all, and nor do they recognise their suffering.
The menu of options for ending the war is presented in a flourish of business opportunities, property deals and share options. The real reasons for the war are simply getting in the way of making money, and so they are dismissed.
This means none of these conflicts can be resolved, and so they aren’t. At least, they are not going to be resolved by Mr Trump and his New York Method. Trump met Xi with a planeload of business leaders. Will business deals dissolve the dedication of the Chinese to realise a united China, and absorb Taiwan?
These views are of two separate ways of seeing the world, and though they may be able to coexist, past form strongly suggests the significant difference between reality and its reframing as real estate. It is unlikely a few lucrative deals will dissolve the boundaries of China, its power and what its people will put up with , just as they have failed to do so with those of Russia, Ukraine, the Palestinians and the Iranians.
In short, Donald Trump is in an argument with reality which he has lost, and this is an even greater defeat than that he and the US empire has suffered in Iran, because it means neither he nor the United States no longer commands the power of make belief.
As with all regime change operations, the regime that changed most in this final one is at home - not abroad. Why is this the last regime change?
It will change the US utterly, and this change is coming home soon.
THE POWER OF MAKE BELIEF
The regime change era was marked by a tremendous self belief on the part of its architects, precisely expressed in a famous quote attributed to the Bush era neocon Karl Rove.
”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” was what was said, according to Ron Suskind’s 2004 article.
The title of that article is “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”.
Bush and Trump, the two presidents who bookend the regime change era, shared a faith in themselves and in an idea of America which has never looked more uncertain than it does now.
THE FAILURE TO CREATE REALITY
On September 16th, 2001, George W Bush said “this war on terror is going to take a while”.
So far, it has taken 25 years, and much more with it.
Another “CEO President” has now delivered the end of the regime change regime. Trump’s war of choice was also inspired by a deeply politicised idea of faith and sold with reasons we have no reason to believe were ever true at all.
The WMDs never really existed, and just as Iraq failed to transition into a liberal democracy, none of the stated aims of the war on Iran have been met. And nor are they likely to be.
The credibility gap is not only between Trump’s tweets and reality, nor even between the absurd assessments of victory given by his administration against an obvious strategic defeat.
It is a capability gap between what America believed it was and what it is now.
5D CHECKMATE
This is the recognition of limits, of hard and soft power, of the power to make people believe in your power, to make deals, to force compliance with sanctions, to use military power as an instrument of policy, and to maintain a belief in your own unipolar power when the world has changed around you. Of course, this also means you and your team are unlikely to win any elections anytime soon.
This has been called Trump’s “Zugwang” moment, using a concept from chess where any move you make is a losing move.
A man lionised for his 5D chess has manoeuvred himself into a 5D checkmate.
Trump is now fenced in by five interdigitated dimensions of an inescapable strategic loss — military, diplomatic, economic, reputational, and domestic-political — that he and his administration continues to present as a brilliant victory.
It is equally impossible for Trump to admit this in public as it is for him to not know this in private. And so the conflict is frozen because of a man and his method, which made him who he is, and why he makes the decisions and revisions which create his ever-winning takes.
This situation (and its non solution) could only have been created by Donald Trump, and he could not have had it any other way, because of the way he is.
THE FACTS DON’T MATTER
Trump seems to have been made in the deals which made his fortune in New York. Decades ago, his mentor at that time was a man called Roy Cohn.
Described as a “cutthroat attorney” in the 2024 film The Apprentice, Cohn taught the young Trump a series of maxims that would appear in Trump’s own “Art of the Deal”. They can be summarised as:
Attack, attack, attack.
Admit nothing and deny everything.
No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat..
The film, which is a feature film and not a documentary, has many other revealing moments. One of them is when the onscreen Cohn says,
“You create your own reality”, before adding that “Truth is a malleable thing.”
There is something of the spirit of our dying age in these words, echoing the Bannonite “flooding the zone with s***” media strategy revealed in 2018. As Eli Hazan, the new director of Netanyahu’s Press Office said in April
“The truth doesn’t matter anymore. The Facts don’t matter anymore.”
Hazan said flooding social media with fabricated narratives, “just like Trump does,” could defend Israel’s now toxic actions with this method.
Yet the facts do matter, and the fact of the matter is that the war in Iran has revealed facts about America which will matter a great deal to Americans themselves and to the world order it once led. Why then do these people act as if they can escape the consequences of the reality their actions have created?
What caused such a strange effect?
THE DEALMAKER WHO MADE DONALD TRUMP
This is inspired by the power of make belief exemplified in Roy Cohn, and which was an article of America’s faith in itself in the self-hypnotic moment of American unipolarity after the fall of the Soviet Union.
When I first heard Col. Douglas MacGregor talk about Roy Cohn’s influence on Trump I thought it was a remarkable insight.
It is, and not only into the mentality of Donald Trump the dealmaker.
When I looked into this film I saw that the rules of Trump the young apprentice were also those of a President of a United States which had seen itself as possessing a limitless power, for whom reality itself was a script to be rewritten by the world’s leading actor.
The collision of fiction and reality in this dramatisation of Trump’s formative years is also an acute retelling of the regime change era.
In one scene, a fictional Trump reveals much of the truth about the real one, the reality he creates around himself, and the political technique which translated this into a decades-long foreign policy which has left America bankrupt in money, morality and meaning.
Trump, played by Sebastian Stan, is talking to Craig Warnock as Tony Schwartz. In reality, Schwartz is the man who would ghostwrite Trump’s bestselling book, The Art of the Deal.
“I got three rules. OK? They’re my three rules of winning”, says “Trump”.
“Rule one: the world is a mess, OK? The world is a mess, Tony. You have to fight back. You have to have a tough skin. Attack, attack, attack. If somebody comes after you with a knife, you shoot ‘em back with a bazooka.”
Rule two is more revealing yet.
“Rule two: what is truth, Tony? What is truth? You know what’s truth? What you say is truth, what I say is truth, what he says is truth. What is the truth in life? Deny everything, admit nothing.
You know what’s true? What I say is true. And third of all, most important, no matter how f***** you are, you never ever ever admit defeat. You always claim victory. Always.”
“Tony” replies
“You know, that sounds like the US foreign policy for the past quarter century.”
Yes, this says a lot about the beliefs which made America what it is today, and which unmade it, too. Yes, this is said in a film and is a dramatised version of real events.
Yet again, in so many ways, the truth spoken by American power today is not stranger than fiction - it is fiction.
The fictional film seems to tell us more truth about Trump than he ever will himself. At first glance, it looks like a representation of reality which explains far more about the state he, America and the world is in that anything which comes out of the Zone Flooding Machine of the White House.
SEASON FINALE?
This is a story of invincible self belief that cannot comprehend its limits to constrain or shape reality. This is the story of a power which shaped much our lives, and it is coming to an end.
Today, the only people who seem convinced by its script are the actors whose livelihoods depend on it and their dimishing audience - who look more like desperate refugees from reality than diehard fans of a soon-to-be-cancelled television spectacle.
This is a dependency culture, which relies on the supply of (and the making of demand for) whatever the cast can make up to keep the show on the road.
The people whose livelihoods depend on reality are going to find out very soon that the facts and the truth matter a great deal, and the time it takes them do so is another looming limit for the salesman-in-chief of American make belief.
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Iran wins regardless. They can hold out long enough for the midterms to hand Trump political defeat. In the meantime we have worldwide famine as farmers can’t afford fertilizer. We have out of sight inflation with oil well over $100/bbl. The US can’t replace its arsenal fast enough meaning China takes over Taiwan. The national debt in the US? The dollar weakening?
All because Trump listens to nobody but himself and yes! Benjamin Netanyahu.
However Frank, what choice did America have? Kamala Harris? A lose/lose situation.
But the demise of America didn’t come down to the 2024 elections. America has been committing suicide on the installment plan for 80 years.
So back to Iran? They win even if they’re bombed into oblivion.
America? Their loss is the result of abject moral decay (as is the Western world) and the fuse for this debacle began with the Catholic Church. The first domino to fall was the loss of its moral compass.