Trump ‘Cards’: Foreign Policy Without Principle
The president’s rhetoric of gambling reveals how he understands power and weakness.
DONALD TRUMP HAS A SIMPLE WORD that sums up his foreign policy. The word is “cards.”
Trump believes that might makes right. He admires aggressors and dictators. He despises victims like Ukraine, “shithole” countries like Haiti, and peaceful neighbors like Canada.
But “cards” captures the larger dynamics of Trump’s worldview. In a card game, you can help or hurt other players by choosing which cards to play. In previous European conflicts, American presidents played our nation’s cards to defeat or contain aggressors. Trump plays America’s cards for the opposite purpose: to exploit the weak.
UKRAINE’S PRESIDENT, VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY, was slow to recognize the extent of Trump’s depravity. When the two men met in the Oval Office on February 28, Trump kept complaining about the way Zelensky played Ukraine’s “cards.” Zelensky seemed baffled. “We’re not playing cards,” he told Trump. “I’m very serious, Mr. President.”
Trump didn’t let up. “You’re playing cards,” he told Zelensky. “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people.”
This was an odd accusation. Even if the war in Ukraine were a game—which, as Zelensky noted, it isn’t—how could Zelensky be construed as the gambler? The war wasn’t his idea. It was Vladimir Putin’s. Yet Trump wasn’t interested in judging Putin. He was interested only in judging Zelensky.
Why? The reason wasn’t that Trump likes Putin (though he clearly does). The reason was that the millions of lives at stake are primarily Ukrainian, not Russian. To Trump, they’re like poker chips. They’re Zelensky’s to lose. Therefore, in Trump’s mind, they’re Zelensky’s responsibility, not Putin’s.
This is how a soulless calculator thinks. It’s not about who’s killing whom. It’s about who has the cards or the chips.
This calculus systematically rewards aggression. Because the lives and land at stake are Ukrainian, Putin gains leverage by taking them. The Russians have “taken a lot of territory, so they have the cards,” Trump explained on February 19. On March 7, as Putin continued his attacks despite Trump’s empty talk of peace, Trump repeated that the Russians “have all the cards,” in part because they were “bombing the hell out of” the Ukrainians.
Ukraine, conversely, loses cards each time Russia attacks. In Trump’s mind, this means Zelensky should accept peace on any terms. Speaking to reporters on February 28, just after their contentious Oval Office meeting, Trump chastised Zelensky for saying unkind things about Putin. “He doesn’t have to stand there and say . . . ‘Putin this, Putin that,’ all negative things,” Trump groused. “He’s got to say, ‘I want to make peace. I don’t want to fight a war any longer.’ His people are dying. He doesn’t have the cards.”
The United States can give Ukraine more leverage by playing cards of its own. That’s what Joe Biden did for three years. He used weapons, aid, and sanctions to weaken the aggressor and strengthen the victim.
Trump has no interest in such moral distinctions. The only distinction he cares about is who has cards and who doesn’t. He’s playing to win. And to him, that means money.
This is why Trump derides Biden for sending aid to Ukraine. He thinks it was stupid to give those cards away. Trump has a better idea: use America’s cards to extract wealth. And that means offering some of them, at a price, to the player who desperately needs them: Ukraine.
Trump has offered Zelensky far less than Biden did—only vague support for Ukraine’s pursuit of security guarantees—in exchange for a hefty share of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. Why should Ukraine accept this obscene rip-off? Because, according to Trump, it has no other option. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards,” Trump told Zelensky in their Oval Office meeting. “With us, you start having cards.”
The alternative, said Trump, was Ukraine’s destruction. “You’re either going to make a deal, or we’re out,” he told Zelensky. “And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty. . . . You don’t have the cards. But once we sign that deal, you’re in a much better position.”
TRUMP’S BEHAVIOR IN THE OVAL OFFICE meeting shocked many people. Afterward, he expressed regret. But it wasn’t regret for his extortion. It was regret that his offer might have been too generous. As he left the White House that day, he told reporters that the prospect of further American involvement in Ukraine, in the form of the mineral deal, was making Zelensky cocky—and that Zelensky’s cockiness was getting in the way of ending the war.
“If we don’t do anything, he’s going to have to make peace, [because] he’s dealing with a very weak set of cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “If we sign, he’s dealing with a very strong set of cards, and then he doesn’t want to make peace. So that’s where we are. . . . You saw what I saw today: This is a man that wants to get us signed up and keep fighting. And we’re not doing that.”
“You can’t embolden somebody that does not have the cards, and all of a sudden that person says, ‘Oh, well, now I can keep fighting,’” Trump complained. “All of a sudden, he’s a big shot because he has the U.S. on his side.”
You could see the gears turning in Trump’s head as he grappled with the nuances of the situation. Not the morality of it—he didn’t care about that—but the strategic complications. Trump had gone into the meeting with Zelensky thinking about how to extract money. But then he realized that if Zelensky, in exchange, got a sense of security that “emboldened” him too much, that might interfere with Trump’s other objective: ending the war on whatever terms Putin would accept. And that objective was important to Trump, because he wanted to collaborate with Putin on other lucrative matters.
A normal American president might have worried more about emboldening Putin. But Trump never worries about that. He has yielded in advance to many of Putin’s demands. Instead, Trump worries about emboldening the victim.
So Trump changed his strategy. To force Ukraine’s capitulation—first to the mineral deal, and eventually to Putin’s terms for ending war—he took cards away from Zelensky. Specifically, Trump halted aid to Ukraine and suspended intelligence sharing with Zelensky’s government.
Trump explained that this was all about squeezing Ukraine. “They don’t have the cards,” he noted again on March 9. When a reporter asked about the suspension of intelligence sharing, Trump said he was trying “anything we can to get Ukraine to be serious about getting something done.”
Zelensky’s objections to Trump’s version of the mineral deal—in particular, Zelensky’s insistence on some kind of security guarantee in exchange for Ukraine’s wealth—infuriated Trump. Trump didn’t see Ukraine as a country in need. He saw it as an uppity beggar with no real leverage.
In a radio interview on February 21, Brian Kilmeade asked Trump whether he had soured on Zelensky because “he didn’t take the mineral deal.” Trump replied that his disgust went back further. “I’ve been watching this man for years now as his cities get demolished, as his people get killed,” said Trump. “I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards. He has no cards. And you get sick of it. And you just get sick of it. And I’ve had it.”
IT’S DISMAYING TO HEAR an American president talk this way about Ukraine. But the danger doesn’t end there. Last week, Trump began to talk in similar terms about Canada. “They should be a state,” he said of the Canadians. “They’re tough traders,” he scoffed, but “some people don’t have the cards.” He compared Canada’s government to Zelensky, who had tried to stand up to Trump on the minerals deal but “didn’t have the cards.” Trump predicted that Zelensky would soon fold. And he implied that Canada, “a very nasty negotiator,” would soon do the same.
The message to America’s allies couldn’t be clearer: Trump doesn’t care about friendship, democracy, or sovereignty. All he cares about is cards. Do you have something of monetary value to offer him or his family? Do you have an economic bloc that’s big enough to fight back against the United States? Do you have nuclear weapons?
If not, start working on it.
