Note to readers: This article echoes my earlier, much shorter and more lighthearted article “The Archduke Game”, which appeared in this magazine on May 23, 2017, but has been updated and expanded to reflect the more extreme present situation in U.S. politics and our rather more perilous times.
My PhD supervisor was an elegant Hungarian who had grown up in the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He completed his advanced studies by the late 1940s and fled Hungary during the revolution. Arriving in Canada in 1957, he joined the faculty at the University of Toronto. He was a terrific mentor and a lifelong friend, and in his brilliant, mirthful and compassionate way taught me high science, low cunning, philosophy, humour, and lots of European culture. Amongst the salad of cultural tidbits that he had salvaged from the rubble of the Kingdom of Hungary was a cynical little game about oral examination boards and favouritism played by graduate students in Hungarian universities after 1919. It was a satirical takeoff on the privileges and courtesies which had been accorded to the royal family of Austria-Hungary prior to its collapse at the end of the First World War. It was called “The Archduke Game”.
In the game, a small group were the examining committee, while another graduate student played the archduke. The examining committee was required to ask the archduke an easy question, and the task of the archduke was to give the most outrageously wrong answer he could imagine. The examiners were then required to explain to the audience and to the judges why that answer was actually correct, and even brilliant and especially perceptive, because it had exposed interesting alternate meanings of the question, or special circumstances, or little-known new knowledge. The judges then decided that either the archduke had won by making an answer nobody could polish, or that the examiners had won by making a plausible argument for the peculiar or outrageous answer.
I had written in May of 2017 comparing the early days of the first Trump administration to a real-life version of the Archduke Game. We’re at that point again, but with a more chilling and dangerous variant of the game being played in earnest in the United States. As before, the role of the archduke graduate student is being played by President Trump, but the easy questions arise spontaneously from the normal daily events in the political milieu, domestic or international, or are posed at press conferences and scrums. The explanatory task of the examiners is now being carried by Marco Rubio, Jamieson Greer, Karoline Leavitt, and a host of other folk sympathetic to or under the thumb of the President. The judges are variously the political classes, the electorate, and the world. No one wants mayhem, so it is natural, sitting in front of a TV, to surmise that surely the President meant something just slightly different, as we try, whether we agree with him on a particular matter or not, to impose a framework of rationality on the world about us.
And it is very likely that, at least in some cases, he did mean something a bit different than how it came out, especially in light of his limited command of language. But the archduke-style answers guarantee a lot of caprice and unpredictability. So, just as in President Trump’s first term eight years ago, dialogue in some quarters, including within the President’s camp, has turned to how to “manage” the President, though this time around, such discussion is in more hushed tones. To be fair, anyone carrying out the busiest job in the world probably needs some “management” to be effective.
But in this case, the discussions about such managing have taken on a disturbing tone, as Republicans quietly discuss the difficulty/impossibility of giving the President bad news, or the likelihood of being fired if your advice or guidance doesn’t match some pre-existing and not fully rational prejudice. Discourse on how to stop or slow the flow of absurd and counter-factual social media posts or make him less inclined to lash out sound less like how to manage an overloaded senior government figure and more like how to manage a performing, semi-tame carnivore.
Imagine, if you will, the discourse of the handlers on a movie set trying to get set up to film the scene where they want their fairly tame grizzly bear to break into the cabin, while making sure he doesn’t eat the prospector inside. Walt Disney, where are you when we really need you? (And, unlike 2017, this time, the bear and his cubs own the whole movie studio.)
Chuckle if you will, but the “handling” being quietly discussed now sounds a lot like how to deal with a sentient creature for which you may have some sympathy, but which is clearly not a fully capable person. This is an unstable and dangerous state of affairs.
During the Biden administration, especially in the 18 months prior to the 2024 election, the grandees of the Democratic party and President Biden’s entourage failed to address the president’s decline, and its impact upon governmental decisions and on their posture for the upcoming election cycle. After the fact, they have been rightly criticized for their lack of courage and their subterfuge, which clearly contributed to their subsequent electoral loss and banishment into the political wilderness, as well as a decline in American power and influence in the world.
Unfortunately, the situation within the new Republican administration is remarkably similar, but it is disguised by the flashy activism associated with President Trump’s cognitive issues, in contrast to Biden’s quiet and passive decline.
After all, what are we to think of a leader who, within a fortnight of taking office and unprovoked, repeatedly threatens to take over his country’s closest ally (in both NATO and NORAD) by coercion, similarly threatens to take part of another NATO ally by armed force, suggests a land grab and ethnic cleansing of a middle-eastern enclave, and various other threats? Unless that person is tastelessly engaged in an April Fools comedic portrayal of the Putin/Hitler school of international relations, it certainly smacks of cognitive decline. We know that, in cognitive decline, one symptom may be the presence of delusions harkening back to activities much earlier in the person’s life, so we should be unsurprised if, in decline, a former rapacious property developer might think that the real world is a version of the classic board game Monopoly.
In 2017, I had incorrectly predicted a fairly rapid end to that round of the Archduke Game, but I was wrong, and round one persisted for the entire four years of the presidential term, and was only brought to an end by a clear electoral loss, which, of course, the archduke, staying in role, insisted must not have been genuine, provoking the dumbest and most incompetent attempt at a coup d’état in modern history.
So, how will the Archduke Game (Redux) come to an end? As before, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that it will drag on until January 2029, with all of the expected negative consequences, including turmoil and suffering in the US, loss of American influence abroad, and the emboldening of the antidemocratic axis of Russia, China and Iran.
On the other hand, the game might end much sooner, and there are probably only two routes from the game back to reality that could occur before the election of 2028. They both start the same way. Once the havoc created by the new POTUS reaches a certain titre, some of his allies will inevitably bail on him. That tipping point is, as always, the point at which the political and social consequences of contradicting him or breaking with him seem less bothersome than the economic and security consequences of staying loyal.
If it is the rich boys’ club that panics first, due to perhaps a slide in the stock markets, a crimp in their asset tallies, or a burst of inflation, they will have their suitable back-of-house methods for reigning him in. However, if it is the political class that panics first, it might possibly be the 25th Amendment route (the “incapacity” provision of the U.S. Constitution) for removing him from office that gets deployed. It would, however, likely have to be by use of the as yet untested Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, about which there still remains considerable uncertainty with respect to the process. But the Democratic Party members of Congress would be only too happy to oblige.
On May 21, 2017, when I crafted the quite different earlier article entitled The Archduke Game, Mr. Trump had just delivered a speech in Riyadh that was not at all bad, so at that time, I had envisioned another possible route out of the game. At that time, I held out the slight possibility that he might have been on the verge of re-inventing himself as superficially sane and moderately truthful in public. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed (or sunk).
How will the Archduke Game end? What route out of the game will it be? Today nobody knows, but we can only hope that it will not be too long before the examiners will begin to sense where the limits to their sophistry lie, and then the judges will judge. And, of course, for more than a century, the deeper meaning of the Archduke Game has always been that an archduke who is a winner in the game is actually a parody of a real-life archduke who is a loser.
