Pretty much everybody uses game theory, with varying skill of course, and "luck" and timing are a big part too.
It's unwise to think that Trump always plays the game with that "tough but fair" pattern. "Tough but fair" is not always the best strategy, and risk taking (deviating from the usual pattern) can have great benefit.
And what makes you so sure his stated goals are his actual goals? Voters are part of this game too.
It's too early to tell whre Trump is headed with all this, but obviously, his utterances are flippant, and he is not afraid of trash talking his allies.
I’ll respond to this in segments.
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It’s unwise to think that Trump always plays the game with that “tough but fair” pattern. “Tough but fair” is not always the best strategy, and risk taking (deviating from the usual pattern) can have great benefit.
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*Shrug* In this case, I’m going way back to the basics. TBF tends to be a dominant strategy, and Trump’s actions have fallen largely into that mold. I could be wrong, but I can only report on what I’ve seen and how it looks.
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And what makes you so sure his stated goals are his actual goals? Voters are part of this game too.
It’s too early to tell whre Trump is headed with all this, but obviously, his utterances are flippant, and he is not afraid of trash talking his allies.
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I don’t know if Trump is telling the truth; no one is a mind reader. But his purely executive actions have been, in my opinion, sheer awesome. In executive actions in which Trump has been able to act completely on his own initiative, he has been the most conservative President in the last 30 or so years.
Also, the HFC is not Trump’s ally. They are a faction on their own. They may have convergent goals with Trump and may want to work with him, but they are their own group working towards their own goals, some of which may not be Trump’s goals. And even if they do share the same goals, they still come into conflict on the best way to achieve those goals.
Throw voters into the mix and it suddenly becomes a lot more complicated than I could try to analyze in a 1500-word vanity.
My argument is that Trump and his administration is a separate faction from the HFC, and Trump’s tactics when dealing with them are consistent with the TBF strategy in game theory, at least on a very basic level. We may not LIKE it, but I would argue that it IS consistent.