What Game Theory Tells Us About Donald Trump
Donald Trump likes to brag about his negotiating skills, but for a tough negotiator, he’s awfully easy to manipulate. There are two types of people in Trumpland: those who are nice to Donald, and those who are not nice to Donald. If you flatter Trump, he’ll treat you well. If you criticize him, he’ll retaliate. “I’m a counter-puncher,” he once told CNN.
So to win Trump’s favor, just say something sweet about him; Vladimir Putin praised him last December, and Trump has been preening over the compliment ever since. And to deliberately draw Trump’s fire, say something nasty about him; last week Elizabeth Warren called him a bully and a loser, which dragged him into a distracting and unpresidential tweetfight with someone who is not his opponent.
Game theorists have studied the counter-punching strategy Trump is now known for. In 1980, political scientist Robert Axelrod invited colleagues to design computer programs that would compete against each other in a contest of cooperation and betrayal known as the prisoner’s dilemma. In the game, two criminals are offered immunity to turn the other in. If only one snitches, he goes free, and the other receives a five-year sentence. If both inform on each other, they get four years. If neither talks, they get two years. The game is played repeatedly, so each player faces the same choice over and over, whether to be a nice guy who protects his accomplice or a nasty one who betrays him.
One of the tournament contestants was a four-line computer program called Tit for Tat. Its strategy was simple: Whenever the other player snitched, Tit for Tat retaliated by informing on that player in the next round. Whenever the other player kept silent, Tit for Tat returned the favor by staying mum the next round. By maximizing cooperation with “nice” players and punishing “nasty” ones, Tit for Tat outmaneuvered its opponents and won the tournament.
This election cycle, we have Tit for Trump. From politicians to journalists to pollsters, Trump is quick to praise anyone who speaks favorably of him, and even quicker to denigrate those who don’t. “If I am treated unfairly,” he once warned BuzzFeed, “I will go after that reporter.” Referring to his Republican primary opponents, he told CNN, “I thought these people were all fine, and they came after me, and then I had to go after them.”
So far, the tit-for-tat strategy seems to have paid off. Trump’s reputation for ferocious counterattacks helped dissuade opponents from tangling with him early in the Republican primary. Other GOP leaders refrained from criticizing him out of fear that he would retaliate against “unfair” treatment by launching a third-party campaign. As Trump’s opponents fell behind, they were finally forced to engage. One by one, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz entered Trump’s tit-for-tat universe and went down under a hail of insults.
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