Tag: Poker

Playing Poker with the Senate: The Art of the Deal with Pam Bondi

I think what we have going on with Trump is a lot of The Art of the Deal and a good sign of how he’s going to handle things in this next term.  This is the difference between a successful business guy and a bunch of people who sought political life because they couldn’t do anything else.  Over the years, this has been a real problem. Our current Senate has a lot of new people who lean toward the MAGA view of the world, but there are still RINO holdovers, and when J.D. Vance walked the proposed Matt Gaetz around to interview all the senators ahead of confirmation, it was like playing poker and walking around the table to see what kind of hands the other players had.  I thought Matt Gaetz was an excellent pick for Attorney General.  Probably the best pick.  But immediately after touring the Senate, Matt Gaetz mysteriously withdrew his name, and Trump announced that Pam Bondi would be the new pick, almost as if that were Trump’s plans all along.  He had talked to Pam about it, and a plan was playing out.  And what Trump learned was that there were 4 or 5 senators like Mitch McConnell who were hard no’s on Matt Gaetz and would not be convinced otherwise.  So rather than fight that uphill battle with great media fanfare, Trump just changed tactics and put a woman in that place to take off the edge for the more progressive senators and Democrats on the confirmation vote. 

Pam Bondi has done the Attorney General job in Florida during the Rick Scott as governor years.  Before that, Florida politics was a lot different as Jeb Bush set the standard, so these days, with Ron DeSantis, it’s a much different place, a much more conservative state.  When Pam Bondi was Attorney General there, she was pretty good.  My opinion is that she was more talk than action.  However, she has been loyal to President Trump and stood by an America First agenda, no matter what happened.  Is she the person who will kick down doors and drag the bad guys out for a hanging? I don’t think so.  But I think she will take on Trump’s personality in his administration, and I think that was always the gig.  I think Trump and Matt Gaetz have other plans looming in the background since he so quickly announced that he was leaving Congress during the next term.  His district is conservative, so that shouldn’t hurt during a special election.  But what we have going on here is a lot of poker playing that is not normal.  And the media doesn’t know how to report it.  And the political machines are not smart enough to understand what is happening.  Trump has a lot of senator confirmations that are going to be tough, but essentially, he put forth his most controversial pick, making all the rest seem very normal by comparison, and paraded him around to see how the Beltway would bet.  And he got his answer and gave the rest of his picks the ammunition they needed to pass confirmation in the Senate.  Although I was looking to Gaetz, Pam Bondi is about as good as we can get for a position like that, but it comes down to the Art of Making a Deal, which has always been Trump’s thing.  We will see a lot of deal-making that will come out very good for all of us.  Trump and the private sector are beating down the political machines of K-Street in a way they have never experienced before.

And that’s the name of the game in most things in life, especially poker.  I think it’s a great game, especially Texas Hold Em’ because it teaches players how to make a good hand win and how to recognize a good hand from a bad one.  Or, how to play a bad hand and still win.  Poker is about strengths and weaknesses and making the most out of personal circumstances.  It’s not about luck as much as manipulating the other players.  A player at the table could have the best hand in the world, and the person holding the bad hand can still beat them by coaxing them to fold.  And I think that’s what Trump did to the entire Senate, now led by John Thune, and appeasing the Mitch McConnell holdovers.  Trump looked at their hands and saw what he needed to do.  Matt Gaetz will be involved in something that does not require Senate confirmation but that won’t be announced until all the confirmations happen.  Once the Senate angers Trump, he’ll pull out Matt Gaetz and get things moving again.  If you are a fan of The Art of the Deal books or Poker, this is shaping up to be an exciting four years, and the established order of things is not ready.  The many media members who have learned to report political news a certain way are about to have the tops ripped off their business; there will be so much every day that nobody will understand how to process it all.  But this Matt Gaetz situation is just a hint of things to come.

You don’t always get things the way you want them.  But what’s important is that you turn unfortunate circumstances into victories however you can.  Seldom does anything work out the way you envision them.  And putting Matt Gaetz up for an AG nomination was an over-the-top bold move.  But not for the reasons people thought.  Rather than place him in a very contentious position as Attorney General, he used him to discover what the other players at the table were holding as cards.  Once J.D. Vance and Matt Gaetz learned who had what at the table, Trump put down his hand to blow them all out of the water.  And that was Pam Bondi, a pick just as good as Matt Gaetz, but she appears much more reasonable because of her polished personality after years of working in established administrations under challenging conditions.  She is the kind of person even RINO members of the Senate can vote for, if not for her politics, but because she’s a strong woman, and nobody wants to be on record going against that.  So Trump played the hand he had to best effect once he knew what the other players had.  And that’s how you win in these games, whether with a more substantial hand or a bluff.  Winning is the goal, and when it comes to getting Pam Bondi confirmed by the Senate in a way that will not harm his other picks, Trump just showed why we voted for him as the best option to Make America Great Again and why he was so successful throughout his life.  This is how business is done, and the world of useless politicians won’t be able to compete with him.  This is only the start of a lot of deals that will be made, and as Trump has shown over and over again in the past, making deals is his favorite thing to do in the world.  And he’s good at it.  And this nomination of Pam Bondi for Attorney General is just the beginning of many great things to come. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Root Cause of all Political Problems: Playing the cards to win, not letting the cards play you

One of the reasons I had to talk about superstition in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, is because one of the failures of Lean manufacturing, which has become the industry standard in process improvement across the world, is that it fails to recognize the most important detriment to all process failures, human behavior. Rather than deal with the detriments of human behavior, Lean seeks to create processes that remove human variables and build group consensus around those resolutions. Because the main problem with human behavior is that in the East, and even in Europe, workforces are much more compliant naturally due to their long histories with kings and overbearing governments. But in America, a different kind of human being emerged. And we can easily see those differences in the type of card games that we play. I specifically use the differences between Tarot cards and poker cards to accentuate the point often to clarify the differences in thought. And this is spectacularly important in our present time specifically because globalists have assumed, as many have with Lean manufacturing, that all people are the same. If the same rules were imposed upon them, then a universal kind of sameness could emerge and could then be easily controlled. But that has turned out to be vastly untrue, and the failure which follows is what we are seeing playing out in our present time. 

Lean manufacturing, as it turns out, which is a problem I have always had with it, is that it was a kind of pre-ESG score way to bring eastern thoughts to western cultures and then launch a global approach of sameness to all industries. I have taught Lean for over 30 years and have always run into the same problem; American cultures tend to push back on it while those in Europe and Asia tend to be much more accommodating. This has been a mystery to all involved because they failed to consider the most important aspect of human behavior and how they transact with their peers. So in my book, I break it down in ways that people can understand, which essentially comes down to tolerance for superstition in a culture and how those beliefs manifest into a business climate or a political one. In the book, I give a history of superstition across the world and talk about the use of horoscopes and Tarot cards to predict the future as some fortune teller might professionally do around a crystal ball. The thought was that people were helpless to the greater scheme of things and could seek help in the stars or in the spirit world of card reading to better navigate through the complexities of everyday life. When a string of luck occurs in business, even the most resolute executive might say, “knock on wood,” hoping not to jinx a project into failure when all has been going well. Behind such thoughts is the fear that humans are not in control of their destiny and that they must subjugate themselves to some “greater good” to function at even basic tasks in life. 

But in New Orleans, during western expansion, the card games of Europe evolved into something much more conducive to the lifestyles of Americans. Poker was invented, and over the next hundred years, the very American game of Texas Hold Em’ emerged and is extremely popular presently. Poker tournaments are common on sports programming such as ESPN, and every casino runs a Texas Hold Em’ game. Likely, they are running dozens of them. Meanwhile, the fortune-tellers are always on the outskirts of such activity at the fairgrounds and sidewalk attractions which offer a different kind of game for the more faint at heart, Tarot card readings. It is often interesting to go to a casino and witness the types of people who play poker and the kind who line up to have their fortunes told to them by someone else. The point of the matter is that the poker players can win the game even if they have a bad hand. The poker players play the cards, whereas the Tarot card reader allows the cards to play them. The fortune is in the cards, but the game is played to win in poker even if the cards are bad. Both are card games, but their rules of conduct are magnificently different to reflect the cultures that play them. 

In the movie Titanic, still one of the most successful movies ever made, this idea of making one’s own luck was a centerpiece of the story. Many women loved the love story between Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet; they could relate to the overbearing mother, the “too perfect” fiancée who was projected to be a great and wealthy business leader. It was, in essence, an East meets West story, where the business leader was a person who made their “own luck,” which he actually says at the end of the movie as his projected wife leaves him for the unfocused exploits of the hero played by DeCaprio.  Only to find herself floating on a door in the freezing north Atlantic after the Titanic sank and her lover sacrificed himself so that she could live. The story’s villain was one who self-determined his reality while the heroes surrendered themselves to circumstance. We see those same politics playing out daily in our news cycles, in our business process improvements, and certainly within our own families. But what the American poker players figured out was critical to the truth of the universe.

Even when you are losing, you can still win, and poker was invented to reflect that new way of looking at things from the perspective of an American, which much of the world admires, but secretly resents because they don’t have the courage for it. It is much safer to have the cards tell them how to live, consult a horoscope, and look to the stars for guidance. But to the American, not all of them, but to the bold ones who figure it out, every moment of every day is an opportunity. Even bad luck can be turned into fortune if you know how to play the cards right. But failure often happens because people let the cards play them. They don’t live their lives in a way where they play the cards. That is why Lean manufacturing always falls short, and companies end up throwing vast amounts of money at process improvements when they should be dealing with the psychology of interpersonal relationship failures. This is why Republicans and Democrats essentially can never work together because they have entirely different ways of dealing with the same problem. One is passive, and one is very active. And this is also why the MAGA movement is growing, why people elected a casino owner with a supermodel wife to the White House twice, and why much of the swamp hated them for it. Politics wants to read the Tarot cards. Trump supporters want to play to win. And those approaches will never go together. The problem was never one of simply political belief. Instead, it all comes down to superstitions and how to manage them. Do we let the cards play us, or do we play the cards? In America, we play the cards. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Tea Party Movement is Alive and Well: But there are different ideas about what “good” is

A lot of Old Friends and a Lot of New Friends

There are many talks now about the Tea Party as if the movement ever really went away.  Many are amazed to hear that there are still Tea Parties in various communities.  I can say that I know of many who are still functioning through the Trump years into the present, and they have been thriving.  The most significant difference was that they weren’t being covered in the media the way they had been, so in that way, a lot of people think that they went away.   But I had been to a few Tea Party events with the West Chester Tea Party over the years, so I had known firsthand that they were still functioning.  Including recently when I was invited to come and speak at one of their meetings on Critical Race Theory and how it applied to Lakota Schools.  Now with Trump out of the White House and functioning as a ghost from Florida, the foundations of his presidency are very much alive and well.  The Tea Party movement can once again be heard.  They never went away; it was just that the noise of the world made it hard to listen to them.  Yet when I arrived at a meeting for the invite cast my way, I was even amazed at how many people were there.  It was a packed crowd.   The church where we were meeting in West Chester couldn’t have held more people; it was pretty amazing to see.  I go back in time with the West Chester Tea Party for over a decade, and they were always a big one with great crowds.  But the crowds now were bigger than back then, which says quite a lot.

It was great to see many of the old faces from back then.  But it was even better to see many new faces.  My participation with the Tea Party in West Chester sort of faded out in 2014 when Trump started to look like he was going to run for president.  Then by 2015, it was clear that I made the turn toward Trump while many other Tea Party members supported Rand Paul and his dad Ron Paul along with Ted Cruz.  In those early days of the Trump campaign, nobody was taking him all that seriously.  But for me, I knew that the fight we had to conduct would be unconventional, to say the least, and that Trump was the perfect guy for the job.  My wife and I had several grandchildren by this point, and we often had visits from them on the same days as the meetings.  It wasn’t any particular thing, just really supporting different candidates for the presidential run in 2015 and 2016.  I still returned to the Tea Party for specific meetings on essential topics, but gradually I went from an every meeting attendee to a once or twice year participant. 

However, returning for this little presentation on Critical Race Theory, I couldn’t help but make some additional observations.  Over the years, many of the Tea Party candidates that emerged into public office I had stayed close with.  Many of them are now mainstream candidates and doing great work.  But the elements of the Tea Party itself were very much still in the rock-throwing phase, so the guilt of trust had formed along those lines that were noticeable.   Back in the early days of the Tea Party in West Chester, many officeholders attended every meeting.  Now, not so much.  There were a few here and there, but generally, there was a lack of trust in all elected officeholders that hadn’t been there before.  My position on rock-throwers is that it’s a critical part of any management. That’s how you can determine whether or not ideas hold up or not.  Yet, if you are successful as a rock thrower, you will eventually find that you will win and become the mainstream.  And that is a different animal. That’s the point when you will be the one responsible for making decisions instead of criticizing others for making them, and for many, that is a tough transition. 

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

As I said, I maintained several of my relationships with Tea Party candidates who are now very much at the core of the Republican Party, and I’d like to see it stay that way as long as the shelf life of those officeholders holds up.  But there is a perception that just being in the office leads directly to corruption.  That is one of the reasons in my new book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business; I talk so much about playing poker because, in politics, that is often the game we are playing, just by the default mode. I’d love to have a republic with Jesus in all the offices; it would be a great world if that were the case.  But often, and this is one of the reasons that Trump thrived in politics, the people you are dealing with are sleazy and up to no good.  But they can be made to your purposes if you play the game correctly.  From what I could see of the modern Tea Party, many didn’t think that such a game should be played in politics, that the effort to install purity was the ultimate goal for officeholders.  But experience said many of those pure minds would wash out the moment evil touched their sensitive souls, and then you are back to square one with those positions. That’s why I think playing poker is a much more appropriate metaphor for officeholders.  Poker is all about managing deceit for the gains of the pot without losing along the way.  I have always felt that the Tea Party produced many good poker players who do a good job today without losing themselves.  But they needed to be more like Trump and less like the apostles of Jesus who easily fold once vast evils of the political world wash over them in the combat of ideas.  I don’t think it’s a void that can’t be worked out, but it was certainly present in the modern West Chester Tea Party. 

One thing that could not be debated was the intent, and at that West Chester Tea Party meeting, there were plenty of people who intend to bring good management to elected office.  They may disagree about the means, but the intent is clear to everyone, and interest in that intent is as strong as ever, perhaps more so.   The Trump Presidency had shown people that much of the evil they thought was out there indeed was.  If there was ever a question about the kind of corruption Ron Paul always talked about, Trump rooted it out for all to see, and we are better off for it.  Everyone deals with such information differently, but at least now we all know and don’t have illusions about it.  What we do about it now is, of course, the real story that is evolving day by day.  But putting up with a communist and socialist world with the complete take over of our government by foreign attackers, well, that’s just not going to happen.  I could see it clearly in that West Chester Tea Party meeting.  And I know it from my political friends who I’ve known as long if not longer than my start with that same Tea Party over a decade ago.  Accepting evil in politics was not in the cards, but like most things in life, the wins and losses come in how we play them. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Poker Game of Coronavirus: Its all about winning the pot of Global Warming awareness sponsored by Bill Gates–Trump can’t fold

Before we start with this, keep in mind, I have no desire in the world to be politically correct. It’s a waste of time and not a true reflection of the human condition, which actually says a lot about how Coronavirus as a scam has been utilized against us all in such a short period of time. Those who are playing by these new rules of social conduct are the first ones to run for cover when the authority figures of our times tell us to, and it is they who are lost as to what’s really happening with Coronavirus. To understand that, I would offer that people have a good understanding of the great American game of Texas Hold ‘Em Poker. And I’m not talking about the games that are broadcast on television, which are great, but not the true essence of the game. I’m talking about the kind of game where the decks feature topless women on the backs of the cards and cigar smoke is fogging out the player across the table where the participants are betting mortgages on their homes. And the cocktail waitresses are serving hard drinks in thin lingerie. Forget about global sentiments about equality, transgender rights and 6’ foot social distancing. To understand the game, you must understand the art of bluffing and to see it through all those visual stimuli and pressure to know how to play the cards you have.

The included clip featuring Bill Gates on CNN’s Anderson Cooper show is the bluff I’m talking about and I’d advise you dear reader to watch it fully before reading any further, and I’ll tell you what kind of game is being played here. Take note that what Bill Gates is saying is almost precisely what Amy Acton from Ohio has been saying, and many health directors across America like her. They are getting their information from a single, global source which has been heavily influenced by Gates and thus, they are setting policy based on information he has been providing for many years, most aggressively since around 2015 as he really started ratcheting up his campaign on viral attacks being the next great threat to the world. Now, if we are all playing poker, and I know what my cards are—and they are good—I’ve seen the three flop cards on the table and watched how all the players at the table bet their chips, who’s raising the stakes, who is already folding. Now we’ve seen the Turn, the fourth card and witnessed all the behaviors, watched the facial expressions, counted the delay in reacting to the circumstances by the other players. Then of course once the global models for projecting Coronavirus deaths had to be reduced in London recently we can see what comes up on the River card and we can see by everyone’s reaction and our own hand that we have a 99.9999999999999999999999% chance of winning this hand—yet the other players are bluffing and this is why.

Bill Gates has one great passion in life after his personal genius made him one of the richest people in the world as head of the Microsoft Company and that is global warming, or rather educating people about his interpretation of it. In the great poker game in that smoke-filled room with those pornographic cards and cigar smoke, that’s what he wants in that pot in front of the dealer. But he doesn’t have the cards to win it, we do. So for him to win the pot, he has to make us think he can beat us which will be hard to do because we have a straight flush. Not the top winning hand, but pretty close—and we know it. Yet Bill Gates is a trusted name, most of us use products from the company he created, so when he presents us with a bluff, we are inclined to listen. Yet, he doesn’t have the cards so we can rest assured that we have all the leverage in the game.

To sell his bluff, Gates must convince us that the Coronavirus testing and spread are important factors of consideration, not the actual death rate now that everyone knows that it will be around .2%–nothing more than a common flu. For Gates he needs to make us think that stopping the spread of the virus to prevent an overrun on the hospitals and that we must keep America shut down to keep it from spreading is the key thing to measure. What Gates isn’t saying is that the rest of the world doesn’t have the hospital capacity that we do in America yet they have been the ones setting the policy of containment forcing us to copy them through guidelines flowed down through the World Health Organization. Of course, it was Bill Gates himself who helped shape those guidelines well before this Coronavirus ever hit the stage. Then from there the CDC in America was an extension of those same guidelines which was passed down directly to the state health directors advising all the governors. Mysteriously there was lots of ad time purchased on the internet and on television to promote the work of the CDC, so budgets for this crisis were already in place based on the pre-determined game plan.
Yet what is the real issue for Gates was to tie this containment effort for a viral outbreak to his love of global climate change—reducing the human imprint on the earth by slowing down all economic movement and keeping people off the roads and in their homes. The Coronavirus as we know by the River card is nothing more deadly than an average virus, but before anybody could figure that out Gates had to sell to everyone from the WHO to the CDC that the name of the game was controlling the spread due to a lack of hospital capacity that was based on a global problem, not a problem within the United States. We have never had real shortages with similar outbreaks, but we were being bluffed into believing that this one was different. Yet it wasn’t.

What the Trump administration has to do is call that bluff, push all the chips into the middle and crush Gates’ hopes of using this Coronavirus to advance his climate science agenda which is a far left platform based on the same faulty science that built the modeling for the death rate of this latest pandemic. Keep in mind it was when the WHO declared Coronavirus a pandemic that everyone freaked out and these lockdown strategies started getting blown out of proportion. So far Gates and his climate activists have bluffed their way to the River card, but they don’t have the cards to win. So Trump has to crush his hopes and send a signal that knocks Bill Gates and the rest of the radicals off their feet forever, otherwise we will have pandemics several times a year and an economy that can never get back on its feet again, which is exactly what the climate activists want from this Coronavirus. Bill Gates is one of the top advocates in the world for this subject and you can see clearly that everyone in the science community has been listening to him. Amy Acton in Ohio has been repeating him almost verbatim. So, knowing all that, as we place our bets on reopening the economy, don’t fold. And certainly, don’t put America through this whole thing again. The climate activists are playing the only cards they have, and they don’t have enough to win the pot—and this is as close as they’ll be able to get for a long time. So go all in and crush them so it would take them years, or even lifetimes to recover, because we are playing that kind of game. The smoke is thick, the optics seductive, but the game is the game and you have to know the odds.

Rich Hoffman

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Gunfighters, Poker Players, and the Great American Constitution

I personally use the western expansion period of American history as a reference to something of a miracle. While the enemy in America, those trying to change the very nature of the Constitution seek to re-write history with progressive sentiments, I see the situation of the great journey into the West by Americans after the Civil War as something of a miracle and I carry around symbols of that age with me every day everywhere I go. The more I have practiced Cowboy Fast Draw with my Ruger Vaquero the more obvious the miracles of America’s west have become to me. Recently a good friend of mine who returned from Vegas brought with him some literal Trump playing cards that he found in his hotel gift shop. Even though they are only playing cards I thought they were some of the most beautiful items I have seen in a while. They are gold covered of course and have Trump’s face on a $100-dollar bill on the back. I think they are fabulous as I do love the game of poker because it is a game structured under the premise of American capitalism. I can’t carry my guns around with me everywhere, even though I think I should. I do wear a cowboy hat often and usually have playing cards and poker chips in my pocket at all times to remind me of just how special the American West was and what role it still plays to this day in the political landscape. Poker was the game of gunfighters and it was the American gunfighters who broke the back of the Vico Cycle in the context of world history and presented us with options today that I would argue are the first in human history.

History and its understanding is more than a hobby for me. I know quite a lot about it, and I would say that up until the Renaissance Period mankind likely for tens of thousands of years if not hundreds of thousands of years rose and fell along the lines of what is known as the Vico Cycle which essentially means all societies rise along a known trajectory of habit, starting with theocracy, then aristocracy, then democracy, anarchy, only to start again. When archaeologists really get into the weeds of why societies fail and great cities suddenly empty and their inhabitants disappear, it is due to this condition everywhere in the world for all recorded history and likely into history we are not even aware of because the rate of decay and erosion prevent our study that far back. During the Dark Ages of Europe, just another period of time when theocracy ruled the minds of mankind, the Renaissance was born and enlightened minds started asking hard questions that took a few centuries to work out, but eventually the Scottish Rites started contemplating what would eventually become the United States. They’d have to leave Europe to try the experiment of self-ruled people but once they did, there was a revolution and born from that the American Constitution. In the context of historical documents, starting with the Magna Carta in England and merging into what we now call the American Constitution I think are some of the greatest concepts of philosophy so far created as a species of thinking creatures.

The Constitution made many freedoms possible for minorities, for women and for all the immigrants migrating into the New World. It produced great wealth which changed the nature of global politics within a hundred years and I would argue broke the Vico Cycle of world history. There was always some Hitler type that came along and cast the world back into theocracy after anarchy but this time it was the West that saved the world from a tyrant and history was changed. Of course, the enemies of the American Constitution recognize that and have learned not to try to fight free people directly. So they are seeking to undermine the power of America by eroding away at the philosophy which created it which describes accurately our present circumstances. However, it was the American cowboy, gunslinger, card player and gold digger who effectively destroyed the Vico Cycle and put us on the precipice of leaving earth to colonize other planets, such as Mars in such a short period of time because due to the Constitution, the autonomous actions of mankind were unleashed and thus a new age was born.

I would contend that the American Indian was not “native” or “indigenous” but were in fact migrants from previous failed societies, some from the Maya, some from the Aztec, some from cultures that came and went which have never been recorded before, but all had a try at the Vico Cycle and failed reverting back to tribal theocracies dancing like idiots just to make it rain under storm clouds dressed as birds and other animals. They were not functioning under the premise of an American Constitution representing free people so the Indians were run over by a conflict of clashing philosophies, one successful and one not. One culture had science, one culture had superstitions and theocratic limitations similar to the Dark Ages of Europe. As the Indians were pushed off their lands and towns were built on the emerging American frontier brothels, casinos and criminal elements emerged and were only regulated by the gun which to an outsider looked like chaos and the worst of mankind. Modern day Las Vegas is very much the same representation, the best and worst that mankind has to offer is on full display. But the judgment of scum and villainy is only a transitory one, it is the unleashed human mind that benefited most, the opportunity to make money free of aristocracy and to personal profit from the work one applied, even if it was a diseased whore working in a gold rush town’s saloon. Or the gambler working a poker table trying to get rich off the ignorance of his associates, a new way of thinking emerged and the perils of the Vico Cycle were effectively ended on the Western frontier backed by a philosophic experiment of the American Constitution.

So yeah, the gold cards with President Trump on them from Vegas were special to me because they represent a change in thought that was new to mankind. When we talk about the age of MAGA, (Make America Great Again) this is what we are talking about, a Constitution that created great autonomy among people who unleashed thriving new opportunities which quickly became huge cities, railroads that crawled across the nation and an unrivaled international economy all within a few hundred years. The enemy of the Constitution of course are jealous and they want to erode away all the value that this fine history has produced, and they want to focus on the slavery, the conflict with the Indians, the conflict with the Spanish who had conquered Mexico and even the fights with Europe to forge the new Constitution. Of course they’d love to erase all the great gains made and get back to the Vico Cycle because it’s all they know and they lack the courage to be free themselves so they look to the Indian and the Eastern mystic for guidance, to surrender thought to the gods of superstition, which likely ruled the minds of the weak for hundreds of thousands of years. But in America things changed, the Constitution brought forth the beginnings of an autonomous culture which didn’t look pretty at first, but through the gun smoke and the haze of bar room poker games came something new, and the greatest country on the face and history of planet earth emerged and it was a miracle worth fighting for. And that’s what I think of when I see a cool gold playing card from Vegas, the hopes and dreams of a civilization that just wanted to be free of the Vico Cycle, and for once it actually happened after a lot of work and thought.

Rich Hoffman

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Donald Trump Reminds me of the Great Poker player Doyle Brunson: Give those Mariachi performers at the White House a $1 tip

If I were Donald Trump listening to the Mariachi protestors outside the White House all night attempting to keep the First Family awake, I’d walk out onto the lawn to the fence and throw a $1 bill into the hat of one of the performers. Then I’d go back inside and let the losers wear themselves out. Trump has the high ground in this fight and he can easily use it to defeat any panic driven protests from the political left. As much as a Mariachi band sounds like a vacation when you hear the music if it is taken as a cultural reference to a Marxist society south of the border, it’s a pretty pathetic protest that will turn off many voters ahead of the November mid-terms. To really add salt to the water, a $1 tip would take the air out of their ruckus. That is what those bands are all about, you can hear them in just about any restaurant in Mexico, they even play in the lines at border crossings seeking money thrown into their hats like beggars in the streets. If that is the best that the political left has, its pretty pathetic. They will wear themselves out quickly and let them.

But the event did bring to my mind the central tenet to the whole Russia issue, that of whether Trump should have chastised Putin in front of his face to make all the corrupt American intelligence directors happy covering up their own crimes, or whether Trump should have played it cool as he had. What a lot of people don’t obviously know about Trump is that he is actually quite well read, and as a best-selling author in one of his books produced through Trump University, that school that most critics said didn’t exist, was that he has a top ten reading list for students to do their own homework. One of the books Trump mentions is The Art of War. Anyone who has read that book knows what Trump is doing. I can certainly see it, I carry The Art of War around with me everywhere I go. I have a pocket version of it that I keep with me at all times, so Trump’s strategies are obvious to me, and so is what he did with Putin and the American intelligence agencies who are trying to build up a case for impeachment.

However, to the protestors on the streets in front of the White House, they likely only read work from Karl Marx and nothing else—which is why they are liberals. They have no way of understanding a strategist like Trump where even misspoken words are part of the strategy to bait opponents into a direction you wish them to go. In Trump’s world, everything is a strategy including the Mariachi protestors. While they think they are doing something that will keep the president and his family awake at night in reality they are doing exactly what Trump wants and needs. Their noise can be drowned out easily within the White House. But the optics being broadcast across America are not to the advantage of the political left. Nobody wants a cheesy Mariachi band playing in their neighborhood streets. They’ll put up with illegal immigrants as long as they are somewhat hidden in poor neighborhoods, but if they think they can migrate into the suburbs and bring a Mariachi culture into the mainstream, they have another thing coming.

The real reason that Trump couldn’t put a stop to any tampering that Putin might be involved in is because America is doing the same thing in other countries and that must continue. The political leftists were trying to trap Trump into what their global aims were, and that was to put an end to what they call American imperialism, or otherwise the influence of western culture around the world. If Trump demanded that Russia stay out of trying to influence America than Trump would be forced to do the same and that is precisely what lefties want. They want to weaken the influence of American culture around the world, they want American movies to be weaker, they want American music weaker, they want everything that comes out of America weaker. However, they want to create the illusion that other cultures have irreversibly penetrated American culture changing it forever, which is why they are attempting to use the psychological assault of a Mariachi band outside the White House to drive home the point. But Trump is smart, he knows that the protesters are an extreme minority and that they will run out of gas rather quickly and that their efforts are pushing neutral voters into the Republican column. So give them a tip and let them sing!

Getting back to The Art of War, I think its one of the most important books on strategy that there has ever been written, and Donald Trump understands it keenly. That is why China will never beat him on a trade war—they know it and he knows it. He has the high ground, it is impossible for China to win. Only people who understand strategy would know why, so the ignorant people trying to make politics about the war of tariffs are at a loss because they do not understand that book on strategy composed so long ago by the Chinese themselves. To understand any dealings with oriental cultures, The Art of War is mandatory. Trump is much more intellectual than he lets on and that is because he has mastered fundamental elements of strategy that all winning individuals learn to utilize.

The Democrats and the Deep State which supports them have projected their own strategies and Donald Trump has exploited them quite brilliantly. One of the greatest poker players in the world is Doyle Brunson who has mastered the art of making his opponents underestimate his hands even when they know he’s doing it. They think he’s talking small talk and what he’s really doing is causing them to up their bets and to inspire them to fold at the wrong times with his easy Texas talk while at the table. Trump reminds me a lot of Doyle—he’s brilliant in making people underestimate their odds against him. The most important quotes in The Art of War are about making other people empty and filling yourself by their efforts, which is what Trump has been doing since 2015 on the political stage. These Mariachi protestors are emptying themselves in front of the White House, and they are filling Trump. People see what is happening, just as Trump needs American operatives to continue to spread western ideas around the world to wear away the socialists and communists who stand between peace and war, these protestors are reminding Trump supporters that Mexican culture is being rammed down their throats from illegal aliens and the optics make it look like they are attacking the White House. Beltway insiders chuckle at what they think is causing Trump to lose sleep. But that is because they don’t understand the strategy of the situation.

I thought about keeping this to myself so not to let the enemies know what Trump is doing. But from my vantage point Trump is fulfilling another important quote from The Art of War, beating an enemy before the war even starts. Trump has already won over these protestors just like Doyle knows he often has the best hand before the dealer ever puts down the “river” card. Great strategists often win before anybody is even thinking of victory and they do so without a lot of fanfare because just like in poker, the game needs “producers.” You have to let the little guys think they are winning sometimes to fill the pot. Trump gives his opponents little victories here and there just like Doyle does in poker to convince them to fill the pot for the real betting. Trump is happy to let the protestors empty themselves and to fill the political pot with lots of talk radio discussion and cable news coverage because it fulfils the requirements of victory. And for that, we should all give those idiots a $1 tip. Because they are emptying themselves and filling us all up, and that is the brilliance of Donald Trump.

Rich Hoffman

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