If there is something President Trump is good at, it is failure. But he fails in order to win. The filed bankruptcies, the lost election bids, the media onslaught… This sounds ironic I know. Most people play to win within the rules of a game in the allotted times with a tangible score. This works well in sports, chess, and other contests where the award at the end of the bout or series of bouts confirms one’s excellence in the game.

But the game of life is different. Or I should say the games of life. For every life game we can perceive, there is game within and a game without. And in the life games, success is not always vertical. Sometimes it is lateral and other times it is not even apparent. In some games losing is the ultimate win. In the movie WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson. The last game in the movie involved winning a bet which the Woody Harrelson character made but at the risk of losing his girlfriend (played by Rosie Perez). He promised he would be able to win but she offered that playing on that bet would mean losing her. He won the bet and lost the girl. Sometimes a win in one of life’s games is juxtaposed with a loss in another.

James Cameron, the legendary director who brought us the Terminator, The Titanic, Avatar once gave a TED talk – sidebar: are those still a thing? – about the importance of failure. He gave a 40+ minute speech on how failure was necessary for success. He summed it up by saying rather than trying to avoid failure, we ought to seek to encounter it often and early. From the highest grossing film director in Hollywood history, that is pretty ironic.

What does this all have to do with Donald J. Trump and his Tariff wars? Well for starters, the likelihood of his current demands falling on deaf ears is quite apparent. However, they present an interesting opportunity. For all his quirks and idiosyncrasies, President Trump has a knack for bluntness. It could be branded as a form of comic naivete. However, it has a way of inspiring such direct results. They could be branded as backlash. But then they have a way of giving way to a new frame of negotiation keep the players in the game and depriving his opponents of walking away with a trophy. Every bout he loses, he starts another one right after. One must wonder, what games is he playing within and without? Can we be so sure that just because we see him lose in one is a guarantee that he has lost at all. For a loser, he sure is always ready to play.

I will end this with a little parable.

There was a family barbecue in the backyard. Everyone was helping themselves to the trays of food outside when suddenly, a pigeon landed on a tree above the food table and began dumping its droppings on the food. The family members all got together and removed whatever food they could. They had to throw a lot of it out. Then a month later, they had another barbecue and this same pigeon showed up and did the same thing. But they were prepared, they had put a cover above the food so that no matter how much bird dumped below, none of the droppings would make it to the food in the trays. Finally, another six weeks later, for Labor Day, the family threw another barbecue and they were ready with the food covers and the they even placed one above the cover of the previous cover so the droppings would not even be in sight. As expected the pigeon came and this time he brought a friend. They were getting ready to do their business when, one of the family uncles lost his marbles and grabbed a couple of pieces of aluminum foil, rolled them up into balls and pelted both pigeons.