Donald Trump wouldn’t be the first president to take up the game, but there’s a whole lot it could teach him about decision-making, human behavior—and winning
In the winter of 1996, the first ever United States Poker Championship took place at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The prize for winning: $500,000. Perhaps no one more excited about the event than its nominal host, Donald Trump. “You’ve got every major television station down here,” he told Michael Konik, a columnist for. “I think we can become the most important poker tournament in the world.
Trump is a man largely set in his ways, but he’s also a former casino owner who relishes winning. As he faces one of the most trying periods of his presidency—not just an uphill reelection campaign, but a global pandemic, economic uncertainty and a national reckoning on race—poker might actually give him some tools to do his job better.
Tilt renders you vulnerable. The good poker player learns to identify tilt in others, and the triggers that cause specific responses, and he takes advantage of that. If you’re the one acting rationally, pressing someone else’s buttons, while they are the ones being emotional and impulsive, you will eventually take their money, at the table or otherwise. The good poker player also learns to identify tilt in herself, to determine what events get under her own skin—or make her jubilant.
Trump, of course, has already lasted longer than that, but even still, his bravado has often met with failure in the past. For one thing, he managed to bankrupt the same Taj Mahal that he boasted would one day run the biggest poker series in the world. His aggressive business tactics often didn’t lead to real-world payoffs.
It’s no coincidence, I think, that some of the best thinkers and leaders in the world, including American presidents, have chosen to spend their precious time playing poker, seemingly absorbing its lessons. George Washington had a permanent card table at his home in Mount Vernon. Statesmen Daniel Webster and Henry Clay were avid poker players.
For Lyndon B. Johnson, poker was even more of a strategic asset. He would often play games that lasted all night with the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen. According to Robert Parker, LBJ’s aide for many years, two of the president’s key pieces of legislation were able to pass at least in part because of the wheeling and dealing that took place during those nights: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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