new video loaded: How Trump Views War
transcript
transcript
How Trump Views War
President Trump’s war in Iran isn’t so much a strategy as a game of “Risk,” says the Times Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie. On “The Opinions” podcast, he explains that the administration sees the world as “we big, they small,” with other nations as non-playable characters reacting to America, the “protagonists of reality.”
Which is for lack of a better term, insanely dangerous. How much of this is actually less about strategic objectives and more about we have these toys, let’s use them? And let’s demonstrate our strength and masculinity on the world stage. And how much of it reflects the way that the administration understands the world as equivalent to almost like a board game as to Risk? Where we have lots of guys and they have fewer guys, we big, they small. And if we roll the dice and move our guys there, we win. A very kind of flattened barely two-dimensional vision of how the world works and a sense that other people, other states, other leaders are, the term is non-playable characters or NPCs. They simply react to us, the protagonists of reality. To me, just observing how they’re talking and behaving, this fits this vision of the world.
March 7, 2026
