Donald Trump has repeatedly used the phrase “holding the cards” during his tenure as President to signal that he, or sometimes an opponent, has the upper hand. The metaphor projects bravado, leverage, and the inevitability of success or failure, depending on who claims control.
Unfortunately, Trump’s repeated invocation of “holding the cards” embodies a worldview where leverage, bluff, and dominance matter more than duty, morality, or responsibility. In contrast, leadership grounded in duty emphasizes ethical obligations to allies, citizens, and democratic principles—elements strikingly absent from this metaphor.
Take Ukraine as a case in point. In the peace talks on Ukraine this year, Trump has insisted that Russia “holds the cards” in the ongoing conflict. But if Russia does indeed hold them, it is not because of some immutable law of geopolitics. It is because the United States—and Trump himself—has ceded those cards by failing to fully back Ukraine’s defense.
Power in international relations is not simply a fixed hand dealt by fate. Instead, choices, commitments, and the willingness to stand by allies all shape it. By declaring that Russia holds the cards, Trump disregards the moral responsibility the United States bears to ensure that Ukraine is not left vulnerable to aggression.
This card-game metaphor strips away the human stakes, treating war and diplomacy as transactional contests. By contrast, principled leadership recognizes national purpose and moral duty. When leaders use only the language of leverage, they obscure the deeper truth: democratic nations have a duty to resist authoritarian expansion, not just calculate strength. Trump’s language thus reflects a broader erosion of social or humanitarian responsibility.
America’s role in the world is not defined by who holds the cards alone. Far more important is whether those cards are played in defense of freedom or surrendered to expediency.
Trump has used this metaphor countless times. He asserted that the United States “held the cards” in its trade war with China, basing his claim on the size of America’s consumer market. Yet the data contradicts this claim. Even as U.S. tariffs reduced Chinese exports to America by nearly 30%, Beijing redirected its goods elsewhere, fueling a record $1 trillion trade surplus. Exports to Europe and Southeast Asia rose significantly, demonstrating China’s ability to reroute supply chains and blunt the impact of U.S. consumer leverage.
Moreover, China has repeatedly used its dominance in rare earth minerals as a counterweight—a sector worth billions annually and vital to defense systems, semiconductors, and electric vehicles. By imposing export controls on rare earths and finished magnets, Beijing makes clear that leverage is not one-sided. The U.S. may have a vast consumer market, but China’s grip on critical materials and its ability to diversify trade partners show that America’s “cards” are far from decisive. Trump’s metaphor thus often clouds reality. Global trade leverage is fluid. China has proven adept at offsetting Trump’s strategic claims.
Of course, Trump also loves to claim leverage over Congress. His constant insistence that he “held the cards” reveals a deeper pattern: he treats constitutional checks not as guardrails, but as obstacles to be bulldozed. In 2025, he tried to cancel nearly $5 billion in foreign aid—already approved by lawmakers—through a rare maneuver called a pocket rescission. He also deployed thousands of National Guard troops to cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago without the governor's consent. Courts later ruled these moves unlawful. He even fired independent agency officials at the Federal Trade Commission and other bodies, flouting statutory protections and claiming these actions proved executive leverage.
The reality, however, is more complex. Unlike the unilateral leverage Trump describes, real power is balanced by constitutional design. Courts have struck down several of his maneuvers, and even members of his own party questioned their legality. Congress retains the power of the purse, oversight authority, and the constitutional mandate to check executive overreach. Trump’s card-game metaphor focuses on unilateral action, whereas the constitutional system demands collaboration within shared powers. In truth, the cards are distributed by design in our Constitution, and democracy depends on respecting that principle.
Trump’s repeated use of the “holding the cards” metaphor may resonate with some as a symbol of dominance, but it ultimately fails to provide moral direction. Leadership is measured not by who bluffs or claims leverage, but by who upholds responsibility and principle.
Reducing governance to a card game overlooks the values that define America: freedom, trust, and a commitment to democratic institutions.
America needs leaders who play not just to win, but to serve the people and defend democratic values.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.