Donald Trump – who has spent at least 45 days of his presidency so far on the golf course – has once again been accused of cheating, and this time there is video evidence. Trump’s long history of golfing malpractice is well documented, not least in Rick Reilly’s Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump (2019) where we read that “Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf. He throws it, boots it, and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs.”
Some will recognise a similar style in his politics. I see here a more general sign that politics today has become a specific type of game – one the privileged play according to rules of their own choosing, and at the expense of others. What’s more, I’d argue, Trumpian-style cheating runs the risk of breaking the game of politics itself.
The notion that politics is like a game is by no means new. Machiavellian scheming was a central feature of Renaissance political life. In the 19th century, the diplomatic maneouvering between Britain and Russia’s imperial interests over Afghanistan was termed “the great game”. These days, political strategists often use game theory to think through a potential course of action (a locus classicus for political game theory is the Cuban missile crisis, a version of the prisonner’s dilemma).
Politics is, after all, an activity in which people, parties and governments seek to further their own interests in competition with others. And they do so in accordance to more or less codified rules, whether these be constitutional and legal, or simply social norms. Citizens of liberal democracies tend to tolerate a degree of political game-playing on the part of their representatives, as long as they are reasonably convinced they are playing by the rules.
What might be new, however, is a sense that today’s political game-players have little intention of abiding by the rules. This sort of game-playing has serious consequences.
In my book, Critical Games: On Play and Seriousness in Academia, Literature and Life (2025), I argue that we live in a world where the boundaries between play and seriousness have become dangerously blurred. Figures such as Trump, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and their populist counterparts elsewhere embody a form of pathological narcissism that collapses the distinction between game and reality.
Johnson treated government as an extension of his childhood game of “World King”. Even during the gravity of the COVID pandemic, he partied on, breaking the rules that he had laid down, while ordinary people buried their dead in obedient isolation.
Meanwhile, I’m a Celebrity contestant Farage is the trickster politician par excellence. He thrives on his clownish image but his intentions are deadly serious.
Above all, Trump, has turned the oval office into the playground of a narcissistic toddler. Most worryingly – with ever increasing velocity and seriousness – his second term has seen him change the rules of the game as he sees fit. He has pardoned the Capitol insurrectionists, violated the US constitution and flirted with running for a third term.
When games take over
What happens when this sort of narcissistic play becomes normalised? Let’s think a bit more theoretically about games. Games are made possible by rules, underpinned by collective consent. Players agrees to be bound by certain rules that they also expect others to be bound by. In committing ourselves to the rules of the game, we agree that we are all subject to them, equally.
To break the rules willfully and consistently – to cheat systematically at cards or, indeed, golf – is to be guilty not only of a breach of rules but also to enter into self-contradiction. A game where everybody made an exception of themselves, where everybody broke the rules, would become a game that nobody could logically wish to play – and would effectively cease to be a game.
By contrast, let’s think of the narcissist. In the eyes of the narcissist, other people only matter to the extent that they can be instrumentalised as playthings. The narcissist always considers themselves an exception. They assume the right to play by their own rules. It is not surprising, then, that narcissists are bad sports and are pathologically liable to cheat.
The extreme sort of narcissistic play, in which cheating is not the exception but the norm, has the effect of destroying the game for all but the narcissist. Johan Huizinga, the great Dutch scholar of play, noted in his groundbreaking study Homo Ludens that we tend to regard the cheat more favourably than we do the spoilsport. “This is because the spoilsport shatters the play world itself. He robs play of illusion.” The spoilsport who shatters an illusion seems a kind of coward, Huizinga notes. Meanwhile the cheat, for his part, at least still plays at playing the game.
Trump’s cheating, in its sheer brazenness and excess, carried out in plain sight, tips over into spoiling the sport. President Richard Nixon, who broke the rules in the Watergate scandal, did so in the shadows. Eventually he had to accept his guilt and resign, however reluctantly. In so doing, he was still playing at playing the game. It is hard to imagine Trump behaving in the same way and accepting that the rules apply to him.
Whether at golf or in politics, Trump’s brazen and spoilsport cheating – and that of Trumpian politicians around the world – should leave us under no illusion: the game of democratic politics is being stretched to the point of shattering. Ordinary citizens are learning to how to endure a game that seems increasingly rigged. In a situation like this, appeals to rules, let alone to a sense of fair play, only go so far. When the game finally breaks, we will find ourselves on a very dangerous field of play.
This article contains references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and this may include links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Tim Beasley-Murray does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
