Aces

Yesterday I was playing poker and a guy said to me, “I saw you making fun of Trump on that TV show.” That’s never a good way to begin a poker session. I hate being recognized at the poker table and the very last thing I want is to be recognized for my political opinions at the poker table because poker players tend to be, how shall I say this, not of my political stripe.

For some reason, the game attracts more than its representative share of Republicans, Libertarians, ne’er-do-wells, real estate investors, drug dealers, ex-athletes, degenerate sports betters, and at least one basic cable superstar (me). And, of course, it’s 90% men. Any political conversation around a poker table is likely to feature off-color remarks about trans people, “liberals,” and the fuckability of Fran Leibowitz, as happened to me a couple weeks ago while playing at Foxwoods.

The verdict from my seatmate after I informed him that the woman he was watching on Real Time with Bill Maher was one of the most celebrated humorist of the last fifty years: “She probably talking about abortion. That’s what every unfuckable woman talks about.”

So that’s a pretty good example of the kind of mentality one experiences when sitting down to play low-stakes poker at any card room across America. There are also, thankfully, more considered players and I’ve had a few (a very few) great conversations with folks. Mostly, though, I just keep my head down and play cards.

Watching sports, talking shit.

Thankfully, the guy who recognized me from Have I Got News For You, didn’t seem perturbed enough by whichever remarks I made on the show to ask for follow-up or clarification, which I would have been happy to give, but did not want to offer. Not because I’m afraid of confrontation – I happen to love confrontation – but because I didn’t want to spend the next several hours arguing about a person I already spend far too much of my life arguing about. Instead, I smiled and nodded and prayed for him to go broke. Which he did.

Politicians from both parties have long been associated with poker. Harry Truman was a player; in fact, the phrase “the buck stops here,” which Truman was fond of saying, is actually a poker term. Richard Nixon was apparently so adept at cards that he financed his first campaign run with poker winnings. Obama, too, plays cards; in fact he left the Situation Room during the Osama raid to play because he was too antsy to sit still during the day-long operation.

Poker rooms are, naturally, male spaces. That’s not to say that women don’t play. They do. But most of the time, you might only have one or two women at a table. Often there are none at all. So the conversation tends to be a little more focused on all the things I have little to no interest in discussing: college basketball, horror films, the attractiveness of various cocktail waitresses. Every once in a while, somebody will bring up politics, a usually verboten topic because nothing good ever comes out of it. When politics are raised, it’s almost always a Trump supporter starting the conversation. They’ll make some off-color remark about a trans person or they’ll mention something “funny” he said or did, or they’ll rage against political correctness. For some reason, these guys are almost always wearing, for some reason, golf shirts.

Golf shirts are all the rage among male members of the MAGA set. They also wear Dockers and/or Dockers shorts. These guys are almost always white (I’ve never heard a Black dude defend Trump at the poker table), are almost always tan, and generally give the impression of having at least a moderate drinking problem and at least one ex-wife. They’re also, generally speaking, really nice guys.

That’s the rub. I like those guys. They tend to take less offense to remarks I make about Trump than I do when they make shitty remarks about gays or women or whomever. In general, these middle-aged, red-faced MAGA dudes possess a cheerful cluelessness that makes them hard to hate. Most of them are successful enough to risk a thousand dollars at a time when they sit down to play, so they’ve obviously got some money, so they’re probably not total idiots. Instead, I think they tend to be moderately dumb guys who skated by their whole lives, fell into good jobs, made a lot of money, and whose primary concern is the betting line on the Chargers game.

One could envision these guys participating in a Trump boat parade, not because they love Trump, but because it’s fun and funny and gives them a chance to get shit-faced out on the water.

Sometimes I forget how little most Americans pay attention to politics. To them, a rich white dude making fun of people seems presidential enough. Why not? Last time wasn’t so bad, wasn’t it? (It was, but not for them.) And Kamala? Well, they don’t say it – they may not even think it – but Kamala’s a lady. And a lady of some - shall we say - a certain melanin content. It’s not that I think these guys are “racist” or “sexist” in the way we think of racists and sexists, it’s that they’re more comfortable with a president whose name they’re not going to spend the next four years getting corrected on pronunciation. Also, do we really want a woman the nuclear codes? You know how they get.

It's guys like this who will be perfectly fine with creeping authoritarianism because it’ll take so long to reach them that, by the time it does, they’ll be nothing they can do about it. Moreover, it’s guys like this who will be the most likely to benefit from a system that goes out of its way to punish minorities, immigrants, and women. When golf shirts become the uniform of The State, they’ll already be fully kitted out.  

I obviously don’t know what a second Trump presidency will bring, but I can tell you that I at least understand how such a thing could be possible. It happens because guys like this talk to other guys like this. They bitch about child support. They drink too much. They have more money than they need but don’t have any interests aside from yelling at the television screen during football season. They don’t read books. For them, the world doesn’t exist beyond their immediate field of vision. And they will Trump.

The funny thing about guys like this is that, every time they sit down at the table, the professionals salivate because they’re as predictable in their poker game as they are in their politics. They’re bad poker players because they can’t think beyond the two cards they hold. In other words, they can only see what’s right in front of their face instead of evaluating the entire situation. That’s a recipe for disaster for both poker and politics. And, it’s guys like this, millions of millions of them, who are going to show up for Trump. They don’t have particular opinions about his policies. Don’t remember the chaos of his previous administration because they were too busy sitting in that same damned seat watching sports on the poker room TVs. All they know is he represents money. They don’t know what she represents, but it sure as hell isn’t money. And that’s one of the many, many reasons I worry about the election.

And yes, I won.