There’s a tug-of-war going on right now between two factions in the GOP over President Trump’s cabinet picks. On one side, there’s Trump and nominees like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel. On the other, there are a few GOP holdouts in the Senate. The difference comes down to one word: payback. Should the Trump administration do to the Democrats what they did to him?
Over the last eight years the left threw honesty, fairness, and a concern for the rule of law out the window in their effort to destroy Trump. They recognized that, unlike prior Republicans, he was an existential threat. A George W. Bush would get along and go along but Trump wasn’t like that. He knew all their tricks and he called them out. And so they threw out the rule book.
They projected all their villainy on him. The accused him of colluding with Russians, when it was they who bought the Steele Dossier with funds from Hillary’s campaign. They said he’d burn books, when it was they who were the censors. They said he’d turn the law on them, when it was they who employed lawfare against Trump and his associates. In a law-abiding country, this wouldn’t have happened, but then it’s not as if we’ve been law-abiding in the last few years. Third-World justice systems have nothing on us.
The Democrats thought they had him, but the American people had a better sense of the rule of law and ignored their bad faith and reelected Trump. And so the new administration has to decide between pretending none of this happened and payback.
For game theorists, this is a familiar problem. They distinguish between two kinds of strategies: cooperate and defect. When the parties cooperate, they promise to play by the rules and both sides do so. When they defect, no one believes they’ll play by the rules because no one does so. Then there are outcomes when one party cooperates and the other defects. In that case, the defector gets the payoff from the other party’s cooperation, while the latter is a patsy.
When the parties repeat the game with each other in real life, one strategy tends to dominate. Start out cooperating, and in subsequent moves do what the other party did in his previous move. If he cooperated in the prior move, then you cooperate too. If he defected, then you defect. The strategy is called tit-for-tat. Try to be a nice guy, but don’t let yourself become a patsy.
If the Trump administration adopts a tit-for-tat strategy, we’re going to see payback against the bad guys on the left. That’s how the Democrats play the game, and it’s what they anticipate in their pleas for more pardons from Biden.
Payback would do two things. It would remove the shame of being a patsy, of being the guy you can tramp on with impunity. It would also amount to what the left calls a teachable moment, and might persuade it that they better start cooperating. If the GOP goes after the Democrats as they did against Republicans, perhaps that might teach the Democrats not to do it again.
So the game theorist would expect to see payback by the GOP. It’s the way of the world. It’s even Biblical. An eye for an eye. Against this, however, there are three possible reasons not to indulge in payback.
First, the patsy is the guy who turned the other cheek, and there’s Biblical authority for that too. Second, it’s not as if the left can be taught anything. It’s too self-deceived about how wonderful it is to think it might ever have done anything wrong. If so, tit-for-tat would simply lead to the low-trust world of zero cooperation, where both sides criminalize the other party.
Finally, there’s one last argument for being a nice guy. Apart from the two players, there are the voters and they’re the last repository of virtue in America. In November they saw through Democratic defection and recognized the GOP as the more honorable party. Perhaps Republicans might not want to jeopardize this through payback.