This week, to distract myself from the lethal antics of the president, I’ve been playing a lot of the card game called… President.
Despite not really identifying as a “gamer” per se, for years I’ve played games on my phone when my anxiety levels are spiking – which, as I’m sure you can imagine, has been the case for pretty much all of 2021 thus far. (If that’s you too, I’m sorry, friend!) Usually I go with Scrabble or Solitaire, but lately I’ve been especially drawn to President.
It’s a card game where the goal is to get rid of all your cards, which (as with many such games) you’re only allowed to do in specific ways at specific times. Read the rules, if you’re curious. But the most important, and most characteristic, quality of this game is that whoever wins the round is dubbed the President, and whoever loses is dubbed the Asshole, and when the next round begins, the Asshole has to give the President their two highest cards, and the President can give the Asshole any two cards from their hand. Since high cards are useful in this game, what results is a situation where a person can win the first round and then be hyper-advantaged in the next round, which leads to them winning again, which leads to them being advantaged again, and so on and so forth. It’s easy to see why one of this game’s alternate titles is “Capitalism”; it could just as easily have been called “Privilege,” or “Generational Wealth,” or, uhh, “Donald Trump.”
I have fond-yet-weird memories of this game because, for a period of time that probably only lasted a few weeks but felt like several months to me, it was the go-to pastime of the “popular kids” I hung out with toward the end of elementary school. I don’t know where they had learned it; we were all about 12 years old.