MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday revealed just how tired she is of one particularly baseless theory about President Donald Trump, namely that the MAGA leader is playing some sort of politically strategic “3D chess” — and not just “doing dumb s**t on his phone.”
Wallace made her case during a “Deadline: White House” discussion involving Dan Kanninen, who served former Vice President Kamala Harris as battleground director ahead of the 2024 election, and Sam Stein, managing editor of anti-Trump conservative site The Bulwark.
“I guess what I would push back and say, Dan, is that every time the press tries to figure out what sophisticated secret version of 3D chess Trump is playing, he’s just doing some dumb shit on his phone,” Wallace said Tuesday.
She continued, “So I want to guard against, like, the opaque mystery. It is likely, I mean, we see from the way he tweets, like, that he reaches for his phone and posts all night. If any of our children did that, they would lose their phone for a semester — or seven.”
Wallace and her guests had been discussing a newly released proposal confirming Senate Republicans are seeking $1 billion for “security adjustments and upgrades” for Trump’s White House ballroom project, with Stein suggesting there are nebulous reasons behind it.
“And it raises the question, why is he doing all of this, right?” Stein said.
He continued, “Is it vanity? Probably a lot of it is. But what is the point of building all this type of stuff if you’re just going to end up leaving Washington, D.C.? Is it a legacy matter? Or is it something larger than that that we’re not really accurately describing?”
It was then that Wallace rejected the “chess” theory, a seeming core belief among MAGA voters who have baselessly argued for a decade now that Trump doesn’t make mistakes — and has strategically mapped out any political hurdle to drain the proverbial swamp.
Many critics have certainly slammed the ballroom as nothing but a “vanity project,” but Trump did recently reveal that the military is building a massive complex beneath it — admitting this was “supposed to be a secret” that only came out “because of a stupid lawsuit.”
Stein was certainly accurate in chronicling the history of the ballroom project construction, which a federal judge recently ordered halted after ruling it requires congressional approval, noting Trump “never” told the American people they might have to pay for it.
“He said it was going to be fully paid for by private donations or money from his own pocket,” said Stein. “It started at $200 million, went to $300 million, went to $400 million … Now it’s $1 billion on top of whatever it costs to construct the ballroom itself.”
Wallace likened the proposal to slapstick comedies showing a thief shoving items under his shirt in such a “stupid” way that it’s baffling “how obvious the thieving” is, and said this “gold-gilded ballroom” project is “something that the American people never asked for.”
She later noted just how high gas prices are as a result of Trump’s war on Iran and said, “Ask voters, and they will tell you that in a time of great economic distress, a gold ballroom is the last thing that the president of the United States of America should be spending his time on.”
Wallace went on to play clips of Florida residents being interviewed last week about the project, who noted that the money “could be used elsewhere,” that “people are starving” and that Trump is “selfish” — and “should be focused on lowering these prices.”
“I think what’s happening here is that Donald Trump, especially in the second term, is not getting any conflicting information into his ecosystem,” Stein argued Tuesday. “He’s surrounded by people in the cabinet who are largely sycophantic.”
He continued, “You see it all the time when they have these Cabinet meetings and they praise him as if he’s the Second Coming. He probably watches only news media that affirms his priors. And when does, he’ll lash out on Truth Social.”
