Back when he was president, Barack Obama told me that only two people treated any interaction with him as a zero-sum game. One was Vladimir Putin, the other congressional Republicans. Both behaved as if there was no such thing as a win-win situation: Any gain for Obama was a loss for them, and any gain for them must also entail a loss for Obama. The moment that the Russian president or congressional Republicans saw he wanted something, they went to work trying to keep him from getting it — even if it was something they might otherwise have approved of.Approaching any aspect of life as a zero-sum game has obvious practical costs: Deals that leave some people better off without making anyone else worse off suddenly don’t get done, because making some people better off now, by definition, makes other people worse off. It also comes with some psychological side effects. It cripples your imagination. It blinds and deafens you, as you sort of know what your adversary is going to do or say before they do or say it. Or, rather, you know how you are going to make sense of it: uncharitably.The zero-sum approach in politics has since spread, as it tends to do wherever it takes hold. It has infected congressional Democrats and parts of the news media, and is seeping into everyday political discourse. Take the case of Stormy Daniels, the porn star, whose interview with In Touch Weekly, along with a bunch of related stories, rests in a tall pile on my lap, as I ride the train from New York to Washington. She claims that in 2006 Donald Trump, whose wife had just given birth to their son, launched a sexual affair with her. She was, according to the Wall Street Journal, paid $130,000 (U.S.) by a Trump lawyer just before the election to keep quiet. Trump’s White House obviously thinks it’s smart to humiliate reporters for even trivial errors, if they happen to reflect poorly on Trump. If Daniels was just making it all up, and the media had repeated her lie ...
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