Decades ago, in peak Cold War days, Soviet chess whiz Garry Kasparov noticed that his rival, Anatoly Karpov, had a paralyzing fear. Karpov, who was then the world champion, couldn’t bear to make mistakes. He’d avoid even the slightest risk if he thought it might lead to a blunder. So Kasparov exploited Karpov’s conservatism. At the 1985 championship, he drove Karpov into a defensive crouch, beat him, and took the title.
As chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative, Kasparov, now a journalist and an anti-Putin political activist, continues to pinpoint his opponents’ fears and spell out how to exploit them. He maintains that President Trump, like other autocrats, most fears democracy. It’s that anxiety that puts torque on everything he does.
Indeed, this presidential phobia makes headlines every day. Trump spends so much time and treasure prosecuting his fear of democracy—trying to crush dissent, flex as a massively incontinent monarch, fix elections, and disable rivals, including anyone who might open the Epstein files—that he neglects his stated goals. He hasn’t, after all, occupied Canada or Greenland. He hasn’t even wrapped Project 2025.
