We are told, year after year, that Donald John Trump is a master strategist, playing 4D chess while his opponents muddle through with checkers. It’s a comforting lie, like believing your drunk uncle is a “character” rather than a walking insurance liability. The reality is far more absurd, and infinitely more dangerous.

Mad King Donald isn’t playing chess. He careens across the White House lawn in a golf cart he declares a presidential limousine, swerving toward a chessboard set up on the 18th hole. The board, warped by the sun and his own ego, looks like it was painted by Salvador Dalí during a three-day ketamine and tequila bender. This isn’t strategy; it’s a demolition derby masquerading as a state function, complete with Kashyap Patel, the former FBI’s Lost Boy, a startled ferret behind the wheel.

Trump’s caddy, a bewildered Marine who signed up to serve his country and somehow ended up helping the world’s worst golfer to cheat, is the only one who seems to notice the cart has no brakes. “The brakes are perfect!” Trump yells, as he sidesweeps a priceless historical monument. “The best brakes! I installed them myself with my beautiful hands!”

Trump screeches to a halt before the board, leaving skid marks on the Constitution. The pieces aren’t pieces; they’re whatever he says they are, reshuffled with each tweet like a demented game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. The pawns are “beautiful patriots” who somehow always end up in federal prison. After being pardoned for insurrection. The bishops are Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, wandering off to rant about critical race theory, woke gender-bending schoolteachers and the War on Christmas simultaneously. The rooks are Trump Tower condos, charging the Secret Service premium rates for the privilege of providing cover while Donald plays Napoleon.

The knights? Those are characters like Kash Patel, pro-Trump narrative, children’s book author turned FBI director—a man who went from writing propaganda for kids about how only King Donald and his Wizard, Kash can save the world, to chasing deep state conspiracies with the focused intensity of someone who genuinely believes Paul Blart, Mall Cop, is a documentary. It’s the ultimate diversity hire: Diversity of Incompetence, a new kind of DEI where the only qualification is sycophantic devotion and a complete absence of relevant experience.

And the queen? It’s a Twitter feed, darting about the board like a caffeinated hummingbird, screaming in all caps and changing the rules of the game through sheer, unhinged volume. The queen never actually captures anything—she just creates chaos and declares victory.

This is his so-called “4D Chess.” The four D’s: Distraction, Deflection, Denial, and veering toward Domination like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel. When a sane opponent carefully moves a knight, Trump doesn’t counter with strategic brilliance. He simply drives his golf cart over the board, flinging pieces everywhere, declares his scattered Diet Cokes a “winning army,” and then sells the broken board fragments on Truth Social as “authentic democracy pieces—limited edition!” Get them while they last.

Yet every carnival must eventually leave town, usually just ahead of the health inspectors. Facing the music stateside—and what a discordant symphony it is—the grand maestro of chaos makes a final, desperate putt for legitimacy: a flight to the hallowed grounds of Windsor Castle. He promises Melania a fairytale carriage ride through streets lined with cheering admirers, or at the very least, a photo op where people don’t scream “Lock him up!” in three different languages.

What they get is a different kind of illumination altogether. As the Trumps arrive, expecting the usual pomp and circumstance (and at least a golden toilet each), the ancient stone walls of Windsor are suddenly lit up not by traditional torchlight, but by a devastating, Led-by-Donkeys-inspired slideshow. There, projected fifty feet high for the royals, the paparazzi, and a hot and bothered regiment of guards who can’t believe their eyes, is the real 4D chess game: a sordid montage of Donnie’s greatest hits featuring his adventures with bosom pal, the late Jeffrey Epstein and a cavalcade of co-conspirators. It is an X-rated highlight reel of debauchery and alleged depredation, set to a jaunty, carnival-style rendition of “It’s a Small World After All”—because apparently, when you’re a billionaire sociopath, it really is.

Melania, the Slovenian sphinx who has perfected the art of looking through people rather than at them, stands frozen like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming scandal. Her face, usually a Mont Blanc of glacial disdain that can freeze a bucket of champagne at twenty paces, flickers with a rare, pure horror—the look of someone realising they are cast in the wrong movie entirely.

Seeing her guest dissolving into a puddle of mortified silence, Queen Camilla—much-unfairly-maligned for her adultery with Charles and her looks -“a face like a bag of spanners” -who has not only survived her own decades of tabloid abuse but emerged with enough steel to build a battleship—leans over with a stroke of vicious, merciful genius that would make Machiavelli weep with admiration.

“My dear,” Camilla whispers, a voice dripping with the honey of centuries of aristocratic sabotage, refined through generations of surviving palace intrigue. “You’re looking frightfully pale. The flash photography is terribly unkind to Eastern European bone structure. Here, darling.” And with one bejewelled hand, she places a vast, ornate, lampshade over Melania’s head, completely obscuring her face and any remaining dignity. “Just stand right there, precious. Perfect positioning. You’re blending in beautifully with the décor.”

Melania freezes, a monument to catatonic stupor, haute couture paralysis and royal bitch-craft. The former First Lady of the United States, at Windsor bloody Castle, impersonates a piece of furniture while her husband’s alleged sex crimes light up the Norman Gate like the world’s most inappropriate Christmas display. She herself is displayed, wearing little but with Jeffrey Epstein’s arm strategically draped over her décolletage. It is the final, perfect metaphor for the entire Trump presidency: a grotesque, hilarious, deeply tragic farce where the only way to survive without a breakdown is to completely obscure your identity and hope no one notices you’re still technically present.

Meanwhile, from his own perch in Benders’ Rest, rural Australia, New England’s old money’s son, Barnaby Joyce and a gaggle of Coalition geese watch this entire circus with the naked admiration of kinder group at Sydney Zoo’s baboonery . They don’t see the existential peril; they see a playbook, a how-to manual for democratic destruction in the guise of a life-raft for their own endangered species. They watch the golf cart chaos, the board-flipping, the lampshade diplomacy: “Crikey, what a beauty! Why didn’t we think of that?”

If we in Australia laugh this off as just another American farce—like reality TV but with nuclear codes—we are missing the catastrophic point. Donald’s golf cart is coming for our democracy too, driven by local copy-cats who study the Trump playbook with the dedication of monks transcribing scripture. They are ready to flip our board, torch our norms, and call it a “fair dinkum revolution” while wrapped in the Southern Cross, singing “We are one, we are many …” and waving a half-eaten meat pie. Or democracy sausage.

The final move isn’t checkmate—it’s the deafening crash of the cart going over the edge, taking half the Western world with it in a spectacular display of democratic self-immolation. But when the dust settles and the inevitable inquiry begins, don’t expect real accountability or actual consequences. Expect a long, expensive Royal Commission—the ultimate Australian lampshade—designed not to expose the uncomfortable truth, but to hide it under chapter upon chapter of bureaucratic verbosity, to bury the carnage under a mountain of procedure, paper and delay until the public’s righteous anger is as thoroughly obscured as Melania’s face at Windsor.

It is the eternal choice facing every democracy under assault: the desperate hope of a lampshade or the hollow promise of a pointless Commission. Both are the last-ditch refuge of every scoundrel and enabler when the lights finally, inevitably, come blazing on.