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William W. Bedsworth: Trump is playing checkers in a chess world

March 17, 2026

Criminy. It never ends with this guy. It’s just one myopic, despotic idea after another.

Now, “Dear Leader” Trump has announced that we’re “tapping” our strategic oil reserve because the Strait of Hormuz—which we insisted the Iranians couldn’t block—is blocked.

Note the use of the word “tapping” here. Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? It sounds like something you might do if you were at Costco for groceries (and gas) and saw a really cute toy for your grandchild. “Honey, I tapped our emergency fund for a Garloo Monster for Teddy; I’ll replenish it next month.”

“Tapping” sounds so much better than “depleting” or “diminishing.” Or “reducing by half.” It’s a clever word choice to disguise how desperate this president is.

Because in this case, the Garloo Monster is costing billions. Every day! He’s “tapping into the strategic reserve”—which is already depleted—because he doesn’t have those billions. Or the oil.

Yes, we did this when Russia invaded Ukraine. But we had to then. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced us to react. We weren’t forced here. We have to do it because the president—once again playing checkers in a world that requires chess—only thought one move ahead.

And he’s bullied our allies in the International Energy Agency into matching us, all so his promise that prices would come down if he were elected will not be so obviously false.

At the same time, between rounds of golf, Trump has lifted sanctions on his buddy Vladimir Putin so that Russian oil can now be sold worldwide. This will, of course, help lower the cost of gasoline but undermine Ukraine’s battle against aggression. It will also prop up Russia’s economy while ours is crawling across the economic desert, praying for an oasis.

We can see from his adventures in the Caribbean just how little he thinks ahead.

We spent $47 million in the last three months maintaining just ONE of the ships he insisted we had to seize because they were running drugs. Somehow he failed to figure out that if we didn’t blow up those ships—if we just seized them—we’d need to maintain them.

And by the way, how did we know the ships that we bombed — killing their civilian, non-combatant crews in violation of international law — were running drugs? An informant told us. An informant whom we can’t identify.

As a retired judge, I’m proud to tell you what any good American lawyer—a commodity Trump’s Justice Department has fired left and right—would tell him about that justification: “Good luck trying to make that hold up in court. Is that all you’ve got?”

So now, tiring of watching us and our Israeli allies blow up military and civilian targets like it was some kind of video game (not his fault, I suppose, that he confuses the two when his administration splices video game footage into real war footage), he’s announced he’s sending 2,500 Marines to the Middle East.

Twenty-five hundred Marines. To join in what he calls an “excursion.” That is either an expensive and wasteful deployment meant only to satisfy his ego, or he is perilously close to dragging us into a blood-on-the-ground land war. Which of those alternatives do you prefer?

I sure wish someone had just bought him a video game so he and Pete Hegseth could blow things up without humiliating our nation and driving what’s left of our middle class into bankruptcy. Maybe we can give him Teddy’s Garloo Monster.

William W. Bedsworth was an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal from 1997-2024. Prior to that, he served as an Orange County Superior Court judge from 1987–1997.

Orange County Register

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William W. Bedsworth: Trump is playing checkers in a chess world

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