by Joshua Cohen
The Taj, like most casinos, has primarily always been a slot palace, and any square footage given over to table games has to favor those that most favor the house: roulette, where the house edge is 5.26 percent, and craps, where the house edge is 1.4 percent, over the easier-to-understand and easier-to-play blackjack, where the house edge is .5 percent (slots are allotted a house edge of up to 15 percent). To put these numbers into words: You done never had a chance. But as long as your pleasure quanta (booze, food, shows, and carnal atmospherics) outweigh your pain quanta (your losses), research has demonstrated that you’ll keep playing along, encouraged through every bad roll or spin or card by PR exhortations, or by the living example of Trump—whose image used to be everywhere in his former casinos; whose image is now everywhere except in his former casinos—telling average citizens that they too can beat the odds and become winners, the ultimate avatars of American exceptionalism.
This type of self-empowering yet self-sabotaging, ignore-all-the-facts-and-go-for-broke gaming faded from fashion through the ’90s with the spread of numeracy online. Data was suddenly determining, because it had suddenly numerated, everything, and I can recall how by the time I was working at Resorts it already felt ridiculous that anyone would go to a casino to play any game besides poker, a game in which players compete not against the house for its money, but against one another, for one another’s money, with the house taking only a tiny percentage of each pot—the vigorish or rake (typically 10 percent, up to $4). It follows that casinos don’t make much money on poker, and so the few AC casinos that still provide a room for it do so begrudgingly, with the hope that the players’ companions—their angry spouses and nursing attendants—will find their ways elsewhere in the casino, to the slots.
Of course, one of the beauties of poker is that it doesn’t have to be played in a casino—it can be played anywhere, for cheaper. The first and last semiregular private game I ever participated in began at the Broadway Suites on W. 101st Street and Broadway in New York on some weekday in 1998—just after my summer at Resorts—and ended on that hungover, smoke-fogged day after Election Day 2000, when an art-history student left the table to hyperventilate on the floor by the poky Zenith TV and an ethnomusicology student went to find a dictionary—a paper dictionary—to check the definition of “chad.”
After the stolen election of Bush v. Gore, which was the first election I and all the other players in that game were eligible to vote in, it became normal for people of my generation—kinda-sorta millennials immersed in the mathematics of poker, who followed the Texas hold ’em tournaments just then being televised and played in online games between IRL games and participated in online poker tutorials—to also immerse themselves in all manner of election-relevant math, to memorize and rattle off how many electoral votes each state had, and to argue about which were the decisive counties or districts or, as in the case of Florida, precincts in each state, which percentage of overvotes or undervotes would have to be counted as legal votes for which outcome to occur, and, of course, how the outcome would’ve been different if all the states, or if certain states, had split their electoral votes along the lines of their popular votes as opposed to awarding them winner-take-all—all of which were topics too specialized for, because too inaccessible to, prior generations of American voters, which kept up with the elections through the morning paper and evening news, without any interactive maps or regression analyses or aggregated (ranked and weighted) polling.
Of course, whenever you’re reading a poll, what you’re reading are odds, which you can convert yourself by flipping each percentage into a fraction, subtracting the numerator from the denominator, and dividing the difference by the numerator. For instance, if Clinton is leading Trump in the popular vote 48 percent to 42 percent, as she seemed to be throughout much of the summer, her odds of winning are 1.083:1 and Trump’s are 1.38:1. However, with the electoral vote determining the presidency, each online bookmaking site projects its own 270/538 split to calculate its odds (for parimutuel betting, meaning, say, a bet that Clinton will beat Trump by any margin; and for betting the spread, meaning, say, a bet that Clinton will beat Trump by the exact margin of 330–208). Ironically enough, most of the more reliable sites that’ll trade U.S. election action for cash are registered in the U.K., the Bahamas, or elsewhere abroad, because America doesn’t quite approve of betting on politics—not because betting on politics is cynical, but because it’s considered a variety of sports betting, which is illegal in all but four of the states.
America: a country in which even a noble law has to be justified through the drudgery of precedent and stupid technicality.
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THE DAY AFTER INDEPENDENCE Day, America’s 240th birthday, the Local 54 picket crowd chanting and waving placards outside the Taj was just about as sparse as its poker-room crowd and equally gloomy: “No contract, no peace!” “All day, all night, Taj Mahal is out on strike!” The poker room was all chairs, stacked and overturned and empty chairs, and two tables of half bachelor-party fools, half “grinders”: pseudo-pros who if they’d been playing just against one another would’ve played tight, would’ve folded and waited, “grinded” in the interest of making a slow, steady profit. But tonight they were staggered between the bachelor-party fools, so the strategy was different, the tactics were looser. The old hands were taking advantage.
Out of shape, insomniac, amphetamined sharks, not circling, just sitting, around the circular tables, sniffing for blood or for related signs of weakness. They were waiting for a player—for a neophyte, a tourist in murky waters—to lose patience and bet, or to match or raise a bet of theirs or another’s, not out of any discernible logic or psychology, but because discipline is boring, and no one comes to a casino to be bored.
That’s the moment the bullying sets in—the daring, the teasing and taunting, which is often unvoiced, and often merely imaginary.
This was how it kept going down: An older, more experienced player would, after a period of concentrated play, without warning go all-in, which gambit the bachelor-party rubes would alternately take as a temptation and a test, a measure of their capacities and so of their manhoods: whether they had the balls to accept the challenge—because if they’d had the intellect, they might’ve declined it—or whether they were too cowardly, too womanly, too whipped. And so they’d let themselves go; they’d let themselves react—they’d become, I guess, reactionaries.
This whole circumaggravating and cumulatively gross situation of being provoked, or feeling like you’re being provoked, and then having to resist responding to the provocation, and then not being able to resist responding because you’re convinced that it’s all just a bluff, seems to me quintessentially male. It forces its victims to choose—quickly, and in a sensory-overloaded, blinking, chirping environment—between the logical brain and the lower instincts, between getting out and getting even. Now, project all this parasexual, paraviolent incitement from the ludic, monetized poker table to the shouldn’t-be-ludic, shouldn’t-be-monetized political stage, and what becomes discernible is the liberal-conservative dilemma, in which the societal demands of social responsibility (folding) vie against the ego demands of animal appetite (staying in play and even raising the stakes), and reveal themselves to be zero-sum irreconcilable. This, I’ve decided, is Trump’s technique: not numerically probabilistic or predictive (and so of limited use against the experienced), but a crude psychologizing that seizes on every weakness at the American table—all the poverty, ignorance, bigotry, and pride—and squeezes, until the electorate mans up and loses everything.
I tried bringing this up at the table, which consisted—at this ungodly and incalculable fluorescent hour of night/morning—of two grinders; two superdelegates, let’s call them, who’d broken away from their bachelor party; and one guy who could’ve been anybody, in short-sleeved hoodie, board shorts, flip-flops, and wraparound sunglasses, who kept comp
laining about how difficult it was to get a proper martini during a labor dispute.
Grinder 1, Ricky from Philly, was annoyed and snapped at me: “No talking politics.” Grinder 2, Bill from Bridgeton, said, rather mysteriously, “That stuff don’t throw me none.” Bachelor 1 said, “Fuck Trump, but fuck Hillary harder.” Bachelor 2: “Bitch hasn’t gotten it in a while—you can tell.”
I left the table about $100 up after ten or so hours—$10 an hour being just about what I’d been paid nearly a decade ago at Resorts. I stumbled out onto the Boardwalk, into wan sunshine and mist, and found myself recalled to AC’s marquee agon: what you’re supposed to do with yourself once you’re finished gambling. The only movie theaters left on the island were an IMAX, which was only showing Warcraft, and a filthy handful of XXX stroke rooms. The live-music scene is now dominated by dinosaur acts (Vanilla Ice appearing with Salt-N-Pepa and Color Me Badd; Rod Stewart: The Hits), and the art scene, which used to feature the paintings of Sylvester Stallone, has since been demoted to displaying the paintings of Burt Young (who played Uncle Paulie in the Rocky franchise). Also: It wasn’t a beach day.
I got some (expired) yogurt and (unripe) plums from the Save-A-Lot, AC’s only remaining supermarket, crawled back to the Professional Arts Building, and clicked through the news. There he was: Trump, the constant companion, the always-on, always-up-for-anything enabler. A link on the homepage of The Press of Atlantic City brought me to a better-funded paper’s lead item about Trump’s campaign chest: Trump’s campaign, it was being reported, had basically nothing left in the bank, and yet had paid out more than $1 million for each of the past few months to Trump’s companies, for use of Trump Tower office space and Trump-owned transportation—this was the Taj scam 2.0. In an accompanying clip, Trump was asked for comment, and answered in incoherent banalities before swerving into remarks about terrorism—or what he always refers to as “Islamic terrorism.” Unwilling to go to my parents’ house and unable to sleep in the office tilt-and-swivel chair, I picked up the book I’d brought from New York: The Theory of Poker, a how-to classic of 1987 written by David Sklansky, a native of Teaneck, dropout from UPenn’s Wharton School of Business (where he just missed overlapping with Trump), winner of three World Series of Poker bracelets, and arguably the greatest draw and hold ’em player of all time. In the very first pages of his book—which I must’ve read a dozen times before, for a reliable soporific—Sklansky lays out his Fundamental Theorem, which in my amped-up wakefulness now hit me like a law on the level of gravity’s: “Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose.”
Here, presented in sane, rationalist fashion, was the insane truth behind this race: that if Trump just keeps on being Trump, and if Clinton keeps pivoting and responding to his every move, he wins. The only way that Clinton can win, according to Sklansky’s schema, is to force Trump to become inconsistent, but since Trump is already inconsistent—since he’s consistently inconsistent—that’s impossible.
As my uncle’s employees dragged in for the day, I formulated what I’ll call Cohen’s Hypothesis, or the Cohen-Clinton Lemma: “If the game you’re playing becomes impossible to win, then your main opponent is probably yourself.”
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A TABLE, WHERE ANYONE can sit, where fortunes are exchanged: This was America, at least the East Coast white-folks version after the Civil War, when a limitless sense of economic growth seemed to derive not only from the Union’s victory but also from the untrammeled expanses of the Western frontier and the prodigious influx of young single European males who kept washing up on the New York shore, including, in 1885, a sixteen-year-old from Kallstadt, Germany, named Friedrich Trumpf, who came here, as many have, and many will always, not to worship freely or speak freely, but to avoid his homeland’s compulsory military service and try to make some dollars. Trumpf—father of Fred, grandfather of Donald—landed at Castle Garden, New York, America’s first immigration depot, which processed more than eight million people over its four-decade career. By the time Friedrich Trumpf had become Frederick Trump—by the time he’d become not just a U.S. citizen but a prominent hotelier and brothel owner catering to gold rush prospectors and an elected justice of the peace—Ellis Island was open and processing about five thousand immigrants a day, not a few of whom would spend their dotages in the nearly thirty thousand low-income residential units that Frederick’s son, Fred, would put up throughout the New York outer boroughs with the aid of state and federal subsidies and tax abatement. Fred’s son, then, came of age at a time in which about one-third of the country—over a hundred million “ethnic whites”—had a parent or grandparent who’d entered this country through Ellis Island. These were Donald’s people, well before he ever leveraged them into a voting bloc. After all, these were his tenants; he was their landlord. The Trump family’s low-income, multifamily “projects”—in Flushing, Jamaica Estates, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay, and Brighton Beach—were intended to be, and remain, substantially whiter than the projects of any other city developer.
Today, a hundred years after the peak of white ethnic pilgrimage to America, go to those projects—to those white ethnic enclaves that still exist in New York—and ask the people you meet where they’re from. Poland, Ukraine, Russia, etc.: The post-Soviets constitute the latest and perhaps last wave of Caucasian “pilgrims” whose acculturation and class ascension has been the dominant narrative in modern American life, until recently suppressing the narratives of forced immigration (black slavery) and genocide (Native Americans). I tried a version of this interview method at the Irish Pub on St. James Place in AC—one of the city’s best, and only, noncasino bars—and about half of the people I asked said things like, “AC,” or “Brigantine,” which is the next barrier island to the north, or else they just named the last bar they’d come from: the Chelsea, or the Ducktown Tavern. But the other half of the people—say ten or so—without any prompting answered my purposefully vague question of “Where are you from?” by offering, “I’m half Irish, a quarter German, and a quarter French,” or, the arithmetic be damned, “I’m half Dutch and two-thirds Italian.” The people who gave me those answers were male and, respectively, twenty-six and twenty-eight years old. In AC, the Irish Pub is festooned with Irish flags; the Italian restaurants and bakeries in Ducktown, the historic Italian neighborhood, are hung with Italian flags; and next to both the Irish and the Italian standards there’s always the Stars and Stripes. In the Northside, which is the historically black side—AC is so confused that it’s flipped the compass, so that the Northside is, in terms of true cardinality, the western-bay-facing side of the island—I didn’t notice many flags at all.
These white ethnic roots—of “Italians” who don’t’a speak’a Italian, of “Irish” who grew up in the Pine Barrens or on the Delaware River—creep into every element of Jersey life, even East Coast life, and if you try to resist their stifling, a gang of wifebeater-and-tracksuit-pants-wearing thugs always drives up to intimidate you with baseball bats and tells you to “suck it,” in that rough, tough, I’m-from-a-cop-family-that’s-also-a-crime-family accent that doesn’t derive from any specific language or identity anymore, but rather from TV and movies and mongrel desperation. The sheer, shrill insistence on the continued relevance of these identities strikes me as a valid if annoying reaction to the fact that their progenitors—the immigrants themselves—have all just passed away. But with grandparents and parents gone, the identities they bequeath are perverted, which explains why first- and second-generation American ethnic whites have abandoned their forebears’ traditionally pro-union, pro-welfare liberal Democratic politics, which were formed by the Great Depression, and amid the privations of the Great Recession found solace in the more medieval aspects of their Catholicism: social conservatis
m and racism. The result is a Republican Party that’s a caricature of the Republican Party, in the same way that Jersey Irishness is a caricature of Irish Irishness, and Jersey Italianness a caricature of Italian Italianness (don’t even get me started on the Jews). With this swift deracination of ethnic whites, America will lose its last sense of white authenticity, of genuine white culture—of a whiteness that’s always opposed and been opposed by the whiteness of the WASPs, the Puritans who once were this country’s elite—and a massive segment of the populace will have to resign itself to an undifferentiated paleness: a whitehood-as-nonidentity, that of a people from nothing, from nowhere, denied grievance. Ethnic whites are a dying breed, who’ve understood only just recently—historically speaking—that all they can be now is American whites, in an identity loss that they regard in their trauma as an identity theft, perpetrated by “minorities” and “illegals,” and aided and abetted by that African Muslim Obama.
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IT’S NO COINCIDENCE, then, that rage has become the prime political motivator of the white electorate today—given that theirs is both the last generation able to remember any ethnic white grandparents and the first generation whose standard of living has not appreciably improved on their parents’. Trump’s supporters resent this so vociferously, it’s as if a birthright’s been revoked: This was not the country that “they,” meaning “their ancestors,” had been sold when they bought the boat ticket over. This was not what being white was supposed to be like, scrapping for the same scarce jobs with diversity-hire blacks and Hispanics and, worse, refugee Middle Easterners. Feeling wronged, feeling disillusioned, they retreat into mendacity and yearning—though because they have no faith in an economy that’s betrayed them and have lost all belief in what their forebears called the American Dream, they yearn not for a better future, but a better past. This is what Trump means by promising to “Make America Great Again”: promising to return us to a time that never once existed.