If you look around the table and you don’t spot the sucker in the first half hour — it’s you.

The Donald seems to be deaf to that bit of poker wisdom, offered by a list of hard-bitten movie and detective story heroes. (As are Eric and Jared and Ivanka.) This would be a consoling thought on which I could fall back during sleepless nights, if the ultimate cost weren’t likely to be so high. But unfortunately, because of our electoral negligence, Mr. Trump finds himself in a position to make us pay a huge price for whatever satisfaction we may eventually reap from the dénouement to come.

Our blessed country has spent only a quarter of a millennium in trying to find solutions for the problems that have bedeviled us ever since the Founders first took them on. The scholars who have been studying the Koran and Mohammad’s Hadiths have already been at it twice that long. The sages who have grappled with the Torah’s conundrums have put in far more time on it than either of them — all of them puzzling over ways to keep men from each other’s throats.

Newcomers that we were at the international table, we Americans spent our first ‘half hour’ enjoying our initial easy successes and testing our strategies. We had some successes, bluffs we lost through optimism, pots we won, partly through the luck of the draw and partly through the fantastic good fortune of finding two opponents (Indians and blacks) from whom we could steal without much worry about retaliation since they were even more inexperienced than we were, and armed only with bows and arrows and gospel songs. Progress was painfully slow, but it was undeniable. Domestically, the slaves did get freed. The boundaries of legally established reservations were drawn up, even sometimes honored. Internationally, we did oversee the establishment of a number of tribal councils to introduce rules that would govern all countries equally and we began to set the standards for fairness in multinational negotiations. We slowly began to be recognized as the major force for sensible government among the world’s 193 nations. There seemed to be an excuse for cautious celebration.

Then the Bomb came along and screwed everything up. For the modest price of starving a few of their own citizens (some of them people the leaders didn’t especially value having in the first place) some players discovered that they could scrape together enough money and expertise and chutzpah to make potentially civilization-ending weapons of their own. With these they could terrorize their ‘peace-loving’ colleagues, holding their aspirations hostage. In self-defense the more sane nations tried to resist with ‘binding’ treaties and agreements. That gave Messrs. Putin, Jinping, Jong-un, Erdoğan, and their ilk greater presence at the table, which they didn’t hesitate to exploit.

But America remained a formidable obstacle. Certainly the most powerful obstacle to anyone with dictatorial ambitions. We were unlikely to give up our hegemony without a struggle. Unless … the Trumps, having gained power largely through an unforeseen upset, and inexperienced in dealing with old hands at diplomatic booby traps, could perhaps be suckered through their naive enjoyment of their new positions, their love of pomp and ceremony, and their narcissism — their susceptibility to any form of flattery, no matter how obvious. They could be tagged by winks and nods as the big sucker and unseated by a group attack. No sooner said than agreed to — under the table.

Now we are faced with the ludicrous spectacle of Jared — sweet well-meaning child — offering to settle thousand-year-old religious disputes with a Queens air-rights-type agreement, Ivanka planning for a smooth introduction of Holocaust-themed luxury handbags for her brand, and Donald — aah, irrepressible Donald — grinning atop a 60-ton tank whose treads will have chewed up the pavement of Pennsylvania Avenue and the grass of the Mall in an infrastructure insult that will cost the taxpayers over a million dollars in repairs when he tires of waving and smiling for the red hats and calling for Hillary to be locked up for losing the election

And a whole new group of players have been allowed to edge up to the table — the plunderers are back : the passenger-pigeon-killers. the beaver-slaughterers, the oil-drillers and the coal miners and the lumber-lovers who have been slavering at the mouth through all these Roosevelt (Theodore) regulatory years waiting for just such a patsy to be enthroned. It’s feasting time at the trough, guys. Get it while the getting’s good!

How will all this play out as an older, angrier generation fades from the scene and a younger more reality-based bunch starts to see the power of their votes, we cannot now know, except that it seems unlikely to slip by without confrontation of a kind we haven’t seen since the Great Depression and apples were being sold on street-corners of Wall Street for nickels by men in threadbare Savoy suits. How will Trump react to being dumped? Where will his sycophantic thugs find a new political home, encircled by gerrymander fences strong enough to protect their predatory-payday-lender ideal form of government? What cracks will they crawl into when cornered? When will Jared and Ivanka go back to the social whirl and give up the notion that a ‘deal’ is the obvious solution to thousand-year old stalemate? When will Donald himself finally realize that grabbing pussies is not really a worthy style of life for a grown man?

If you’re young enough, dig in and wait and see. I’m probably not going to make the curtain call. Maybe that’s a consolation prize for being old.