Nate Silver: Trump Like a 'Terrible Poker Player'

The government shutdown fiasco proved President Donald Trump is akin to a bad poker player, analyst Nate Silver argues.

Silver, the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, wrote Monday the way Trump handled the shutdown — which lasted five weeks before it ended Friday — did not work out in his favor.

"The way Trump has played his hand so far on the shutdown has a lot in common with how bad poker players tend to cost themselves money," Silver wrote.

Silver said his argument is not so much based on Trump purportedly losing the showdown over border security to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi but based more on how Trump showed his cards.

"Good players play in such a way as to avoid putting themselves to tough decisions," Silver wrote. "Bad players, conversely, tend to paint themselves into corners. They'll curse their luck when they suddenly realize that a hand they'd assumed was a winner might be no good. But more often than not, it reflects a mistake they made earlier in the hand, such as playing a weak hand that they should have folded to begin with.

"Sound familiar? It sounds a lot like Trump, who didn't have a lot of good choices on the shutdown."

Trump struck a deal with lawmakers to reopen the government for three weeks as a bipartisan group of senators and House members work on a solution to border security that would include a physical border barrier. Silver said that was Trump's best option, mostly because the shutdown was causing his poll numbers to plummet as Americans blamed him for the shutdown.

Silver said, because Trump did not have any good options in the shutdown, it proved he was like a bad poker player who had terrible cards to play.

• Government Shutdown Cost Economy $3B: Budget Office
• End of Shutdown Still Leaves Contract Workers Hanging