A chess grandmaster says he can see Trump's next moves — and he is scared

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One during travel to Palm Beach, Florida, from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., November 25, 2025. REUTERS/Anna Rose Layden/File Photo

Garry Kasparov, a Russian chess grandmaster regarded by some as the world’s greatest chess player, issued a warning on Thursday that he can foresee President Donald Trump’s next moves — and they pose a grave threat to American democracy.

“I wish we could play chess, but unfortunately the games we are discussing now, they are not played by the rules,” Kasparov, who chairs the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), told independent journalist Ben Cohen, writing for his anti-extremism Substack The Banter. Kasparov founded the RDI after fleeing Russia due to that nation’s brief democratic era gradually sliding into authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin.

“I predicted, and unfortunately I was right, as on many other occasions, that Trump would illustrate to Americans that everything, or not everything, most of the things they believed were cornerstones of American democracy are in fact based on customs,” Kasparov told Cohen regarding Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “It's not coded by laws, it's about traditions. Nobody ever did it. These kinds of arguments never worked against Donald Trump. Nobody could afford hiding their taxes, and the list could grow long.”

During his first term, Kasparov observed, Trump mostly hired “traditional Republicans” who believed sincerely in American democracy and therefore limited the damage he could do, especially after he attempted a coup after losing the 2020 presidential election to then-former Vice President Joe Biden. In his second term, Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists who prioritize pleasing the president over their respecting the Constitution and rule of law.

Yet despite these facts, and Trump’s attempts to steal future elections and silence his opponents, Kasparov warned that the “American public at large” does not seem to take his threat to democracy seriously.

“I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, so I know what the KGB is, not from books but from personal experience,” Kasparov said. “I fought Vladimir Putin in a Russia that was accelerating on the way to becoming another KGB dictatorship. But for most Americans, the Constitution is ironclad. I remember just after Trump's second election, I was a guest on [former US Attorney] Preet Bharara's podcast, and I asked him about a third term. He said, ‘No, no, no, Garry, you're kidding. That's unconstitutional.’ ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Absolutely ironclad.’ I said, ‘Trump will try. He said, not impossible. And he is trying now.’”

Ultimately Trump has produced “a climate of nihilism and tribalism, and we have a lot of people on both sides saying it's my tribe,” Kasparov told Cohen. “The biggest threat is coming from the far right, because Trump is in power, and you don't see anyone on the left who could represent the same threat to democracy. But it's very important that this my-tribe feeling does not overrule the Constitution.”

Kasparov has been a frequent critic of the Trump administration. Last year, after media companies began capitulating to Trump by either seeming to get fired comedians who criticized him (Stephen Colbert), trying to do so (Jimmy Kimmel), getting settlements from news outlets for bogus lawsuits (ABC News, CBS News) and convincing media CEOs to do his bidding (Jeff Bezos from The Washington Post), Kasparov warned that these are signs of Trump aspiring to be a dictator.

“Also notable is this is happening when Trump has record low approval numbers, but his targets don't feel they can depend on democracy-based resistance for the same reason Trump and his gang don't fear it,” Kasparov argued. “Elections and the rule of law don't matter if you don't believe in them.

In 2019, Kasparov elaborated on how Trump’s rise to power reminded him of the type of authoritarianism he opposed in the Soviet Union.

“I’m a post-Soviet citizen,” Kasparov said at the time. “The country of my birth ceased to exist in 1991. We enjoyed less than a decade of tenuous freedom in Russia before Vladimir Putin launched its post-democratic phase. My ongoing attempts to fight that tragedy led to my exile in the United States. Now, my new home finds itself locked in its own perilous battle: a battle to avoid becoming the latest member of the post-truth world.”

He then compared life in the Soviet Union to what Trump is trying to create in the United States.

“Unable to change the facts, Trump and his supporters instead try to shift the debate into an alternate universe where the truth is whatever they say it is today,” Kasparov explained. “Trump repeats the same lies over and over, and it’s hard to say which is more troubling: that his followers don’t realize that they are lies or that they don’t care. Globalization and the internet may have made the world smaller, but now, we’re experiencing a counterattack: the regionalization of truth.”

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