Which makes the convergent evolution of a similar mythology among liberals all the more notable. In a marginal but influential liberal vision of the president — prevalent in Twitter-driven coverage and in discursive cable-news segments — his impulsive behavior and impetuousness are recast as steps in some sort of complex playbook. Their version of the theory doesn’t exactly correspond with its counterpart on the right, but the two don’t contradict each other, either. Maybe Trump isn’t a chess master, these liberals might suggest, but he’s at least a studied Machiavellian. In a viral Medium post in January emblematic of this mode of thinking, a Google engineer made the case that Trump’s botched immigration order was a “trial balloon” for a coup: that Trump could make use of the ban’s failure to mark a path to unchecked power.

The most common liberal version of the theory is less byzantine. It takes the form of what the journalism professor and critic Jay Rosen has called “distraction theory.” In this line of reasoning, the Trump administration’s production of chaos is not a result of incompetence or venality but, in fact, a series of targeted acts of diversion. These usually take the form of tweets saying something like: “Don’t be distracted by [breaking news story]! Trump is only trying to distract us from [long-simmering news story]! Stay focused.” Such claims are most often made about Russia: For example, distraction-master Trump diverted unwanted attention from that story in March by claiming that he was wiretapped by President Obama. The approach doubles as press criticism, which gets something right on the way to getting something wrong — identifying journalistic market failures but crediting them to a constantly unfolding and infinitely complex external master plan.

It should be said that chess theory is suspiciously well suited to the mediums on which it is most prevalent. On the right, it thrives in nihilistic, irony-drenched message boards, where the Trump phenomenon has always been seen as something of a game. But it is perfect for Twitter. Among Trump’s opposition on that platform, a sense of political disorientation is constant and paralyzing, conferring attention on anyone who can provide temporary relief. Twitter’s ephemeral, overlapping conversations about politics are constructed almost exclusively from alternative takes and counternarratives. For the most fervent and least coherently ideological members of the self-described Trump opposition, a mastermind figure provides a stable and versatile narrative prompt. The stories they create are, true to their venue, constantly remade and rarely challenged, easily resurfaced for occasional vindication and otherwise allowed to drift down the feed.

One telling feature of chess theory is how sparingly it is applied to anyone but Trump himself. There is no projection of chess mastery onto Jeff Sessions as he systematically enacts his right-wing ideology through the Justice Department and expresses a revisionist view of history that he has proudly held for years. There is nothing counterintuitively strategic about Scott Pruitt’s Environmental Protection Agency or Betsy Devos’s Department of Education; nobody strains to frame Rex Tillerson’s public crash course in diplomacy in such lofty terms; the well-documented rises of Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn within the West Wing have inspired plenty of gossip but required little theorizing; likewise for Kushner’s more recent struggles. Nobody will ever accuse Sean Spicer of playing any sort of chess at all. Kellyanne Conway occasionally gets the treatment, mainly for making cable-news pundits flail with impossibly cynical arguments. Steve Bannon, who once referred to Trump as a “blunt instrument” for his ideology, risks 4-D-chess-playing his way straight out of his position of influence, as his president has reportedly become either annoyed or threatened by his attempts to cast himself as the real grandmaster.

Chess theory rarely benefits from the passage of time. Trump does not appear to have planned his first health care failure as an “Art of the Deal” scheme to remove Paul Ryan, as Breitbart speculated back in March; weeks later, he leaned heavily on the House speaker for the graceless, forceful vote on a newer version of the bill. Likewise, in situations that leave less room for creativity, we rarely spot the shadow of a chess master. Firing James Comey, the person in charge of an investigation into your associates, isn’t a chess move; it’s swiping the pieces off the board and walking away — a transparent display of dominance and power. Offering a plainly disingenuous explanation for the firing is something you do because you don’t feel the need to outsmart anyone. It’s something you do because you think you can.