Donald Trump, his indicted co-conspirators, and the nineteen dimensional prisoner’s dilemma

| 9:09 am EDT August 15, 2023
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The “prisoner’s dilemma” is, at its core, a fairly simple logic puzzle. Two men get arrested for committing a crime together, and they both know that if neither of them flips on the other, they’ll both go free. But they also know that they if they’re going to flip, they have to do it before the other can. It’s a rather straightforward scenario, but it’s still quite the dilemma for anyone caught up on it.

Then there’s Georgia. District Attorney Fani Willis has managed to set up a prisoner’s dilemma, but not a classic kind. No, this is far more complex. Donald Trump and his co-conspirators are now facing a nineteen dimensional prisoner’s dilemma.

Take, for instance, Sidney Powell. She doesn’t just have to worry about whether she should flip and cut a plea deal before Rudy Giuliani can flip on her. Powell also has to worry about whether Jenna Ellis will flip first, or if Mark Meadows will flip first, or if Jeffrey Clark will flip first, or if any of the indicted local officials will flip first.

If any one of these nineteen co-conspirators cuts a cooperation deal and confesses to their role in the overall racketeering plot, it’ll help increase the odds of conviction for all eighteen other co-conspirators. So if you’re one of those co-conspirators, it’s not a simple matter of trusting that one other person will remain loyal to you. Think about nineteen people being in a room, and how many handshakes would need to take place for all of those people to shake hands with each other. There are that many prisoner’s dilemmas going on here simultaneously within this one RICO indictment.

Of course the one person who doesn’t have to spend any time thinking through the prisoner’s dilemma is Donald Trump, because as the big fish, he’s not getting a cooperation deal anyway. Fani Willis isn’t going to let Trump off the hook in order to secure a conviction against his underlings. Nothing plays out that way. Trump can just assume now that at least some of these co-conspirators will flip on him before trial, and there will be nothing he can do about it.