I remember trying to play Pokemon with my kids. They had huge decks of Pokemon cards, and they’d say, “Dad, do you wanna play Pokemon?”

What am I supposed to say?

So, like an easy mark on a Coney Island boardwalk, I said, “Sure. But you’ll have to remind me of the rules.”

See, that right there? That’s a dead giveaway that you’re a sucker.

“What, you don’t know the rules? Don’t worry; I’ll teach them to you as we go.”

You ever had a kid teach you the rules of the game “as you go?”

Better question: You ever win a game that started out with the kid saying, “Don’t worry; I’ll teach you as you go?”

Here’s how that goes.

“First, you have this deck of cards, Dad. I’ll play one of the cards from my deck, and you put one of your cards up against mine. They’ll do battle, and the winner gets to keep the other person’s card.”

“Okay, that sounds easy enough.”

And it does sound easy, doesn’t it? Just play a card—sort of like when you play the card game War. You each turn over a card, and the bigger card wins. Easy peasy!

But my next question was where things always started to slide into weirdness. “Okay, I get that the biggest card wins, but I still have a question: How do I know which card is bigger—or in this case, if ‘bigger’ isn’t the right word—better?”

In other words, how will I know if I won?

“Don’t worry. I’ll tell you when you win.”

See? That right there is the recipe for what I like to call “frustrated Daddy.”

I’m no pushover … mostly. I know I’m going to be frustrated, so I say, “All right.” Trying to change tracks on the sly, “How do you know when your card is better than mine?”

That feels like a pretty straightforward question, requiring a straightforward answer. But every time I got to that point in the conversation, my kids were capable of coming up with more creative answers than one of Donald Trump’s attorneys. “Well, the thing is, it’s kind of complicated. Just trust me.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

And it’s like Jake Tapper trying to get a straight answer out of a politician committed to avoiding giving any straight answers.

Like nailing Jello to a tree.