Americans love sports far more than they do politics. There’s a good line attributed to linguist and activist Noam Chomsky that if Americans loved politics as much as they love sports, there would be a revolution tomorrow.
I didn’t put that in quotation marks because Chomsky apparently never said it. But it neatly sums up his thoughts about the bread and circuses aspect of sports and how many people use a lot of intelligence — citing history and statistics — when they talk about sports, but defer too much to so-called experts when it comes to politics.
This past weekend, I watched a college football game in which “my” team lost. It was a tight, defensive game, during which all the calls on the field were clearly correct, even the ones that didn’t serve the team I was rooting for. Every review of the plays in question showed the truth of the matter, and the officials adhered to those truths and were not swayed by the often childish behavior of both head coaches on the sidelines.
This American ideal of fairness and the importance of following rules that I grew up with and was taught to admire by my teachers, in our church, and by the culture, doesn’t apply to the man-child occupying the White House or his sheep-pen of enablers in Congress.
It goes without saying — but it needs to be said — that being fair and faithful to rules is not at all the Trumpian way. This American ideal of fairness and the importance of following rules that I grew up with and was taught to admire by my teachers, in our church and by the culture, doesn’t apply to the man-child occupying the White House or his sheep-pen of enablers in Congress. The worst of them — think Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., or White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt — smile broadly as they lynch the truth and denigrate the working press on the daily.
My making a sports-related argument about President Donald Trump’s lifelong determination to win by cheating is not out of bounds. After all, he cheats at golf, showing zero respect to the very game that holds the ideal of personal honesty highest of all. (If there were any justice in the world, a guy who cheats at golf should not be able to own golf courses.) In his 2005 confirmation testimony to the Senate, John Roberts made the case for becoming chief justice of the Supreme Court by using a sports metaphor: Calculatedly, he touched on American heartstrings by likening his role to an umpire who calls balls and strikes and has no agenda.
What a nasty slider that was, delivered in a hokey, aw-shucks manner by a Federalist Society–approved conservative ideologue. Twenty-two Democratic senators simultaneously whiffed on that pitch.
What I’m saying about my alma mater losing that football game connects with what is happening to our country. My team lost, and the calls on the field were all correct. There was nothing I could grouse about, and I simply admired a good game played.
For the vast majority of Americans, that remains our standard, adhering to norms and rules that ensure fairness and relying on people with experience to make the calls with honesty and intelligence on a football field, a baseball diamond — or in any field of endeavor, where all citizens have a right to the facts on the ground, from public servants working on the foreign intelligence that protects us or collecting accurate economic data that helps our businesses make good decisions or, say, doing the weather modeling that allows populations at risk to be warned in time to head for the hills or to at least take cover.
The man infamous for serial infidelity, for a conviction for sexual assault, for two impeachments, for major fines for operating a bogus university and a phony charity, for attempting to overturn an election, for cheating his way to 34 felony convictions for fraudulent business activity and, I’ll add, for not living up at all to his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution doesn’t want any of us to have that crucial information. Like any wannabe dictator, he said the free press is the enemy of the people, when, of course, his own dishonesty (and general ill-will toward others) is the enemy.
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His latest toddler-like meltdown has been about an anti-tariff television commercial that uses an economic speech given in 1987 in which President Ronald Reagan speaks about the damage tariffs do to the economy and to Americans in general. The ad, commissioned by Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, and shown during the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays, prompted Trump to sulk and call off all trade talks with Canada and then, a day later (still sulking) threaten an additional 10% tariff on all goods from our northern neighbor.
Trump and his right-wing propagandist echo-chamber decried the ad, claiming that it cherry-picked lines from Reagan’s radio broadcast, misrepresenting what he said. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute said much the same about the ad and noted that it was considering legal action.
But many outlets, such as this one, presented the speech with the lines used in the ad in boldface, so anyone could see there was no misrepresentation of Reagan’s general feelings about trade and tariffs. In his talk about using tariffs temporarily against Japan, Reagan emphasized, invoking the scarring hardships of the Great Depression, that he didn’t want the American people to have to deal with “the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity.” (In the speech, Reagan even mentioned speaking to Canadian leaders about the importance of free and fair trade.)
As much as I love Los Angeles and my friends who live there, if the Blue Jays should win the World Series, that would be some karmic justice, after Canadians have had to deal with Trump’s ceaseless blather about annexing Canada as the 51st state while threatening punishing tariffs in one of his mob-style shakedowns (“Nice country you’ve got here. It would be a shame if something should happen to it.”)
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Am I anti-American to say that? No, just a human being who believes in rules and fairness in general. Inexplicably, Major League Baseball still doesn’t have a salary cap, and, according to the Sporting News, the L.A. Dodgers’ payroll, at $350 million, is the highest in baseball. That’s nearly $100 million more than the also-bloated payroll of the Toronto Blue Jays. (Frankly, it’s hard to root for either team, given their financial advantages over most hometown teams, but a win by Toronto would, as my wife pointed out, at least give slight credibility to our vainglorious World Series.)
A lifelong cheater — on golf, on wives and everything in between — Trump’s presence in the White House permits his followers to think and behave as badly as he does, to lie and otherwise be as boorish and rapacious as he is every day — or to at least take pleasure in seeing him do it because it upsets “the libs.” (It actually angers all Americans not in the Trump cult.) The MAGA Republican party has become a sordid den of liars and cheats, curtailing voting rights by gerrymandering states to ensure more Republicans in the House and intimidating voters, like by threatening to send election monitors from Trump’s toady-filled Department of Justice to New Jersey and California.
So, yeah, I’m gonna root for the team that sells the poutine hot dog this year.
Hey, as John Roberts claimed way back when (and, somehow, with a straight face), all I’m doing is calling balls and strikes here.
