TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME

Mickey Mantle was my first sports hero.  I grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where the closest major league baseball park was in Kansas City, 200 miles northeast.  I only ever got to see one game in person as a kid, but it was a doozy.  I was 12, when – on June 22, 1959, my Aunt Cleo took me and my sister Mary to Kansas City to watch the Athletics (they played in KC before moving to Oakland) play the New York Yankees, with Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and other names to conjure with.  Mantle hit two home runs and a triple in that game.  It was one of the most gratifying spectator events of my life.

I wasn’t at game 5 of the World Series on Sunday, but I found it gratifying as well.  Not the game on the field, but the sight – and sound – of Donald Trump getting a rare comeuppance. 

Many of the usual Beltway stuffed shirts tut-tutted about civility and the need to respect the office of the president.  You know who is never civil and doesn’t respect the office of the presidency?  Donald Trump, that’s who. 

Trump loves to issue veiled threats.  In virtually every speech, he gets to a point where he starts using phrases like “everything is on the table,” “we’ll just have to see what happens,” and so on.  He thinks it makes him sound intimidating without committing himself to any particular outcome.

Strategic ambiguity can be an effective negotiating tactic if used judiciously, but Trump is incapable of being judicious. 

There are those who argue that Trump, if not exactly playing eight-dimensional chess, is making conscious choices to be outrageous in strategic ways.  I will concede that Trump is an experienced con man, and that he’s using tactics that have worked for him in the past.  The thing is, his past opponents were business rivals and various tradespeople he decided to screw over.  He’s playing in the major leagues now, with critics who won’t be intimidated or bought off. 

Trump rarely leaves his cocoon.  He surrounds himself with toadies, spends his time watching Fox News sycophants heaping praise on him, and rarely leaves the White House except to bask in the cheers of adoring Deplorables at yet another campaign rally.  He knows he has enemies, but he rarely encounters them in person. 

I regard it as salutary, then, that Trump learned that – even right after a rare success story – lots of regular people really don’t like him.  Not journalists, not deep state bureaucrats, but baseball fans.  Thousands of them.

Judging by his facial expressions at the game, the boos and chants of “lock him up” took him by surprise.  Good.  What goes around, comes around.