Baseball and the White House

Why the Pete Rose thing bothers me.

I was going to skip writing about Donald Trump and Pete Rose, but it’s still annoying me and there really is a larger, non-baseball point to be made here.

For those of you not obsessed with baseball: Rose, who died last year, was a great player from the 1960s to the 1980s who eventually was banned from baseball for betting on games involving his own team. The ban was lifted in mid-May after Trump called on baseball to do so; obviously Rose can’t participate in MLB activities what with being dead and all, but it does mean that he will now be eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame. We don’t know for sure, but it seems likely that the baseball Powers That Be decided it was better to avoid getting into a fight with the president.

So….this totally stinks, and not just because it’s a terrible decision for baseball.¹

As far as I can tell, this was a case of the president as Donald-from-Queens, the caller to talk radio. And of course presidents are entitled to their opinions, just as every loudmouthed, ignorant, evidence-free opinion-spewer is entitled to their opinions. Not only that, but part of the deal of the office is that presidents can not only spout off on stuff outside of government they know nothing about, but those opinions will be widely broadcast, and therefore a lot more influential than those of pretty much everyone else.

Now, it’s obviously a very bad thing when Trump runs the government based on his ill-informed prejudices (Tariffs are great! Wind power is bad! Let’s have a hyper-military parade just like cool kids like Putin get!). This one is a lot less dangerous, and I’m not trying to pretend it’s more than it is.

But still...there’s something really wrong here. This isn’t a case of a president using the bully pulpit to advocate for something outside of the normal scope of public policy which then, thanks to his exhortations, becomes popular and forces the hand of private actors.

No, this appears to be a case of an autocrat bullying private organizations to carrying out his personal desires.

To be sure: It’s totally legitimate for presidents to use leverage over one thing to get private organizations and people to cooperate on other things.

But this is different.

This is a case of a president at least perceived to be bullying a private organization into granting a personal, private whim. In that, it’s not actually different in principle from a president extorting protection money – which Trump also appears to be doing. We don’t know whether Trump made any overt threats, but given how he’s running his presidency he no longer has to; everyone knows that the president is willing to extract revenge on anyone who crosses him. He’s repeatedly said so, and he’s followed through (or at least tried).

It’s not just about his use of the office to punish his enemies (or potential enemies), however. What’s even more extraordinary about Trump is that his ambitions are almost always for his own private interests.

This is a bit tricky to explain. Ambition is a good thing in politicians; we don’t want presidents who aren’t ambitious. And it’s okay for a president to seek personal glory or political power; in fact, in some ways those kinds of ambition (what I call the “content” of their ambition) are safer than ambition for specific public policies.² But it’s all good, because for normal politicians it pushes them into the public sphere, which has rules and values that they need to work through to achieve their goals. Trump, it seems to me, just doesn’t make that transition. He wants what he wants – prestige, influence, money, showers that work the way he likes them, Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame. It’s all personal. And the flip side of it is that on the many things he’s not personally interested in he’s perfectly willing to let others handle it (especially if they flatter him – something he very much is interested in).

Okay, there are a lot of assertions there and not a whole lot of evidence presented, but for now all I’ll say is (1) it’s consistent with the Dan Drezner idea of Trump as a toddler, and (2) I’ve been thinking of him this way since his first term, and it hasn’t steered me wrong yet. It’s consistent, as well, with things such as how Trump uses his phone despite security and other risks because, well, he likes talking on the phone.

At any rate, the Pete Rose thing strikes me as a good if perhaps trivial example of how Trump uses the public aspect of his job for purely private goals. And a good example of how governing without the rule of law can rapidly mean arbitrary presidential interference with any business or organization or person who happens to draw the president’s attention. On the whole, I think that’s a very, very bad form of government.

1. Why is it bad for baseball? Rose broke baseball’s most important rule. And the current sports betting craze makes it even more important for baseball to make it clear that the game is on the up-and-up. Banning a player as good as Rose demonstrated that the anti-gambling rule was a very big deal; reinstating him shows exactly the opposite.

2. My argument is that rather than talking about how much ambition a politician has or for what office, we learn more by thinking about the “content” of their ambition. It could be for policy. It could be to build on a family heritage. It could be to advance the intersts of some group. There are many possibilities, and it’s not always single-dimension. I haven’t developed this any further than a blog post, but if someone wants to I think there’s something worthwhile here.