Standardized Tests

Recently I completed my annual physical exam with my doctor. A few weeks earlier I had given a blood sample and urine sample for testing, gotten weighed, had my gait and grip strength measured and my blood pressure checked, completed eyesight and hearing tests, and done some of the other preliminaries. In my second visit, my doctor went through all of the test results gathered from the blood and urine samples and performed some of the other checks and probes that are part of this annual ritual.

For a few years now, my annual physical has included memory and cognition tests designed to identify early signs of dementia or other mental issues that are common among aging people. The tests are pretty basic. One involves him giving me five words to remember, then we talk for a few minutes about something else, then he sees if I can repeat the words back for him. Another involves listening to a story and then answering questions about it. Other parts of the test involve answering math questions. It’s become part of the routine.

I thought about this part of my physical when I read about President Biden’s annual physical, which did not include any cognitive or memory tests. His press secretary says he doesn’t need one, because “he passes a cognitive test every day” on the job. Some people disagree and question that omission.

Let’s set aside President Biden, Donald Trump, and politics of the moment. Doesn’t it seem strange that there isn’t agreement on the tests that will be administered and reported on as part of the annual physicals of incumbent Presidents and candidates for the office–and that the check-up will include standard cognition and memory tests given as a matter of course? Serving as President is obviously a difficult, challenging job, and when individuals seek the office voters deserve to have reasonable information about their physical and mental capabilities. To be sure, it intrudes upon their privacy–but anyone who runs for President accepts that, in doing so, they will be giving up some personal privacy in the process.

Part of the problem with the current hyperpolitical atmosphere is that people find it difficult to step back from the individual circumstances of the current candidates and look at the big picture. We’ve admittedly come a long way since the days when President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke and disability were kept secret, but I think there is more to be done in serving the interests of transparency. I’d like to see Congress or a bipartisan commission agree on what physical and mental tests are material to the office of the Presidency and should be included in the annual physicals, and then require every candidate to agree that they will undergo those tests, and to authorize their doctors to release the results of those tests in a standardized report for public inspection.

Regrettably, there will probably always be weird conspiracy theories and wild speculation about presidential candidates, but coming up with a standardized approach to assessment of their physical and mental fitness for the job should help to refute the crazier assertions while also giving voters meaningful information as they make their choices.

The Power Of Unanimity

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court decided Trump v. Anderson, the case that concerned whether the State of Colorado could invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to bar former President Trump from appearing on the ballot for the Republican primary in Colorado. Section 3 prevents individuals who have taken the oath to support the Constitution of the United States, and who later engage in insurrection or rebellion against the federal government, from serving in designated federal and state offices. The Court held that Colorado could not bar former President Trump from the Colorado Republican primary ballot because, while States can enforce Section 3 as to individuals seeking state office, individual States lack the power to enforce it with respect to Presidential candidates.

An important aspect of the Court’s ruling is that in this case, as in many others, all nine Justices–appointed by Democrats and Republicans over more than three decades–agreed on this outcome. The primary opinion is a per curiam opinion, which is Latin for “by the court.” Four Justices wrote separately, also noting that they agreed with the result. As the concurring opinion of Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson–the three Justices appointed by Democrats–explained: “Allowing Colorado to do so would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles. That is enough to resolve this case.” Justice Barrett, in her concurring opinion, similarly stated: “I agree that States lack the power to enforce Section 3 against Presidential candidates.”

The four Justice wrote separately to note that the Court did not need to go beyond that point to resolve the case before it and therefore, under principles of judicial restraint, should not have addressed some of the broader issues discussed in the per curiam opinion. Those separate opinions raise the question of whether, in the context of some future case, certain aspects of the discussion in the per curiam opinion will be viewed as dicta, and not of precedential force, because they are not essential to the Court’s unanimous judgment. Such arguments, if they are ever raised, will be decided by the Court in that future case.

That point, however, should not detract from the fact that, in this hyperpolitical era, the different members of the Supreme Court reached a unanimous judgment on how the Constitution applies to a specific case that has been a political lightning rod. There is significant power in that expression of unanimity, and the members of the Supreme Court clearly recognize that fact, with the unanimity being emphasized in all three of the opinions.

Justice Barrett, in her concurrence, expounded on the significance of the unanimity:

“The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”

Will Americans take that message home, as Justice Barrett urges? We’ll see. In the meantime, all of the opinions in Trump v. Anderson can be seen here. They are worth a read.

The Trump Weight Bet

It’s pretty much impossible to get away from Donald Trump these days, no matter how much you might really try to do so. What with various indictments, raids, investigations, lawsuits, and the former President’s evident narcissistic desire to be the center of attention at all times, the news websites these days seem to be all Trump, all the time. Some people apparently can’t get enough of this guy.

Recent evidence of this is that some bookmakers are taking bets on various aspects of Mr. Trump’s arraignment in Georgia, thereby combining two of America’s obsessions–gambling and Trump. You can bet on whether Trump will smile or scowl in his mugshot (or wear a MAGA hat), as well as the color of his tie, or whether he will be wearing a tie at all. And, since the booking process in Georgia apparently involves stepping on the scales, you also can bet on the former President’s weight.

The Trump weight over/under currently stands at 273.5 pounds–a number that has increased because 77 percent of bettors have chosen the “over,” causing the bookies to raise the target number by eight pounds so far. (As gamblers know, the betting lines shift as bets come in, to protect the bookies from losing their shirts.) That weight is well above what the former President has disclosed as his weight in the past, when Mr. Trump, who is 6′ 2″, has reported that he weighs about 240 pounds.

It’s weird to think that people are willing to bet about this kind of stuff. Wagering on a person’s weight is pretty embarrassing–if that person is capable of embarrassment, that is. But if you care about how much Donald Trump actually weighs, we’ll find that out this week, as he apparently won’t have the option of handing authorities one of those “please don’t weigh me” cards. Some bettors will be happy, some will be disappointed, and then, regrettably, we’ll no doubt move on to focus on a new Trump-related fixation.

Punch Drunk

If you needed further proof that modern America has become a weird place, consider the strange dynamic that was supposed to put two of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, into a “cage match” for a mixed martial arts fight. Now it looks like that misguided event isn’t going to come off, perhaps because Elon Musk has come to his senses and questions why in the world he would want to get involved in a punch-out with anyone–much less the billionaire CEO of Facebook.

The talk of fisticuffs isn’t limited to social media tycoons. Recently former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is running for the 2024 GOP nomination for President, was asked who would win if he got into the ring with former President Donald Trump. Christie gleefully responded: “I’d kick his ass.” It’s not clear why the interviewer, Piers Morgan, raised the possibility of fisticuffs between a morbidly obese 60-year-old and an overweight near-octogenarian, provoking painful mental images for anyone who thought about that ugly scenario. But Christie wasn’t the first modern politician to raise the possibility of a physical encounter; his comment was reminiscent of an earlier dust-up between President Joe Biden and Trump about going out behind the high school gym for a brawl.

It’s interesting to think about why political and social leaders talk in these kinds of juvenile terms. I don’t remember the politicians or wealthy businessmen of my youth boasting about duking it out with opponents. To the contrary, hot-headedness was viewed as a negative quality at a time when an ill-considered decision in the Cold War setting could lead to nuclear armageddon. Whether in the business world or in the political arena, the idea was to be seen as cool, calm, and calculated, ready to out-maneuver and outwit your opponent and keep your head while everyone around you was reduced to blubbering panic–not as an angry, loud-mouthed street brawler ready to take a swing at the slightest provocation.

The world still seems like a very dangerous place to me, where those same attributes of calmness in crisis are crucial–but obviously perceptions have changed. Do current leaders mistake physical toughness for mental toughness? Do they feel they need to talk about fighting to break through the din and convey to their supporters that they really care? For whatever reason, it’s disturbing to hear political and social leaders acting like physical violence is a way to solve anything. Where’s the likes of Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson these days?

Another Date That Will Live In Infamy?

There are some notorious dates in American history.  FDR declared December 7, 1941, the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “a date that will live in infamy.”  September 11, 2001 obviously is another, and so is April 14, 1865 — the day John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, and sent history veering off into a different direction.

Should February 5, 2013 join them in the annals of infamy?

Why?  Because, according to this interesting article in Politico, that’s the date Donald Trump learned how to send tweets all by himself.  Before then, all of The Donald’s tweets were typed and sent by his social media manager.  But on February 5, 2013, Trump personally composed and issued a tweet that was a simple thank-you to an actress who said something nice about him . . . and the rest was history.

Of course, you can’t really equate mastery of Twitter with a bombing that pulled America into World War II, or the assassination of the greatest President in American history — but the Twitter breakthrough clearly has had profound implications.  Before, politicians and Presidents tended to communicate with the American people primarily through speeches and prepared statements that could be carefully vetted.  Now, tweets are issued directly from the President himself, without any ghost-writing or review.  Ill-advised 140-character (now 280-character) blasts thumbed in at odd hours can set a new direction for American policy or radically change the news cycle.

In my view, that’s definitely not a good thing.  But the genie has escaped the bottle, and you wonder if we’ll ever get back to the day when there is some kind of gravitas and mystique — and distance from the masses — to the office of the Presidency again.

And here’s an even more disturbing thing:  according to the Politico piece, President Trump’s former social media manager is advising him to “up his game” on social media and engage more personally with his supporters, by making his Instagram account more interesting and doing things like live-streaming from the Oval Office.  Hey, what could go wrong with that?

On Genius

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” — Confucius

“To know, is to know that you know nothing.  That is the meaning of true knowledge.” — Socrates

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” — William Shakespeare

“I have no special talent.  I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstein

“I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our own intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.” — Albert Einstein

“Wile E. Coyote — Super Genius!” — Wile E. Coyote

“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” — President Donald Trump

“I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star . . . to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius . . . and a very stable genius at that!” — President Donald Trump

The Presidential Knife Fight Hypothetical

It’s the end of 2017, folks.  Time to stop worrying about the minor stuff, and to start thinking about big-picture issues — like whether Donald Trump or, say, Chester A. Arthur is more likely to prevail in a knife-fight to the death among American Presidents.

Believe it or not, people have given serious thought to this concept — so serious that they’ve even figured out what kind of motorized wheelcraft FDR would use in such a fight, and what kind of knives the Presidents would employ.  This is important stuff, far beyond the Hall of Presidents at Disney World and much more important than developing phony resolutions that you’ll forget within moments after the new year arrives.  Which Presidents are likely to survive until the bitter, bloody end — and, equally important, which Presidents are likely to be the first to give up the ghost?

The prevailing view seems to be that Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt are likely to be the last Presidents standing.  Jackson, because he was a bloodthirsty killer, Lincoln, because his height, rail-splitting strength, wrestling skills, and saintly notoriety make him somebody who would survive the initial killing frenzy, and Roosevelt, because his Bull Moose fitness and hunting prowess would give him a leg up over perceived presidential wimps like, say, Woodrow Wilson.  I’m not sure that the analysis gives sufficient credit to the more recent Presidents — like Harry Truman, who would be happy to stay in the kitchen heat, slashing away at his predecessors, or President Obama, who probably would enter the fray wearing a bicycle helmet and would use his basketball moves to avoid that fatal thrust.

That’s all well and good, but to me the more crucial question is which President would be the first to meet his maker.  I’d bet on James Buchanan, pictured above with his really horrible case of bed head.  Seriously, who cut this guy’s hair.  Putting aside the fact that he was a horrible President, who did nothing to prevent the Civil War — just look at the guy’s face.! Who wouldn’t want to stab this loser and probably punch him square in the mug, besides?  Add in the fact that he was the only bachelor President, who couldn’t even deal with having a spouse, and you can’t help but see Buchanan cowering in a corner once the bloodsport begins, ready to be stabbed repeatedly by other Chief Executives.  I’m convinced Buchanan would the first to go, before even out of shape guys like Tubby Taft or wheelchair-bound Presidents like Roosevelt.

As for Trump?  I think he’d cut a deal with somebody like Matthew Van Buren and make it past the first wave, then get cut down mid-tweet.  I’m convinced Trump would outlive the sideburned Chester A. Arthur, somehow.

The Big Disconnect

At some point in the future, perhaps, we’ll look back at the Trump presidency with some sense of perspective.  For now, though, as we’re in the midst of it, it’s just one weird thing after another.  And with each new, unseemly tweet or attempted put down, it becomes more and more apparent that there is a significant disconnect between the President and his supporters and at least some of the rest of us.

The President’s various petty feuds with members of the news media are the best example of this phenomenon.  Every day, the President seems to become locked into some bitter dispute with a TV show host or a network.  His crude, mean tweets about the hosts of the Morning Joe show on MSNBC are strange because you’d expect the President to be able to remain above the fray.  Surely the President has bigger things to deal with, right?  And, even if he did feel the need to respond to the comments of a particular broadcaster, couldn’t he do so in a fashion that doesn’t involve referring to somebody’s purported plastic surgery?  Wouldn’t most Presidents conclude that very few people out in the country watch, or are even aware of, Morning Joe and therefore responding to its hosts can only call attention to what they are saying?

The President’s recent video tweet, showing a tinkered version of footage of Donald Trump at a Wrestlemania broadcast, body-slamming somebody with the CNN logo superimposed on his head, is the latest example of the disconnect.  Trump evidently thinks that the footage shows, in graphic form, that he’s not afraid to take on CNN and other members of the “mainstream media,” and that his supporters will cheer because they think the press is biased and deserves its comeuppance.  But many of the rest of us shake our heads, and not just because it seems bizarre and childish that the President would tweet out doctored footage of himself engaging in an act of physical violence.

No, the President’s latest tweet also manages to remind some of us:  Oh my god, we’ve actually elected a President of the United States who once voluntarily agreed to appear on Wrestlemania!

Confirming That Standards Still Exist

I’ve always considered Kathy Griffin to be an unfunny, no-talent hack who always seems to be willing to do or say anything in a desperate bid to get some attention.  Calling her a “comedian” is an insult to people who have a legitimate sense of humor and make people laugh for a living.

So it was no surprise to me that Griffin did something stupidly provocative — in this case, posing for a photo with a mock-up of a bloody, severed head of Donald Trump — in a bid to try to remain “edgy” and in the news.   The fact that anyone, even a pathetic attention grubber like Griffin, would think that posing with the severed head of the President of the United States was funny, tells you something about how out of touch some people can be with prevailing human sensibilities.

What’s encouraging, though, is the reaction to Griffin’s photo.  She was universally criticized by everyone, left and right, liberal and conservative, irrespective of whether they support Trump or think he’s the worst President ever.  Griffin also was, not surprisingly, removed from gigs and jobs, including participating in the CNN New Year’s Eve show that I’ve never watched, because someone who thought, even for a second, that that kind of photo was funny is obviously so lacking in judgment that she’s capable of doing or saying other things that are grossly inappropriate.

The broad condemnation of Griffin’s ill-advised publicity stunt shows that we still have some standards of propriety in this country.  To be sure, drawing the line at posing for a photograph with the President’s head may be a low bar, but it’s nevertheless nice to know that the bar is still there.

When Griffin realized that she crossed the line and was being subjected to withering criticism by just about everyone, she issued an apology of sorts, asking for forgiveness, calling herself “a comic” and saying:  “I cross the line. I move the line, then I cross it. I went way too far. The image is too disturbing. I understand how it offends people. It wasn’t funny. I get it.”  You wonder, though, whether Griffin really does “get it” — and in fact she and her celebrity attorney are supposed to hold a press conference today where they will explain the “true motivation” behind Griffin’s bloody Trump head image, and “respond to the bullying from the Trump family she has endured.”   That’s right:  Griffin apparently is claiming that she has been “bullied” because the Trump family harshly criticized her callous and outrageous stunt.

Trying to reposition yourself as the victim is a classic, last-ditch tactic when you’ve done something so colossally wrong-headed, so it’s no surprise that Griffin is trying it.  It will be interesting to see whether anyone lets Griffin get away with it, when in reality she has only herself to blame for her witless, self-inflicted injury.

Looking “Presidential”?

Last week President Trump ordered a missile strike on a Syrian base that was implicated in a toxic chemical attack by the Syrian government against Syrian citizens.  This week we’ve got an array of U.S. Navy ships heading into the western Pacific regions, apparently as a show of force against North Korea, which has been engaged in repeated missile tests and is continuing to develop its nuclear weapons program.

Couple the military maneuvers with a few presidential summits with foreign leaders like the Chinese head of state and the president of Egypt, and you’ve also got a lot of people talking about Donald Trump looking “presidential.”  Of course, Presidents always are said to look “presidential” when they are dealing with foreign policy or ordering military action; that’s because those are areas where the President can act unilaterally, without having to try to convince balky Congresses to take one action or another.  It’s been a time-honored technique of the residents of the Oval Office for decades — if you’ve had a rough time on your domestic agenda, have a foreign leader over for a visit or try to shift the focus to the actions of a “rogue state” or “terrorist threat.”  So, whether through careful planning or happenstance, Donald Trump is following a well-thumbed presidential playbook.

It’s interesting that we frequently associate ordering military action and foreign policy positioning with looking “presidential,” because in doing so we’re really encouraging Presidents to spend their time on those areas rather than focusing on the domestic issues  that never seem to get addressed and actually trying to convince Congress to do something about those nagging problems.  How many Presidents, deep in their heart of hearts, have been tempted to engage in a little sabre-rattling or to lob a few missiles at a terrorist encampment or an air base to shift the focus of national attention and raise their approval ratings a few points?

Donald Trump isn’t the first President to receive the “looking presidential” kudos, and he probably won’t be the last, either.  But the association of military action and photo ops with foreign leaders with “looking presidential” troubles me.  Wouldn’t we rather incentivize our Presidents to focus on fixing what’s gone wrong in this country, and reserve the highest, gushing “looking presidential” praise for when the President does what the Constitution contemplates, and signs domestic legislation that has passed both Houses of Congress into law?

Trump’s Business Approach

Here’s a surprise:  Congress is mired in disputes about the new legislation that is supposed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (or at least claims to do something to deal with the ongoing problems with President Obama’s signature legislation).  There was supposed to be a vote on the legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday, but the tally got postponed over concerns that the legislation might fail.

President Trump has been involved in the wrangling, and last night he weighed in with what the Washington Post described as an “ultimatum.”  According to the Post, Trump told the Republicans in the House to either pass the legislation on Friday, or reject it, in which case Trump will move on to other items on his agenda.  Trump apparently will leave it up to the Republicans in the House to figure out whether they can agree or not.

It’s an interesting approach, and I suspect that it comes from Trump’s years of working in the business world.  Corporations typically don’t engage in open-ended negotiations, allowing events to marinate and slowly come together — which often seems to be how Congress works (if you believe that Congress works at all).  Instead, because there’s a time value to money and limits to corporate resources that can be expended on potential deals that don’t materialize, corporations set establish priorities, set deadlines, and push.  Once a deadline gets set, it becomes another means of applying pressure to the parties to reach an agreement, and if the deal doesn’t get done by the deadline, typically that takes the transaction off the table, the corporation moves on, and there is no going back.

Trump’s approach to this legislative test is, obviously, also informed by political considerations; he wants to set a deadline so members of Congress are actually forced to do something concrete, and we don’t have the lingering story of “what’s going to happen to Obamacare” attracting all of the media attention and detracting from the other things he’s trying to accomplish.  It’s a gamble, because if the legislation Trump is backing doesn’t pass, he could be painted as a failure in the early months of his Administration, making it less likely that he’ll be able to obtain passage of other parts of his agenda, like tax reform.  We already knew that Trump is a gambler, of course — his whole campaign was a bizarre, otherworldly gamble that paid off.  Now he’s bringing some of that high-stakes, business world approach to the legislative political realm.

We shouldn’t be surprised, by now, that Trump is going to continue to gamble and continue to do things in confounding ways.  Today we’ll get another lesson in whether his approach can actually work in Washington, D.C., even on a short term basis.

Trump’s 2005 Taxes

There was a dust-up yesterday about Donald Trump’s taxes.  MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow obtained two pages of Trump’s 2005 personal tax returns, which apparently had been leaked — by someone.  The two pages show that, in 2005, Trump reported income of $150 million, paid $38 million in taxes, primarily through the alternative minimum tax, and benefited from a continuing write-off of losses that apparently date back to 1995.

The White House bemoaned the leak of the two pages of the tax returns, noting that an unauthorized leak of tax returns is a violation of federal law.  At the same time, the White House noted that the two pages show that Trump paid a big chunk of money in federal taxes — while also pointing out that he has no obligation to pay one penny more in taxes than the law requires, a position that virtually every taxpayer heartily agrees with — and added that Trump also paid “tens of millions of dollars in other taxes, such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes, and this illegally published return proves just that.”

In addition, some Trump supporters used the two pages of the return to refute some of the things said by Trump opponents during the presidential campaign — namely, that Trump wasn’t releasing his taxes because he was a poor businessman, his business empire really wasn’t that successful, and his returns would show that he paid no taxes at all.  As a result, some people are speculating that Trump himself engineered the leak and is using the 2005 return to play the media like a Stradivarius — by releasing limited documents that appear to refute opposition talking points, while at the same time objecting to leaks in violation of federal law.

It’s a messy story, and we’ll have to see whether we learn anything further about the source of the leak.  For now, I hold to two basic points:  (1) if Trump didn’t approve the leak and somebody in the federal government (specifically, the IRS) leaked the two pages of the 2005 return to advance their own personal political agenda, that is both illegal and a grossly inappropriate intrusion into Trump’s personal information and should be opposed by anyone, regardless of their political views, who has entrusted the government with their confidential information, via tax returns or otherwise; and (2) the returns show why presidential candidates should release their returns and why, if they object to such a release, voters should insist that they do so.  The 2005 returns indicate that Trump paid millions of dollars pursuant to the alternative minimum tax — a tax that Trump has talked about abolishing.  The public deserves to know whether political positions are motivated by a politician’s own self interest.

Nascar In The Age of Trump

If there’s one sport that I would associate with our new President, it’s Nascar.

Both Nascar drivers and Donald Trump like ballcaps with printed messages.  Both Nascar and the new President like to throw in the random commercial plug here and there.  Both Nascar drivers and Donald Trump need a lot of help from their pit crews.  And both Nascar and Trump appeal to older, rural white voters.  It’s no surprise that, last year, one of the Nascar execs endorsed Trump for President.

So it seems like a counterintuitive cultural disconnect that, with Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office, Nascar is really struggling — but that’s the case.  Ratings for Nascar broadcasts have been cut almost in half since 2005.  Racetrack owners have torn down sections of bleachers at their tracks due to declining attendance, but the remaining stands still aren’t filled.  TV executives are pushing the sport to make dramatic changes to reverse the decline.  And, according to the linked article, even with two years’ notice Nascar wasn’t able to find a new primary sponsor that was willing to pay its asking price and it therefore had to sell the sponsorship and naming rights on the cheap.

Why is Nascar on the downslope?  The article gets into a lot of inside baseball talk, but I think the reality is simple:  it’s boring to watch cars driving around a race track for hundreds of miles, no matter how garishly painted they might be and how many product stickers they might sport.  I’ve never understood Nascar’s appeal for that central reason — and the generations coming behind mine, growing up with Walkmans and cell phones and social media, apparently have even less of an attention span than I do.  When Nascar people are talking about installing wifi at the racetracks, that tells you all you need to know about the future of the sport.  People just aren’t willing to sit in the stands for hours, drinking beer and hoping for some aggressive driving on the turns and an exciting crash now and then.  Changing the rules of the races and trying to come up with nicknames that make the drivers more interesting aren’t going to change that central reality.

It would be weird if the term of President Donald Trump saw Nascar once again relegated to the status of a small, regional sport — but that may be the direction in which we’re heading.

Politics, Even On The Links

Rory McIlroy, of Ireland, is one of the best golfers in the world.  Recently he decided to tee it up in a friendly foursome that included President Donald Trump.

Apparently, that’s now forbidden.

McIlroy faced withering criticism on the Twitterzone from people who thought that simply playing golf with the President could be viewed as some kind of endorsement of Trump and his policies.  Our culture has grown so heated that even an amiable Irish guy, who doesn’t vote in American elections, can’t go out for 18 holes of golf with the President without facing a backlash and having people accuse him of “whoring” himself and trying to shame him.

Playing golf used to be viewed as a kind of politics-free space.  Celebrities, comedians, movie stars, and sports figures could hit the links with Presidents, Governors, Senators, and Congressmen without being accused of endorsing their political views.  But it wasn’t just American politics that weren’t transported to the golf course, either.  Gary Player was a beloved player in America and elsewhere, even though he hailed from South Africa during its apartheid era.  And golfers freely played in international competitions without people trying to ban them because their home countries enforced repressive policies or weren’t viewed as sufficiently following the prevailing political views of the day.   The golf course was a kind of sanctuary where people could just play golf.

And this was true even at the local level, where people playing in club tournaments or outings might detest the views of the people they’re paired with — but they play with them anyway, and treat them cordially and in the spirit of friendly competition.  It’s one of the great things about golf.

It’s just too bad that the concepts of tolerance and sportsmanship and getting away from the hurly-burly of the world while you’re out on the course aren’t shared by more people who apparently must view everything through a political lens, and hold everyone to rigid standards of acceptable political behavior.  When somebody can’t go out and just play golf with the President without getting ripped as a turncoat, it’s a sad statement.

Redefining “Presidential,” And Reconsidering Overreaction

In some way, Donald Trump is like the weather:  you’d like to ignore him, but you just can’t.  He’s like that blustering, loud summer thunderstorm that blows in on the day you’ve scheduled an outdoor party and requires everybody to change their plans whether they want to or not.

It’s pretty obvious, after only a few days in office, that the era of Trump is going to change how we look at our presidents, and what we consider to be “presidential” behavior.  In recent decades, we’ve become used to our presidents maintaining a certain public decorum and discretion.  Sure, there have been a few exceptions in the sexual dalliance department, but for the most part our modern presidents have tried to take the personal high road.  They leave the attacks to their minions and strive to stay above the fray.

Not President Trump.  He’s down there himself, throwing punches via Twitter.  His most recent activities in this regard involve lashing out at the federal district court judge that issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s immigration executive order.  Trump referred to Judge James Robart as a “so-called judge” and said his ruling was ridiculous.  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer immediately attacked Trump, saying his comment “shows a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn’t always bend to his wishes and a continued lack of respect for the Constitution.”

I’ve got mixed feelings about all of this.  I personally prefer the more genteel, above-the-fray presidential model; I think it’s more fitting for a great nation that seeks to inspire others and lead by example.  I wish our President wouldn’t “tweet.”  But I also recognize that American presidents haven’t always been that way.  The behavior of presidents of the 1800s — think Andrew Jackson, for example — was a lot more bare-knuckled than what has come since.

I also think there’s danger for the Democrats in repeatedly overreacting to Trump.  If you argue that everything Trump does is the most outrageous travesty in the history of the republic (and that’s pretty much what you get from the Democrats these days) you ultimately are going to be viewed as the boy who cried wolf — which means the townspeople aren’t going to pay attention when you really want them to listen.  And in this case the reality is that, since the very early days of our country, elected politicians have been strongly criticizing judges.  Andrew Jackson famously declined to enforce a Supreme Court ruling, and Abraham Lincoln harshly lambasted the Supreme Court, and its Chief Justice, after the Dred Scott decision.  More recently, the rulings of the Warren Court became a political lightning rod during the ’60s, and President Obama saw fit to directly criticize the current Supreme Court, sitting right in front of him during a State of the Union speech, about their Citizens United ruling.

So Trump’s reference to a “so-called judge” really isn’t that big a deal when viewed in the historical context.  What’s weird about it is that it comes out in tweets — which makes it seem less presidential and, because it’s a tweet, less serious.  When Trump has these little outbursts I think if the Democrats simply shook their heads and said that what Trump is doing is “regrettable,” without acting like his every move threatens to bring down the Constitution, Trump’s Twitter act will wear thin on its own.

But they can’t help themselves right now, and neither can Trump.  So we’re going to have to ride out a few of those thunderstorms.