Donald Trump, World's Greatest Sports Fan
Donald Trump is always telling you exactly who he is. It helps that he is an extremely, almost hilariously uncomplicated person—a four-piece LEGO minifig of a man, all hairpiece and red painted-on tie, Frankenstein’d into a visceral stimulus creature about whom it is impossible to imagine an interior life that is at all at odds with his behavior in any given moment. Whether he is (poorly) reading prepared remarks, or ripping through a newly-updated enemies list from the East Room, or tweeting, or just kinda riffing for the cameras in front of Marine One, Trump is never not wholly Trump.
“I yam what I yam.” — Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States
The constant Trumpiness gives life to the execrable and excrementous cliché voiced by Real Americans to every Coastal Elite Reporter dispatched to the diners of the heartland in search of answers—that Trump “just tells it like it is.” The “it” here is best understood not as “reality” as experienced and understood by virtually everyone else, but as whatever thoughts and emotions happen to flit from one neuron to another in his miraculous little brain. “It” is certainly not “truth” as it is widely understood, because truth, of course, doesn’t exist as some external identifiable objective standard. He’s just completely himself, that self-made and fully ablaze straw man, constantly telling us the story of his aggrievement, telling it like it is. He seems to lack even the concept that he ought to be any other way.
This punishing don’t-call-it-authenticity—it’s always freshly low tide with Trump, all of his needs and neuroses just there in the sun and mud—has made him the single greatest pop-psychology culture-wide case study in history. His sheer elemental reactivity makes it impossible to look away, whether he’s there to be watched or if you’re just watching other people react to him. He’s whatever the opposite of a universal solvent is.
And he’s always telling you exactly who he is, whether directly or because his feeble psyche can’t help but to project and amplify his every insecurity. In just the last week—a particularly bonkers week, even by his galactically inflated and cosmically expanding standard—he has provided dozens of examples of his disordered and disqualifying inhuman weirdness. To wit, just a few:
The big speech on Tuesday night was not so much an update on the current state of the Union as it was eighty minutes of Donald Trump attempting to demonstrate the incredible breadth of his own magnanimity. The Bestower in Chief gave a scholarship to a girl who didn’t need one, reunited a soldier with his family like it was the fifth inning of a Memorial Day baseball game, had his wife pin a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh’s moribund corpus, of all people, and handed a country to a wannabe coup artist. He was demonstrating his benevolence, basking in his own willingness to deploy his power so gently and generously, taking half a step back from the microphone whenever he deigned that the elected, terrified cultists in the audience stand and applaud. The second half of the speech was a sordid recap of the putrefying corpse of Democrat-controlled America, the carnage palpable:
…which his supporters, of course, found positively uplifting.
“Hurr derp blurp derp uh werp! Herp sherp derp ah bler!” — Sean Hannity
It was a bizarre speech, poorly delivered. He so rarely has any idea what the words he’s reading actually mean that he doesn’t know when in the text he’s meant to stop for applause.
On Thursday morning, at the definitely-not-parodic National Prayer Breakfast, Trump insulted the faith of his political enemies and openly mocked the possibility of such an event being remotely meaningful. On Thursday afternoon, he held court for over an hour in the East Room, calling his myriad enemies evil and corrupt and deranged while eulogizing the dignity of the assembled cultists, one by one. He betrayed his own withering shame while praising the slamming hot bod of another man, he expressed genuine disbelief that a wife would be quite upset when her husband was shot very nearly to death (because his own wives have always hated him), told a homely Congresswoman that he likes her name far more than her face, and pointed out that he probably wouldn’t be president any more if he hadn’t fired James Comey. Oh, also he thinks Lisa Page and Elise Stefanik are hot, put verbal scare quotes around the military rank of a Purple Heart recipient, and seemed to admit that either Barron is not his actual son, or at least that he hasn’t spent a single moment of the last fourteen years raising the boy.
Also this week, he was a mere nineteen Senate votes away from being the first US president to be removed from office by impeachment. It was a pretty crazy week!
But what prompted this post isn’t any of that, but something Trump said to Sean Hannity during his pre-Super Bowl interview last Sunday. No, not the petty and grade-schoolish name-calling of his potential presidential rivals, and not the lunatic claims of unprecedented accomplishment, and not the insistence that all of his enemies are just haters and liars. No, I’m here to talk about what Trump thinks makes sports great. It’s very weird, and very much in keeping with the established fact that, in everything he does and says, Trump is always telling you exactly who he is.
The transcript, beginning at 7:40:
Hannity: I love sports. I think sports mirror life, you know—
Trump: It’s true.
Hannity: You gotta learn to win, sometimes you don't always win. I know you're not sick of winning, is my guess, um. But also the harder you work, the better you do—that's very Americana. Um, what do you love about sports?
Trump: Well, it is. It's sort of a little bit of a microcosm of life. You know you have winners, you have champions, you have people that you expect to see that final play. You have great coaches like Belichick. Uh, you have people that you expect more out of, and often times they produce. But then you have people that you just don't expect they're gonna do it and often times they don't. It's a microcosm of life.
What Donald Trump professes to love about sports, despite being prompted in the question itself with a perfectly acceptable, human response, is precisely the opposite of what I would wager every other normally-functioning human being loves about sports. Trump is always telling you exactly who he is. Here, Trump is telling you that he’s deeply, deeply strange.
A—if not quite entirely the—fun thing about watching sports is the increasingly rare experience of the chaos and unpredictability of the live and unexpected. The reason live sports is just about the only thing people across the world all at once turn the television on for anymore is the possibility of seeing people do crazy and unexpected things in defiance of the established narrative about what everyone else thinks they can do. I watch sports to see people achieve the unthinkable, to transcend the essentialist limitations imposed by my own preconceived notions and handicapped imagination.
Trump, it turns out, to my great surprise, is the absolute worst sort of sports fan—the total determinist. The Winners Won because the Winners always Win, because they are Winners. The Losers Lost because the Losers always Lose, because they are Losers. What he likes about sports is that they reveal the barest truth about one’s predetermined character. He thinks this is what makes sports like life. That life is a series of tests that only peel back the facade of trying and determination and work and passion and luck—so much luck! Just an impossible amount of improbability made real by the unthinking bounce of the universe—rather than anything beautifully unknowable and imperfectly human.
What I love about sports is the opposite. What I love about life is the opposite. The not knowing. The never knowing. The transcendence of the established narrative—the surprising power of the human spirit to rage against and occasionally even overcome the tyrannical essentialism of someone else’s limited definition of who can achieve what.
Donald Trump is always telling you exactly who he is. Believe him.
