Trump Playing Pickleball
They make fun of Trump’s ability in racket sports. What he’s been playing in
the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars in his second term. We explain.
There’s a mass of loud keyboardists outside the beltway who develop and fanatically promote their own memes about the President of the United States. The recent news that Trump had had his second physical at Walter Reed fueled an immediate leap to the conclusion that he was at death’s door. People who had trouble spelling (congenitive heart defect) were busy diagnosing presidential health with the expertise they’d already demonstrated by refusing to believe that there was anything physically or mentally impaired about the 80+ year old Biden.
According to a flurry of breathlessly repeated inferences from brief mass media summaries of the Reed checkup and flu/COVID boosters, Trump was suffering from the results of a stroke, a serious blood disorder that was causing red blotches on his hands, and the penalty of a long life in which he had never worked out, played no sports, and was now grossly overweight. Their proof consisted of having observed verbal and slips in a President who has had more direct and transparent exchanges with the mass media than any POTUS in living memory, his well known junk food diet, the aforesaid hand blotches, wild rumors of incontinence traceable to lefty political cartoonists, and the general lack of detail in the press accounts of his medical condition. No tests described or quantified.
I’m pointing this out because it’s relevant to two issues with regard to TDS sufferers on the one hand and the press generally on the other hand.
With regard to the TDS hysterics, the most annoying aspect of their rumor mill is what they are prepared to believe without looking anything up. Trump’s body weight was disclosed. 224 pounds. I looked it up. The recommended weight range for a 79 yo man is from 176 to 216 pounds, depending on frame size. Overweight by 8:pounds, Trump is 3.5 percent above the recommended range. That’s very far from obese. It was also disclosed that he takes a lot of aspirin, which is a blood thinner, and probably factors into his hand blotches. As it happens I take a lot of aspirin, and I too experience virulent red blotches linked to what should be slight bruises. They don’t hurt, they don’t last long, and I have no known heart or blood pressure issues, just the aches and pains of a man in his seventies. And the aspirin, which may contribute to the fact that his heart was reported as being 10:years younger than he is. When they fuss about his diet, they seem to forget that he probably doesn’t eat as much junk from McD’s as Bill Clinton (no special burger and fries plate for him at state dinners), and he can also boast of a health benefit only Mormons generally achieve: he doesn’t smoke, drink, or do illegal drugs. Most of the health experts raising the alarm about Trump are probably more overweight and more engaged with non-medical chemical substances than he is. That’s just a guess, but it’s better than all of theirs.
Yeah, he’s old. They don’t seem to express any concern about his lifelong regimen of far fewer than average sleep hours per night. He associates that with his success in business and politics. It certainly seems preferable to the sleep schedule of Joe Biden, who had a working day lasting generally from 10 am to 2 pm, at which point the White House staff “put the lid on.” Hillary stopped talking about the phone call at 3 am when she ran against Trump. He wouldn’t be wakened. He’d just his tweeting long enough to take the call.
Does he look tired in public sometimes? Yes. His presidential schedule is enough to kill men decades younger than he is. That’s who he is. When he was the best running back in football history, Jimmy Brown was famous for getting up slooowly after being tackled. He wasn’t hurt. He was resting.
Now we come to the subject of sports, where both the Threads thugs and the mass media are missing a bet. Donald Trump never works out? He’s on the move all day long and often all night long. He was nearly a scratch golfer (no handicap) until a few months ago when the Secret Service reined in his tee schedule to keep him safe from snipers. You could look it up, as baseball manager Casey Stengel was famous for saying.
You could look up a lot of things. Now that baseball has been mentioned it’s relevant too, as you’ll find from the following data that pop up immediately when you ask simple questions about Trump and sports.
Interestingly, of the five other Presidents who played football in college, all but one were Republicans. The exception was JFK, who made the Harvard team but never played in a game because of health issues. Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan all played for their teams on game days.
But football didn’t interest Trump as much as baseball.
All of this is a click away from simple questions on the Internet. Do the Trump bashers ever bother to check up on their own airy slanders? No. There can be little doubt that even today Trump would throw a better opening pitch from the mound at an MLB park than a 40-something Barack Obama.
Obama’s a wuss. Trump is a jock.
I’m guessing a lot of political journalists have never played sports seriously enough to have had a career chance on a field of play. Their tendency when groping for metaphors to apply in the field of international diplomacy and negotiations is usually a nonphysical game like chess or poker. The trope of Trump’s acumen at three-dimensional chess, a nonexistent game invented on Star Trek, is about as useful as Quidditch as a means of explaining what Trump does on the diplomatic playing field..
My own preference for metaphors that illuminate Trumpian behaviors on defense and offense tends almost always toward sports, especially boxing, baseball, and golf. Chess and poker do play out in real time, but for all the talk of skill, poker directly involves the mathematics of chance, and chess involves the mathematics of finite possibilities in any given situation. They are not live and subject to random external forces in the sense that the world of war and peace and prosperity and depression are. The stakes may be high but neither death nor breakthrough accomplishment is not on the table.
When Trump was battling the continuous personal assaults on him during his first term and in the years of all-out warfare against him by the government I was repeatedly reminded of Ali’s greatest fights against George Foreman and Joe Frazier. In both cases he was stalked by fearsome sluggers who, worst case, could kill him in the ring.
Round after round of absorbing punishment, followed by seemingly impossible triumph.
The lawfare trials of 2021 through 2024 were designed to wound and gag his candidacy for reclaiming the presidency. Mandatory courtroom attendance, gag orders, capricious judicial rulings by partisan judges, were designed to keep him on the ropes until he could be knocked out of the race by a prison term. This wasn’t chess. This was a heavyweight fight between the President of the United States and a former President of the United States battling at a level unique in American history. Trump survived by the equivalent of Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy. Letting the opponent punch himself out until the moment when the tables could suddenly be turned, which they were in the one Trump-Biden debate. This performance was reminiscent of Ali’s second title bout against Leon Spinks, whee he let the wild swinger flail, chose his moments, and won in a unanimous decision.
The 2024 election was reminiscent of the kind of late charge victory that made Tiger Woods in his prime the greatest golfer in history. As the opposition faltered and dropped important strokes in the water, Trump rose to a higher level of play, delivering a blistering three to four rally speeches a day that won him all seven of the swing states. Long drives, brilliant short play, and some miracles on the putting green.
The fabled Trump mastery of strategic negotiations in foreign policy are also tediously compared to poker and chess. The better metaphor is from baseball, where Trump was a .300 hitter and a winning pitcher scouted by a major league team. The tariff offensive is not like a table game so much as a confrontation between a pitcher and a hitter. This is not an equal proposition. Even the best hitters fail to reach base more than half the time. In modern baseball, the ace has mastery of three to fours pitches used to baffle the hitter in each at-bat. Fastball, curve ball, slider, and a trick pitch of some kind (screwball, knuckleball, sinker, changeup) are the usual arsenal.
Fastballs are vital, and Trump has a great one, but they are not enough. When he came into the majors as a youngster, Koufax had a legendary fastball and a great curveball but his ERA and W-L record were not impressive in the early years. The turning point was his carefully learned mastery of the changeup, a slow pitch delivered from the same windup as the fastball. Since the hitter as 0.3 seconds in which to swing, or not, the hitter is also choosing in advance the pitch he expects to see from the windup and the look of the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand. The fastest fastballs can be hit by a hitter who has worked out the timing. Curveballs can be detected on release but are tricky to hit. When the ball delivered is a changeup, however, it leaves the pitcher’s hand with the same motion as the fastball. If the swing is timed for the fastball, it’s done before the ball arrives. Strike. This is how Koufax became unhittable for five of the best yewrs any pitcher ever had.
Sandy Koufax, apotheosis of pitchers
As a foreign policy negotiator, Trump has a wicked fastball and a wickeder changeup. He also has a fine curveball, slider, and knuckleball. (Back to boxing for a second: Cosell marveled at how Ali could play pit-a-pat with his jab, landing lightly but harmlessly at will, until delivered as brutal rope without warning; confusion followed.) Like most power pitchers, he likes to start with a fastball, reeling off a list of impossible demands designed to provoke reflexive ire and overreaction by the opponent. (Sometimes he starts with a knuckleball, as with his stated intention to make Canada the 51st state; confusion favors the pitcher.) If response to the fastball is defiance, he throws faster, intimidatingly, followed by curveballs and sliders that seem to keep changing the terms of negotiation in every respect but aggression, until there’s a whiff or an out. If the initial response is confrontation at the negotiating table, counter-demands and such, he employs his changeup, a charming and reasonable demeanor that takes the opponent by surprise, so that realistic negotiations can proceed. In time, other negotiating partners learn that changeup exists and thinks they can prepare for it, but they still swing and Miss at whatever Trump throws them on a full count.
Doesn’t that make better sense than 3-D chess? This accounts for a great deal of the success Trump has had in his tariff negotiations and at the strategic level of peace negotiations. He declares his intended outcome at front. His fastball is overwhelming American economic and military power, and the changeup is the willingness to listen to negotiate in good faith, but always with the promise that lies and delays will mean a blistering combination of curves, sliders, and knuckleballs until his demands are met.
When strategic confrontations in circumstances of existing war and by built-in time constraints, there’s another sport that comes into play. This isn’t chess or poker either, because it’s where speed and skill of response come into play. This is the realm of tactics. In both the Israeli and Ukrainian crises, Trump has been playing an extraordinary level of the popular new sport of pickleball. Not familiar with it? Take a look.
This is all about speed, dexterity, and teamwork. It’s played as a game of doubles on a court smaller and tighter than a tennis court. Everything happens fast. That’s the realm you enter when wartime negotiations hit a snag or a deliberate series of delays and postponements. Why there are “redlines.” These are deadlines for the response of an opponent. They only work if they are real. Trump’s dealings with the Iranian nuclear threat are pure pickleball. Except that this real world version has Trump playing alone against multiple opponents, sometimes on multiple courts at the same time.
In the Iranian situation he had to lay down a very real redline of a sort that is never followed through because politicians have learned that nuclear redlines are too frightening to the player who attempts to make a redline stick. He also had to keep Israel on a tight leash, obedient but militarily ready for a worst case outcome. Having watched redlines laid down by Obama and Biden pass harmlessly away, Iran did not wholly believe Trump’s, though they were frightened enough to hit back faster in the volleys of words and symbolic maneuvers. In fact, no one in either side truly believed Trump redline was real until he made it real, just when he said he would.
Pitchers have all day to throw that next pitch. Pickleballers don’t. The boxing metaphor seems more applicable to domestic political brawling. The foreign policy stuff is more delicate, violent only in the occasional overhand putaway shot.
The countdown and completion of the current Israel-Hamas peace spagreement-in-process is a game of pickleball in which Trump has been playing single-handedly in a tournament where more than a dozen matches are being played all at once, with Trump responding tactically on a virtual court that involves all of them.
That’s what we’ve been watching for the last few weeks. While the Great Unleashed in InstagramLand are braying for 25th Amendment removal of the best foreign policy jock America has ever had. What’s so different about his game strategy? He wants to change the world without slaughtering thousands of American troops. No one’s tried that as successfully as Trump has so far in his fifth year as President.
We’ll all have to wait and see how he plays the many rounds/innings/sets to come.
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