Trump Follows Classic Wrestling Logic
I did actually notice that the NBA playoffs began this past weekend, but I only watched a little bit because in my middle age I’ve once again become much more of a Baseball Guy, more interested in watching the end of a regular season Padres-Angels game than a Celtics-76ers first round playoff tilt. I’ll probably get drawn in during the conference finals.
This week, I wrote about Donald Trump’s pro wrestling persona, one’s dominant eye, “Project Hail Mary”, a great baseball book from the 1970s, my recent trip to Ireland, and more. LFG.
GO DIRECTLY TO
- Trump’s Pro Wrestling Logic
- “The Summer Game” by Roger Angell
- Do You Know Your Dominant Eye? What About Baseball Players?
- MLBGuessr
- The Helen DeWitt Drama
- Slop Is Not Inevitable; You Don’t Have to Use It
- “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir
- Ireland
Trump’s Pro Wrestling Logic
Donald Trump is not complicated. The president’s plain actions and statements indicate that he pursues policies motivated by personal grievances, racism, and whether he or his family will be enriched. If he is bored by a given subject, it may as well not exist to him.
But for those subjects that do catch his fancy like so many jingling keys, I keep returning to a specific framing with that best explains how Trump pursues his objectives: pro wrestling. Obviously, I’m not the first to notice the pro wrestling aspect of Trumpism — this Current Affairs piece and this NPR story explain it well — but I think the crisis in Iran has illustrated the limits of governing by cutting promos.
When Trump posted to social media that a “whole civilization will die tonight,” the correct and rational reaction was to view it as a threat made by the head of a nuclear state, because to do otherwise would be to risk underplaying the danger at hand. However, it is also yet another example of Trump making an outlandish statement that garnered an incredible amount of attention precisely because the United States president made it, while at the same time weakening the country’s position or status because Trump does not appear to take his own statements seriously, thus chipping away at his own credibility.
Where pro wrestling comes in is that this episode shows Trump following classic wrestling logic to his own detriment. The protagonist of the storyline — in Trump’s world, it’s always him — shouts something to the world that raises the emotions of the audience and keeps them guessing about what is next. That makes sense for a television show where the goal is sustained attention and engagement which directly leads to dollars, but while sustained attention and engagement can help a politician win votes and attain high office, it pointedly does not do much for someone navigating international diplomacy and high stakes global economic dynamics.
Surely, there are some people in the administration who understand they have screwed things up at home and that scores of people are dead because of Trump’s ignorance and recklessness, and so they’re desperately seeking anyone to bail them out in a way that doesn’t make Trump feel like he lost. But it will just be the same cycle of losing over and over again so long as the big wet guy keeps treating his position like he’s the star of the pro wrestling show, cutting promos and striving for nothing more than being the center of attention.
Trump keeps promising the Iran crisis will be over in a matter of days? Pro wrestling. Trump threatens to bomb power plants? Pro wrestling. Trump feuds with Pope Leo XIV? Pro wrestling. Even if we all understand this shit is real and has real-life consequences, that’s not how he’s experiencing it, and so it will continue.
“The Summer Game” by Roger Angell
In 1972, Roger Angell published a collection of his essays on baseball from the past decade, titled “The Summer Game.” It’s not in the San Francisco Public Library’s collection, but I was able to get a hardback copy on eBay and plowed right through it.
Obviously, I recommend it to any baseball fan because Angell has an unmatched way of describing the breadth of a season on an adult level, yet expressing wonder that is usually associated with childhood. Mets fans, in particular, should read it because Angell, based in New York, was there to chronicle the team’s early futility and its magical run in 1969, told with special fondness for individual players, from Ed Kranepool, to Cleon Jones, to Ron Hunt, and others.
But, of course, it’s more than that. As the contemporaneous New York Times review noted, Angell had a lot to say about Major League Baseball owners and other management. A few of his criticisms feel dated, such as the gripes about expansion, but the fundamentals of his point of view are still resonant today: do baseball team owners see themselves primarily as guardians of an American institution that matters to millions of people, or are they capitalists first? Angell is too careful to put it in such plain terms, but the totality of his observations lead to the conclusion that capitalists will only care about the institution to the point that it makes them profit, and it’s easy to see how, both then and now, owners might chase profit so enthusiastically that they degrade the institution, making it less profitable in the long run.
Do You Know Your Dominant Eye? What About Baseball Players?
I am right-handed, but left-eyed. This makes me somewhat unusual to the general population, which is apparently about 70% right-eye dominant. Because more people are right-handed and right-eyed, there may be a correlation to handedness, but I can’t tell from quick searching if there’s causation. If you want to find out which is your dominant eye, simply point to an object on the other side of the room without thinking about it, hold your hand steady, and close one of your eyes. If you are still pointing at it, the open eye is your dominant one.
I first learned about my left-eye dominance when I was in high school because I came across a post online asking if there was any indication that, say, right-handed left-eyed people were more likely to succeed at hitting a baseball because a right-handed hitter would be able to better focus on the ball with his dominant eye in a more advantageous spot. The question stuck with me because I was exclusively a right-handed hitter until my sophomore year of high school, when I began switch-hitting in games, having practiced hitting left-handed in batting cages since I was 8 years old.
My personal observations were that as a right-handed hitter I could see the ball relatively well coming out of the hand of either a right-handed or left-handed pitcher, and as a left-handed hitter I could only see the ball well coming from a right-handed pitcher and had extreme difficulty seeing the ball coming out of a lefty pitcher’s hand. However, I continued switch hitting because I also felt I took good swings as a lefty and, most important, I was better as a lefty against righties than I was as a righty against righties.
All that’s to say that I’ve searched online and found other people opining about eye dominance and how that affects hitting, but I haven’t found anything authoritative on the subject. The premise that a left-eye dominant person is more likely to succeed as a right-handed hitter seems like it makes sense, but there may not be an empirically observable effect, assuming that could be disentangled from everything else that goes into hitting. After all, a right-handed person who is right-eye dominant might feel better hitting left-handed, but eye dominance might be somewhere pretty far down the list compared to their comfort with swing mechanics and facing fewer same-side pitchers.
MLBGuessr
If, like me, you are a habitual Immaculate Grid player, there’s a new baseball trivia game you may love. It’s called MLBGuessr, and it’s an incredibly simple concept: Given a still frame from a moment in baseball history, mark on a map where it happened and provide the month and year of when it happened.
That’s it! I love it.
The Helen DeWitt Drama
Helen DeWitt is an American novelist of some renown, and while I haven’t read any of her work before, I had seen her name mentioned in my circles. A few weeks ago, she reached new levels of notoriety after sharing the story of how she was offered a $175,000 literary prize but ultimately declined because she was unable to fulfill the commitments required by the organization giving the prize. If you’re unaware of this story and have already starting thinking that the organization must have been kind of predatory and making unreasonable asks, that’s precisely where my mind went until I read her account of everything, which reveals a very different kind of story.
Essentially, DeWitt lays out a harrowing story of cognitive fatigue and executive dysfunction that plays like a psychological breakdown. The entire time I was reading, I had the same creeping anxiety that the movie “Uncut Gems” gave me, and I absolutely hated the feeling of wanting to pull DeWitt aside and simply tell her, “All you have to do is…” while at the same time trying to be compassionate about her growing confusion and sense of helplessness, while at the same time wanting to bellow, “Why have you structured your life this way?!?!” (Side note: I urge you to learn how to tether your laptop to your phone.)
In the end, things seem to have worked out well enough for DeWitt; someone else gave her a totally separate monetary grant, and I can’t be the only person inspired by this whole thing to put one of her books on my TBR list.
Slop Is Not Inevitable; You Don’t Have to Use It
I don’t know how many other ways to say this, but it sure feels like too many people are using AI as a replacement for thinking and doing things themselves, rather than a tool to help them think and do. Here’s another angle, from Karl Bode, expressing the hope that the tsunami of slop will lead to a resurgence of authenticity and humanity. A representative passage:
The craft of writing, and thereby the act of learning, is viewed by some as a sort of nuisance that gets in the way of the important stuff: engagement, subscription growth, attention, and being recognized as a person of importance and insight.
The problem is if you skip the learning and the making human mistakes through writing part, you're going to be boring. You're not going to have an "edge." Hyper-reliance on AI, which can only generate output based on what's already been said elsewhere, is inevitably going to result not just mass homogenization, but an erosion of personal growth, experience, and intellectual evolution.
“Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir
I have not seen the Ryan Gosling movie, but, inspired by the trailer, I put the book on my TBR list, and when the movie hit theaters I got my hands on a copy. (Possible sort of kind of spoilers ahead, I think, maybe?)
Overall, I found myself chuckling as I realized I felt the inverse about it as I do “For All Mankind” (I’m waiting to watch the currently-airing season, after it’s finished): I wanted to know much, much, much more about what was happening on Earth and spend a lot less time solving problems in space. Part of that is a function of “For All Mankind” having an absolutely batshit plot that makes sense in the hypothetical far reaches of space colonies while ringing hollow on Earth, but also because I think the writers of the TV show are kind of bored by happenings on the home planet and so don’t put the same sort of effort into what could be great stories prompted by an extended space race.
For the “Project Hail Mary” book, “solving problems by rationally applying scientific knowledge” is basically the whole story. You might get more pleasure out of that than I did, especially if you are able to buy in to the conceit of the central problem Dr. Ryland Grace is trying to solve. However, the book suffers from the same dynamic as every other harder sci-fi novel I’ve read does: Without the ability to simply brush off given elements as “advanced technology solved it don’t worry about how that actually works on a known physics level” I’m encouraged to ask certain questions about how, realistically, things would work in a given situation.
For example, a lot of space is given over to explaining relativity and how long it would take Dr. Grace to go on an interstellar journey, both from his perspective and from the perspective of people on Earth. Furthermore, characters talk about the psychology of a small crew going on such a long trip. However, the same thought and care is not afforded people who aren’t scientists.
Throughout the book, as various scientists came up with dramatic solutions that would require billions, if not trillions, of dollars in investment and the mobilization of millions of people into totally different industries, I kept thinking that I wanted to see those processes dramatized instead of the story about the guy sent to a different star system. That is, the book glossed over the human struggles that surely would have occurred in order to send Dr. Grace on his journey in favor of focusing on the scientists who know the correct answers and, only because of a once-in-an-eon crisis, have been empowered to do as they see fit without having to gain approval from the know-nothings who would otherwise be in charge.
A few times, people object, and the objectors are treated as unfortunate fools who are wasting the time of people who are focused on saving Earth. But the book would unquestionably be better if it had granted that any of the objectors might have a point, and that the authoritarians stepping in to run the effort to save the planet might make mistakes.
Ireland
Over Easter weekend, my family and I visited Ireland. It was a short trip, only three and a half days, on the island, so we spent most of it in Dublin, but we also devoted one day to a bus tour of the west side of the country, including the Cliffs of Moher and Galway. Of course, there is far more worth seeing and doing in the country than we could do in that short a time period, but I think we packed in a lot.
At the airport as we waited for our flight home, I talked with The Little One in an effort to glean what the lasting takeaway from the trip might be for them. They didn’t say it in these exact words, but they seemed to have absorbed from our tours, conversations with people, and the built geography that, to our American minds, Irish history is closer to mind than American history is to ours. I’m not saying I think the average Irish person is going around thinking about the 1920 massacre at Croke Park all the time, but that the baseline understanding of the nation’s revolutionary history was consistently explained to us, by various people from different walks of life, in a way that closely connected the conditions of the present day with the actions of and choices of people decades ago.
I don’t think that is the case in much of the United States, where the cult of individualism and self-reliance encourages people to think they are disconnected from both their neighbors and the tides of history.
In any event, my top recommendations based on this short vacation:
- Visit Dublin, but if possible, spend more time outside the big city. Galway was pretty great, but if we go again, we may try to identify a town we can use as a home base. That said, I don’t like the idea of figuring out the whole driving on the other side of the road thing.
- In Dublin, the best restaurant we visited was Las Tapas de Lola. Everything was delicious, including the complimentary house wine/lemonade concoction we received upon being seated.
- The Croke Park tour was excellent. I already had a passing familiarity with hurling and Gaelic football, but even my spouse and child, who had zero exposure before I suggested the tour, were enthralled with the building and learning its history.
Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.
(Top Photo: “Nico Angelo vs Leyton Buzzard” by jacquemart. Uploaded as public domain image. Body Photo: "Cliffs of Moher" by David 29 Sunset.)