We now know that the current (and greatest, according to him) president of the United States of America is not only a great golf player and the supreme authority of American football. In his youth, he excelled as a batter and could easily have become a Major League player in the great American pastime.
Baseball, or rather baseball-related literature, also happens to shed sensational light on the origins of his idiosyncratic approach to more serious issues, including international relations.
Really? Isn’t he just a textbook narcissist bent on flexing his proverbial muscles anytime, anyplace? Maybe so, but contrary to conventional wisdom, he also turns out to be a great friend of literary fiction. Consider the following lines for example, lines published during his formative years:
‘It would seem – – that [the spectators; in this particular case, billions of spectators] were transfixed, perhaps for the first time in their lives, by the strangeness of things, the wondrous strangeness of things, by all that is beyond the pale and just does not seem to belong to this otherwise cozy and familiar world of ours.’
Penned by Joseph Roth, The Great American Novel (1973) teems with conspiracy theories, political intrigues, alternative facts and a vast variety of slurs, some of which are so obscene that they would be unprintable today. Unprintable, except when you quote the current occupant of the White House.
Remember how he characterized African (and some other) countries during his first term? Well, another baseball lover said it first. Cannibalism, per Roth, flourishes in the ‘primitive interior of Africa’ where ‘black devils’ rule over ‘savage women.’ Worse still, Africans don’t know how to execute a decent swing: they ‘deflower’ their own offspring with baseball bats.
I rest my case. Over to you, baseball fans and political scientists!
Image source: Donald Trump playing baseball, Shrapnel 1962 (New York Military Academy Yearbook)
