Trump, as in Rump

By Bill James
February 23, 2016
Trump, As In Rump
Let me begin by telling you, if the title does not make this clear enough, what I think about
Donald Trump. I stress that I am not trying to tell you what YOU should think about The
Donald; I am merely telling you what I think, how I react to him. I have despised Donald Trump
for 35 or 40 years, however long he has been a national figure, and I dont intend to give this up
now, or after he becomes President. Of all of the people who are running for President or have
now dropped out of the race, Donald Trump is absolutely the last one that I would vote for. I
could summarize the reasons for this in five bullet points:
1) I believe that Trump is more interested in what is good for Donald Trump than in what is
good for America, not that the same could not be said about many of the other candidates,
but it seems to me that this has to be more of a concern in the case of a man who has
spent 30 years plastering his name to everything he could put his name on,
2) I dont think Trumps background in business prepares him for the challenges of the
Presidency,
3) I think Trumps hard-ass approach to problems, in the Presidency, would be very
dangerous for our nation, and might have terrible consequences for all of us,
4) I dislike self-promotion. I intensely dislike self-promotion. Donald Trump is the nations
most notorious self-promoterand was, before he decided to run for President.
5) I dont believe that Trump is sincere in 99% of what he says. I think almost everything he
says is either an outright lie, or something he is merely saying because it is convenient for
him at the moment.
We havent had a President since Harry Truman who mocked people, a President who was
openly rude and vulgar, and I am not anxious to bring that back to the oval office. Also, although
I stress that I dont know, I doubt that Trump is likely to win the election. I would like to see the
Republicans nominate somebody who could actually win, not that I necessarily am going to vote
for him; I would just like to have better options, just as I would like to have better options in
buying an automobile or a gallon of milk. I would like to see Chevy produce better automobiles;
it doesnt mean that Im going to buy a Chevy.
I dont think that Trump can win, frankly, because I dont think there are enough morons to elect
him. A certain percentage of the American public is just morons; thats the way it is. When you
divide the public in two and then divide the voters in one of those halves among five candidates
or more, a candidate can win by dominating the moron vote because it only takes about oneseventh of the total population to take the lead under those circumstances. But when youre
talking about needing 51% of the WHOLE population, rather than needing 30% of half of the
population, you run out of morons. I hope we will; I hope Trump will lose because I hope that he
runs out of morons to vote for him.

Again, I stress that I am not trying to tell you what you should think about Donald Trump; I am
merely telling you what I think about him. Also, I resent the fact that the cable networks have let
Trump sucker them into playing his game for the last eight months. What the networks want, of
course, is to draw viewers. Donald Trump has been a public figure for 40 years and a reality TV
star for 20 years, and he is much, much more savvy about attracting viewers than any of the other
Republicans who have been seeking the office. Because he is so much better than they are at
attracting viewers, the networks have him on, constantly; you cant get away from the egomaniac
son of a bitch. But the networks have done this, oblivious to the consequence. The consequence
is that, just as there is an attention effect in Hall of Fame voting, there is an attention effect in
political voting. Trump gets a grossly disproportionate share of the attention, and thus a
disproportionate share of the idiot vote. I resent the fact that the networks dont have the tiny
modicum of self-discipline that would be required to realize that they are dancing to Donald
Trumps tune like a bunch of rats being trained to ring the bell for a morsel of cheese.
Now, having said all of that, having hopefully dispelled any notion that I am a closet Trump
supporter, let me speak on behalf of Donald Trump, or at least Donald Trumps supporters, for
the rest of this article. What Trump is advocating, I believe, is courage; not that this is all that he
is advocating, but this is a critical part of what he is advocating. I believe in courage. I am all for
politicians displaying courage, and I think that Donald Trump has done a better job of displaying
real courage than anyone else running this year. Donald Trump has had the courage to say things
and do things that people tell him he cant do. We need that, in a President. We need somebody
who is willing to stand up and say You dont make the rules for me. I make the rules for me. I
applaud Trump for being that person.
Also, Donald Trump is advocating real democracy in a way that the other candidates are not, and
in a way that is too subtle for most of the Talking Head class to understand. We have in this great
nation, blessed by God but not uniquely blessed by God, and not chosen by God to stand ahead
of other nations we have a class of professional do-gooders who have made a lot of rules for
the rest of us, and who have, with the knowing co-operation of the media, forced the rest of us to
comply with their rules. These rules were never voted upon, and were never agreed to by most of
us. Some of these rules are good and proper, and some of them are useless and counterproductive. I will explain a little better what rules I mean in just a moment, but first my main
point. Donald Trump is saying screw you to the professionally self-righteous, and he is saying
screw you to those people who are trying to force him to obey these rules that the nation has
never really agreed to, but has been forced to accept by leaders who lacked the courage to stand
up to the professionally self-righteous.
The rules to which I refer are emanations and outgrowths of completely legitimate rules (and
laws) which were adopted for sound reasons. Lets start with racism, and, indeed, these rules do
generally start with opposition to racism. It used to be, in my lifetime, that one could express
open hostility toward people of other races. It used to be that you could use racial slurs on radio
or TV, and use them in the most pejorative way, not teasing or mocking but carrying real
menace. You cant do that now. Thats great. In no sense should we retreat from that. Oliver
Wendell Holmes dictum that freedom of speech does not extend to the right to yell Fire! in a
crowded theater may reasonably be extended to mean that no one has an inherent right to say
disparaging things about a group of people, while those people are in real danger of suffering

serious consequences from being treated unfairly by our society. But extend that idea out without
resistance, extend it outward without respect for its natural boundaries and without any respect
for the other valid principles with which it may come in conflict, and here is where you wind up.
A couple of years ago I described Gino Cimoli, 1950s outfielder, as I forget what the words
were, but it focused on his being Italian. He was super-Italian, actually. He was part of the same
Bay-Area Italian culture that gave us the DiMaggios, Ernie Lombardi, Billy Martin, Cookie
Lavagetto and many others. I am missing the point, somehow; he dressed like he came straight
out of Goodfellas: sunglasses, slicked-back hair, high-gloss shine on his shoes and glittery suits.
But when I described him this way, I heard immediately from the self-righteous rules makers:
No no no; you cant characterize him by his ethnic origins. Its racist stereotyping. Well, but
Gino Cimoli wasnt ashamed of being Italian; he was extremely proud of it. He wanted to be
Italian; he wanted everybody to know that he was Italian. You couldnt miss it. And I hadnt in
any way insulted him by pointing it out. Why, then, are we not permitted to say what is true?
It is wrong to extend the principles of anti-discrimination willy-nilly in this fashion. It is wrong
for four reasons. First, to do this implicitly equates telling Pollock jokes or making innocuous
comments about Italians or Irish with the real harm that has been done to Blacks, to Native
Americans, to Jews and to gay people. What has been done to those victimized groups is not the
same as teasing or even taunting. It is not the same, and it should not be treated as if it were the
same, and it should not be regarded in the same way. Second, to do this extends a valid
premisethat one should not discriminate against others based on their originsbeyond the
point at which that valid premise comes into conflict with other equally valid premises. Third, it
tramples on the freedom of speech of other people. It denies people the right to say what they
have to say. For you to make rules about what I can say and what I cant say assumes that you
have to right to govern me without my consent. And fourth, this is turning us into a nation of
whiners.
Petty story. A few years ago, when my son was in the seventh grade, he brought home from
school a handout about peanut allergies. Many kids have peanut allergies, of coursewhich is a
very serious condition from which 75 to 100 people die every year--so you cant bring peanut
butter sandwiches to school, and you cant bring treats to school to share with your class on your
birthday or Valentines Day, because somebody will forget and bring something with peanut oil
in it. Thats fine; make whatever rules you have to make to keep the kids with peanut allergies
safe. But then, there was also a paragraph about kids being teased about having peanut allergies,
so each kid was required to sign a pledge stating that he wouldnt tease the kids who had peanut
allergies. What? Lets talk about, lets say, lisping. Kids who talk with a lisp get teased about it.
When I was in school, if my father had ever heard about me teasing the girl who had the bad lisp,
teasing her about her lisp, believe me, I would have caught hell about that. If we had ever caught
our kids teasing a classmate about lisping, THEY would have caught hell about it. It is not
proper to do this, and it is not proper to tease kids about having a peanut allergy. But also, if I
came home from school and complained to my father that the other kids were teasing me about,
lets say, wearing glasses held together by masking tape, it would be the understatement of the
week to say that I was not going to receive a sympathetic hearing. I would have been told in an
extremely direct manner to grow up and stop whining.

What exactly do you think youre accomplishing when you try to ban that sort of thing, not by
teaching proper behavior but by banning improper behavior? Do you really think that that brings
an end to teasing, among schoolkids? What it really does is, it creates a nation of whiners. Oh,
Mrs. Templeton, Sally is picking on me because I talk with a lisp. Oh, Mrs. Templeton, Johnny
is picking on me because Im short. Herman said something bad about me because Im Polish. It
is my perceptionas it is the perception, I think, of almost all of the Trump supportersthat we
are becoming a nation of whiners. When you try to make rules about how others treat you, you
are always a victim. And the solution to that is simple: you dont make rules for how others treat
you; you make rules for yourself. You make rules for yourself, and you teach those rules to your
kids, but you dont make rules for other families.
The authors of the Constitution were dead wrong about many things, and they were right about
many things. One of the things that they were right about was this issue. The Constitution
doesnt say that you have a right to be free from other people saying things that you dont want
to hear. It says that you have a right to say whatever you want to say, and other people have to
put up with that. The Constitution is a barrier to infringing your legal right to say whatever you
want to say, but the self-righteous majority, aided and abetted by the media, has made de facto
rules which have infringed on the right of free speech in ways that invade our daily lives. The
Trump campaign, I think, is telling these people that they dont make the rules because were
tired of following their rules, and were not going to take it anymore. And I second the motion.
The basis of Donald Trumps campaign is not conservatism; it is the principle that you have to
stand up for yourself. Thats what his whole campaign is about, I think: you have to stand up for
yourself. Our politicians have to stand up for us. I dont believe that anyone has ever run a
Presidential campaign before based on this principle, and I think that what Donald Trump has
done is to demonstrate exactly how powerful this is as an organizing principle for a political
campaign. Well, I dont think there is anything wrong with the proposition that you have to stand
up for yourself, and I dont think there is anything wrong with making that proposition the
centerpiece of your campaign. I think it is a completely valid point, and I think it is high time
that somebody did this.
Donald Trump tells us that he is going to make America great again. I am not voting for Donald
Trump because I dont believe that he has any idea how to make America great again, nor do I
even necessarily believe that America, all things considered, was ever greater than it is now. It
doesnt appeal to me, but then, I have been a very fortunate person, and America as it is has been
very good for me. But it appeals to other people, and I think that I understand why it appeals.
The slogan make America great again has two parts: (1) It implies that America used to be
something that it no longer is, and (2) It argues that the responsibility of the President is to stand
up for America, and not to worry about what the Europeans or the Mexicans or the United
Nations delegates think about this.
Trump is implicitly saying that we have lost touch with certain values that used to characterize
America, and I think that that is absolutely true. I think it is always true; every generation loses
touch with certain virtues from the past, and then re-discovers those virtues only after the
consequence of losing them becomes visible. We have lost touch with the virtue of toughness.
We despise toughness, not as individuals but as a collective, and we sympathize with whiners

when we should ignore them. The consequences of this are becoming visible, and they will
become more visible until we realize that toughness is a real thing, a real virtue, and that we need
more of it.
And I believe that it is true that the responsibility of our elected officials is to stand up for
America, and I believe that we have had many failings in this regard. It is the responsibility of
IBM officials to do what is best for IBM, and not to worry about how the people who run
Microsoft feel about this. It is the responsibility of the NFL to do what is best for the NFL, and
not to worry about what the NCAA thinks about this. It is the responsibility of the New York
Yankees to do what is best for the New York Yankees, and not to worry about whether the
Boston Red Sox fans are annoyed by this. This is not to say that IBM is good or that Microsoft is
bad, and it is not to say that the NFL is good and that the NCAA is bad, and it is not to say that
the Yankees are good and the Boston Red Sox are bad. It is to say that the system doesnt work if
the people who are running each part of the system dont protect their own interests. Im not
saying screw the Europeans or to hell with Asia; what I am saying is that the United States
President needs to do what is best for America, without any concern whatsoever for what the
Europeans or the Asians or the Mexicans think. I believe in the old phrase Tough Shit or, as
we used to say to our kids about fourteen times a day, Tough Bananas. (Sometimes we would
say Tough Cookies or Tough Toenails, just for variety.)
You dont like Guantanamo? Tough Shit. The rest of the world doesnt approve of Water
Boarding? Tough Shit. That, I think, is what Donald Trump is saying, mixed in with a lot of lies
and half-truths and stupid self-promotion, but thats the kernel of it. Ill vote for anybody that
you put up against him, but neither do I believe that everything he says is untrue or is without
merit. Hes on to something. Hopefully somebody who isnt The Donald will be smart enough to
pick up on it.