The Dodgers Went To Grandpa’s House!

There are aspects of being president of the United States that Donald Trump is really bad at, and others at which he is significantly worse. It goes without saying that none of that is improving, but what is most notable about his performance in the position is the extent to which he has never really bothered to figure out what the job is. From the earliest days of his presidency there was a sort of inchoate yearning that emanated from the more respectable reaches of the political culture for the possibility that Trump would not so much grow into the job as be transformed by its sheer prestige into a totally different type of person—not just chastened by the awesome responsibility of it all, but changed by it in a way that forced him to become human in all the ways that he had spent his life avoiding.

This was embarrassing even then, and seems more so after a decade of Trump-centric national humiliation and decline. It's easy enough to understand as a sort of elite coping mechanism; no one really knew what to expect from the installation of one of the dumbest and worst men this country has ever produced into its highest office, although it was natural to hope the outcome might be something other than "exactly what you would expect to happen in those circumstances." It is perhaps more easily and correctly understood as an expression of just how much that elite cohort believed in the majesty of the edifice they'd constructed around the shabby, brutal business of American politics.

There might be some dead-enders still holding out for a Grinch-type outcome, there, but after a decade in Trump's fragrant shadow it's clear that things broke the other way—every institution and tradition and office held up as grand and permanent rapidly and readily debased and degraded itself in Trump's image, or in his honor. They could not believe that this office might become as stupid and small as he has made it, because they'd worked so hard and for so long to make it so large. But what was implicit in the desecrations and derelictions of his first term is explicit and thuddingly literal in his second; he is literally supergluing shit onto the walls of the Oval Office and kicking everyone off his lawn. In every sense, the White House will require a gut renovation once he's finally extricated from it. There's just too much grease and gilt on all of it now.

It was to that increasingly jacked up White House that Trump welcomed the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday. The event, which honored their 2025 World Series Championship team, is the sort of stilted ritual that Trump does best, and to the extent that he is still capable of running into one, the opportunity to vamp and pivot in front of a bunch of rich guys who mostly like him is just the kind of fat pitch he requires. There is a script for this sort of thing, and Trump had a specific script for this particular iteration of this thing, but while he did eventually mumble his way through it, he was clearly much more excited to show off all the improvements he'd made to the place since the Dodgers last visited. "We're building a beautiful helipad, after many years, you know the helicopters were landing on the grass," Trump said in the general direction of a nodding Dave Roberts. "And the new helicopters didn't do well on grass. So we're putting up a beautiful helipo-helipad, and we've got a lot of things going, we're bringing this building to a level that it was not at even when it was first built, in 1792, if you can believe it."

There is always something of a Mandatory Visit To Strange Grandparent element to this sort of thing, the effect of which only has been heightened over the last decade due to the uninterrupted presence of visibly faltering grandparent types in the White House. Trump's chops at this sort of thing have been honed over a long life spent hosting this kind of gaudy/shitty event, but his capacity for and interest in holding up his end of that deal have gone soft. He mostly just kind of does whatever, now. The Athletic detailed what that looked and sounded like.

Before Trump read from a script, with the Dodgers standing behind him, he boasted about the changes he’d made to the Rose Garden. They included white stone in place of grass, which "was always wet," Trump said. "You know, the White House is built on a wetland, and when you build on a wetland, the grass is always wet." He pointed out newly installed gold letters spelling out "The Rose Garden" on an awning.

"You think Biden would do that?" Trump asked. "I don’t think so."

You have been in a situation like this, probably—nodding and going "ah" and "heh" while someone who doesn't care about you fills the space between you and them with whatever is on their mind. It is just one of those things you have to do when you're growing up, and when you have a specific kind of boss, but mostly it is just One Of Those Things. It would be nice to get more from public life than this, and for our politics to afford us more agency than the opportunity to stand in the jetwash of some bored old man's weird breath while he says a bunch of wrong stuff at you. But that is not the moment we are in.

"If you would have told me you could be the best pitcher and the best hitter at the same time—you know, Babe Ruth was pretty close to that,” Trump said during his remarks, while paying tribute to Shohei Ohtani. “They drafted Babe Ruth. He was 19 years old. I know something about baseball. They consider it the worst trade in the history of sports. He was 19, and they got a 36-year-old third baseman and $100,000.” It is impressive, in a way, that every bit of that statement except for the $100,000 figure is wrong, but it's also beside the point. The point of this sort of visit, and of a large and expanding part of American and global politics, is for Trump to say some stuff and for his audience to endure it. Somewhere downstream, those small things become terribly large.

Over a long enough period of time, this is corrosive; the tidal push of it strips and shrinks the everyday, and worries things down towards the nerve. But from one moment to the next, it just looks and feels like this—one lopsided and unfulfilling experience of an immense and extremely dull vanity after another.

Because Trump loves to be photographed next to winners, this moment came with a photo opportunity at the end of it. "We’re steps away from the most powerful office in the world, the Oval Office, where everything begins and ends and begins," Trump said before inviting the team to join him for photos. "People walk into the Oval Office, and no matter who they are, they just sort of feel sort of different. And it's a great place to negotiate." In the photos of Trump with various Dodgers after the event, the office appears preposterously dense with gold stuff and flags and statuary and other pop-pop style bric-a-brac. He is at the center of the shot, grinning, surrounded by all his shit. The space itself looks strikingly small.