Impromptus

In Trump they trust, &c.

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Former president Donald Trump attends his first campaign rally after announcing his candidacy for president in the 2024 election in Waco, Texas, March 25, 2023. (Go Nakamura / Reuters)
On the GOP, Biden, FDR, WFB, Shohei Ohtani, Cary Grant, John Daly, Alexander Hamilton, Louis Armstrong, and more

Earlier this month, a poll was taken, finding that 53 percent of Republicans believe Donald Trump to be a “person of faith.” Only 35 percent of them believe Mitt Romney to be the same. (For an article about the poll, go here.) How is that possible? We could spend many pages on this (and have). But here is one factor: the media. The cable shows, the podcasts, the websites — all of it.

“You are what you eat.” I have adapted that expression into “You are the media you consume.” See whether this plays out in your personal observations.

• If President Biden is not to be the 2024 Democratic nominee, it’s getting awfully late in the game — late for Biden and his party to pivot. If the ticket is again Biden-Harris, many Republicans will say that a vote for Biden’s reelection is a vote to make Kamala Harris president, before 2029.

I have been thinking about Henry A. Wallace. He came very close to being president. He was the vice president in FDR’s third term. The Dems ditched him for Senator Truman. FDR died less than three months into his fourth term.


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A Wallace presidency — of whatever duration — would have been a screwy time in these United States, probably. One of those what-ifs of history . . .

• “Capitol rioter who attacked AP photographer and police officers is sentenced to 5 years in prison.” That is a headline from the Associated Press. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Rodney Milstreed, 56, of Finksburg, Maryland, “prepared himself for battle” on Jan. 6 by injecting steroids and arming himself with a four-foot wooden club disguised as a flagpole, prosecutors said.

“He began taking steroids in the weeks leading up to January 6, so that he would be ‘jacked’ and ready because, he said, someone needed to ‘hang for treason’ and the battle might come down to hand-to-hand combat,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.

Here is one more excerpt:

Milstreed used Facebook to update his friends on the riot in real time.

“Man I’ve never seen anything like this. I feel so alive,” he wrote to one friend, sharing photos of blood on a floor outside the Capitol.

That has been a component of human nature from the beginning — and something to be guarded against, vigilantly.

• In the 20th century, there were anti-anti-Communists. Since 2016, there have been anti-anti-Trumpers. For the past couple of years, there has been a new type: people who are anti-anti–Jan. 6.

I knew many of the first type. I know many of the second and third.

• Rodney Milstreed, the above-mentioned Jan. 6 rioter — and future pardonee? — said that someone needed to “hang for treason.” In recent days, Trump has expressed a similar sentiment about General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a 60 Minutes interview, Milley was asked about this. I thought he answered well.

I admire Milley. He seems to me a throwback to an earlier America. He is a bête noire in Republican circles. But then, many good people are. Between Trump and Milley, there is a chasm.

• More than ever, some of us have been thinking about independence of thought: its importance; its relative rarity. Two employees of the Heritage Foundation signed the “freedom conservatism” manifesto. Their employer demanded that they remove their names. Okay. For an article on this matter, go here.

The article quotes the president of the Heritage Foundation as saying, “There is no such thing as a conservative cosmopolitan.” Well, that is a subject for debate, as most things are. Part of it is a word game.

In any case, I thought of William F. Buckley Jr. “Cosmopolitan” was often applied to him. And it’s true: No one was ever more cosmopolitan. Or worldly. Or urbane. And a lot of people hated him for it. He dealt with them — their barbs, their sneers, their resentments — his whole career.

Stalin, among others, labeled people “rootless cosmopolitans.” Bill was not exactly rootless. But he did live hither and yon, in the course of his decades.

Back to independence of thought for a moment. Matt Labash, my old friend and colleague, sometimes takes reader questions, or responds to reader comments. Not long ago, someone said, “Try pissing out of the tent once in a while.” I thought, “Matt is not in a tent. He’s his own man.” And, lo, he went on to say essentially that.

Read it here.

• Last Monday, Hannah Keyser, a leading baseball writer, published an article headed “Shohei Ohtani is the most intriguing person in baseball without talking to the media. But he’d be a lot more interesting if he did.” In her article, she says, “He hasn’t talked despite remaining the most fascinating player alive, and he has remained the most fascinating player alive despite being mostly unknowable.”

Hmmm. Cary Grant was the one guest whom Johnny Carson couldn’t get (for the Tonight show). Grant was canny. He knew that exposure — knowability, if you will — could diminish his magic.

And do you recall what Walter Bagehot said? “The monarchy’s mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”

It could be that Shohei Ohtani is fascinating in no small part because he is not a talker in an age saturated with talk.

• Speaking of athletic talent out the wazoo:

• Last Saturday, Jim Harbaugh, the football coach of the Michigan Wolverines, returned to the sidelines. That is, he coached his team against Rutgers. He had served a three-week suspension (a topic we can discuss another time). (I have a feeling the suspension was ridiculous.)

Anyway, what I want to say is: I admired the apostrophe here:

• In Riverside Park, in New York City, two boys were playing catch. One was crouched down, like a catcher; the other was pitching. Then they switched positions. As they did, I heard the pitcher-to-be say to the catcher-to-be, “Let me give you my signs.”

This warmed my heart. I thought soccer had taken over almost entirely. (Nothing against soccer. I appreciate a diversity of sports, a market in sports, as in other things.)

• Another baseball item. A weird one. I knew Lenny Dykstra as a famed Met and Philly. An All-Star. I did not know he was a political extremist with a troubled and criminal past — until I read about him, after he tweeted the following at me:

There is a great deal of damage in our country, stemming from drugs, political kookery, etc. We see it all around. There is a great and general and crying need for healing.

• I spotted this sign in the Cleveland airport:

What a relief — and what a surprise — to see that word “mankind.” It has always meant all people — the human race. But lately, people have pretended that it refers to one sex. Which is nuts. (No pun intended.)

• James Hoge, the newspaper and magazine editor, has died. He was a Bill Buckley dinner guest. I enjoyed him a lot. Clyde Haberman had a clever lede in his obit:

James Hoge, who was a blue-blooded editor and publisher of blue-collar newspapers in Chicago and New York for a quarter-century and then long guided a leading journal on international relations . . .

• On Fifth Avenue the other day, I spotted Alexander Hamilton:

Handsome son-of-a-gun. (I think I would have done well in the age of wigs. And Whigs.)

• On another New York street:

The Jehovah’s Witnesses offer services in English, French, and Haitian Creole. I love this about America — American freedom. I realize this is controversial (and has been since the beginning — the beginning of our nation).

• A mother of my acquaintance was playing some music for her children. The eldest — a sharp and curious girl — asked, “Louis Armstrong?” “Yes,” said her mother. The girl then asked, “Is he brothers with the guy who went to the moon?”

In a sense, yes.

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