With Donald Trump, what you see and hear is what you get

As a teenager, I played baseball every summer. My coaches, hoping to improve their players, hectored my teams with old baseball wisdom — clichés that Babe Ruth probably heard. "You play as you practice" was one. Practice is predictive of what to expect when the umpire shouts "Play ball."

It is a stretch to link diamond maxims with the presidential campaign, but stay with me. We know what to expect from Donald Trump as president from what he has shown in "practice" — the campaign. He will be impulsive, chaotic, vindictive, contemptuous, dishonest and uninformed. My list is not name-calling; examples of his recklessness, toxic hostility and disdain for the facts are easy to find. For now, let's just try uninformed. Trump is a guy who, by his own admission, does not read books, and he quotes the National Enquirer. He says climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

[OPPOSING VIEW: Trump hit the right notes, and his foes can't stand it.]

If you think I am unfair, check out what Ted Cruz has said about him.

Trump also is irresponsibly willful. The great man thinks he can impose his will not only on his own country but the entire world. He believes that when he acts, his inferiors — everybody — must submit. This is behavior that leads to lawlessness, and I expect a Trump administration to have the American Civil Liberties Union working overtime.

Trump is unique in American political history. I will give him that. Unique is not the same thing as capable.

If you watch the television news shows, you will see smart, experienced commentators attempting to explain the Trump phenomenon. I respect them but I think they are missing something. Do Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande, NAFTA, factories gone to China, stagnant wages, a black president, political correctness and ISIS fully explain a nation roiling with rage? We are an angry people, and the anger is not confined to the Republican Party. Look at the weeping, wailing Sanders followers in the streets of Philadelphia chanting "Hell no DNC/We won't vote for Hill-ar-y." The widespread anger suggests more than a political/economic crisis — a loss of confidence in our country, a loss of faith in ourselves and despair about the future.

In baseball, performance doesn't lie. If you can't hit, your batting average proves it. If you can't throw strikes from the pitcher's mound, the whole ballpark knows it. Politics is not like that. Some politicians believe reality doesn't matter; they are convinced they can talk their way out of anything. Trump vividly illustrates this species. He is the guy who has it in his head, "If I'm talking, I'm winning."

[BUMPER STICKER? Make America think again.]

Ball players will try this — off the field. Dodger pitcher Kirby Higbee came home after World War II to be confronted by his wife holding a dozen perfumed letters from a nurse with whom he had a torrid affair in the South Pacific. The nurse wrote while he was on a slow-moving troop ship. When Mrs. Higbee demanded an explanation, the pitcher glanced at the letters and replied, "Must be some other Kirby Higbee."

In the '50s, Allen Ginsberg began his riveting poem "Howl" with "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night."

Well, Ginsberg was a prophetic poet, not a sociologist. He was invoking the ghost of William Blake, not inventorying Greenwich Village residents. Today, madness seems just around the corner. You can hear it the GOP delegates shouting "Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!" in response to Hillary Clinton's name. And in the snarl of the New Hampshire legislator who said Hillary should be tried, stood up against a wall, and shot. The people who say these things are unaware of what they sound like. Misogynists.

Enter stage right Roger Ailes, a 76-year-old overweight, droopy metaphor for one of the maladies that "ailes" America — sexual exploitation of women in the work place. He has been defended by Trump despite the revelations of 20 women who worked for Fox. Ailes' friends, speaking not for attribution, say people should understand that Ailes came of age in the Mad Men era. This is slandering Don Draper, the central figure of the TV series. Dapper Don is not the fanny patter or the guy who makes crude remarks to his new secretary. When interested in a woman, he drops by her desk at the end of the work day, smiles, and says, "Have dinner plans?" Don may be a wolf, but he is a wolf in wolf's clothing, not a Fox suit.

Out of the noise, confusion and hostility of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump has emerged with a good chance of entering the White House. If he does, our senators, our congressmen, and really, the rest of us can't say we didn't know what we were getting. Donald Trump has been absolutely clear about one thing: Who he is.

Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@alaskadispatch.com.

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