Stengel, Trump, and nukes

Like a recurring, unavoidable, ubiquitous virus, Ballroom Boy keeps messing with my mind, even when I am trying to ignore him for a few peaceful moments and focus on a far lighter, much less lethal subject, like baseball.

Recently, for example, I have been reading a delightfully written book about the history of the Mets, So Many Ways to Lose, by Devin Gordon. The author describes the management style of Casey Stengel, whose odd manner as the first Mets manager helped the fans to laugh at, rather than boo, the players’ abysmal on-field performance. One of Stengel’s oddities, the book points out, was his inability to remain awake during the game:

The 1962 Mets were terrible at every phase of the game, but throwing the ball over the plate was a particular challenge for them. And so over the course of 160 games, Stengel made many more than 160 trips to the mound. Typically when a pitcher gets in trouble, the manager sends out his pitching coach first and saves himself for the kill shot, if required. Not Casey. It was boring in the dugout, and he liked to chitchat. Plus it gave him an excuse to bask in the warm applause that always accompanied a Stengel sighting in those days.

It also kept him awake. The Mets played 30 doubleheaders that season—yes, thirty—and he was 72 years old. He was also Casey Stengel, the only manager ever to win five straight World Series, a father figure to Mickey Mantle, a legend in his own time and in his own words. If Casey needed a catnap in the fourth inning, you know what? Let the man nap. He wasn’t missing anything. If something on the field jolted him from his repose, he’d act like he’d been paying attention the whole time. He’d wake up to the crack of a bat and cheer a double off his own pitcher. Once he came charging out of the dugout to scream at the home plate umpire about a play he did not see.

That description was worth a smile, but not for long. Stengel’s inability to remain awake reminded me painfully of the current occupant of what’s left of the White House. Among his many other worrisome character traits, Trump has shown an appalling ability to nod off, in the courtroom at his Manhattan criminal trial, in meetings with foreign dignitaries—just about anywhere. This led to an opening bit on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show about the release of a new Trump commemorative coin. In the real world, Trump wants his face on coins and his name on a football stadium. In comedy world, Colbert’s show unveiled a coin featuring a golden image of Trump’s sleeping face.

Funny, but scary. In the case of Casey, dozing on the bench would cause nothing more calamitous than waking to the crack of a bat and cheering a double that the other team had hit off his own pitcher. But Trump’s sleepiness and inattention provide yet another reason to worry about what he might someday do. Call me an alarmist, but I worry about nuclear weapons. With Trump in possession of the nuclear football, the codes that would allow him to launch a nuclear war, I worry that any of his frightening mental conditions—his malignant narcissism, primarily, and his cruelty—could lead him to push the button. His inability to remain awake fits into that catalogue of brain problems.

Come on, you’re saying to yourself, Trump is not going to awake from a nap and start a planet-ending nuclear exchange. Actually, what I’m saying is that his chronic sleepiness is just another reminder of how profoundly messed-up this commander-in-chief is. And he has been saying and doing worrisome things on the international front: Asked about ordering the military to bomb alleged drug boats off Venezuela, for example, Trump answered: “I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be, like, dead.” More scary is his announcement that he wants the United States to start nuclear tests again, a really bad idea that Trump typically announced in a social media post:

The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

In his Substack column on national security, Doomsday Scenario, Garrett Graff called into question the accuracy of much of what Trump posted:

Trump’s announcement, not surprisingly, is something of a muddled mess. In fact, there’s almost no part of his tweet that’s factually accurate. For one thing, it’s the Energy Department that runs nuclear weapon testing, not the Defense Department. (In fact, it’s an agency known as the National Nuclear Security Administration, which the Trump administration already this year chaotically devastated with DOGE cuts before it realized that that agency was in charge of the nuclear weapons stockpile, backtracked, and then tried to rehire and reinstate all but 28 of the 350 or so people it had fired.) For another, Russia actually has a larger nuclear stockpile than the US does; nor did Trump actually update our arsenal during his first time, a process that began in the Obama era and will continue into the 2040s at the earliest.

No one today really knows what Trump’s announcement really means. Does he intend to restart aboveground nuclear testing, which no one has done since the 1980s? Does he mean a full-on nuclear explosion or the underground lab-based experiments that have become the norm? Is he intending to end the US participation in the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which has kept the world’s nuclear peace since the 1990s? Or is he just talking about continuing or expanding the regular testing of nuclear delivery systems (e.g. ICBMs)—as opposed to nuclear devices (e.g. bombs)—that the US already does routinely?

Another effort to parse Trump’s nuclear testing announcement came from Joseph Gerson of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security. His analysis started with a reference to a new film about a president confronted with an incoming nuclear missile, possibly aimed at Chicago (a city suffering in real life from ICE excesses):

The thriller House of Dynamite, playing in theaters and streamed into our homes, leaves its audiences hanging as an unprepared US president must decide humanity’s fate after a surprise nuclear attack. Now picture the real president, Donald Trump, whose uninformed and garbled statement about resuming nuclear testing may have sounded the starting gun for an existentially dangerous multinational nuclear arms race. We can hope that those who may be able to influence this unstable and ill-informed president will devise a face-saving way for him to walk back the threat. But we can’t count on that happening.

One more analysis came from Back from the Brink, an organization that is working to bring communities together to abolish nuclear weapons. Here’s their take on Trump’s announcement:

This is a very dangerous, unnecessary, and horrible idea. If the U.S. starts to conduct explosive tests, Russia, China, and other countries will likely follow — making everyone in the world less safe and further fueling a global nuclear arms race. And people and communities will again be at risk of having their land, air, and water poisoned by deadly radioactive materials.

We also know this. We can take this moment to raise our voices and get our elected leaders to take action on advancing nuclear disarmament and enacting common-sense policies to halt the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war.

If you are not sufficiently worried about nuclear war, you should think about watching Kathryn Bigelow’s film, House of Dynamite, the latest entry in the nuclear-war-ends-the-world genre of cinema. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “Unfortunately, the real-world POTUS who’d be responding to such an attack won’t have the tortured humanity of the film’s Idris Elba as commander-in-chief, but this definitely is the flick to watch right now.”

If you want to watch something nonfictional, you might take a look at a brief documentary from Veterans for Peace about their sailboat, Golden Rule. It first sailed in 1958 to protest nuclear weapons testing and is still sailing around the world to promote the abolition of nuclear weapons. You can check the Back from the Brink website, which has a lot of educational material about nuclear weapons. And you can call your legislators to support resolutions in both houses of Congress, H. Res. 317 and S. Res. 323, “Urging the United States to lead the world back from the brink of nuclear war and halt and reverse the nuclear arms race.”

Remember: Trump seems deeply uninterested in nuclear disarmament. At a 2016 MSNBC town hall, Chris Matthews asked: “Why wouldn’t you just say, I don’t want to talk about it.” But Trump did: “Somebody hits us within ISIS— you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” Moments later, Trump added: “Look, nuclear should be off the table. But would there be a time when it could be used? Possibly. Possibly.” Matthews said: “Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.” And Trump answered: “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?” Asked where he might deploy nukes, Trump said, “I’m not going to use nuclear, but I’m not taking any cards off the table.”

Bottom line: Trump’s many deficiencies, from his Stengel-like sleepiness to malignant narcissism, added to his apparent willingness to muse about using nuclear weapons, make him a dangerous choice to have his finger on the nuclear button. Unlike Trump, we should all be wide awake and thinking deeply about ways to pull back from the nuclear brink.