Seriously, You Can Still Ignore Trump

You really can. There will be time to deal with him if you need to.

This Saturday, in my other life as a sportswriter, I was at Truist Park in Smyrna, Georgia, to cover Game Four of the World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Houston Astros. It was an exciting game in front of a pumped, incredibly loud crowd, one desperately to cheer their team to their first World Series victory in 26 years. (They’re not quite there yet.) But most of my friends and family weren’t so curious about that. That’s not what they were texting me about during the game.

They were texting me about this:

Drawn to the sort of sports-as-political-culture-war spectacle that was the World Series in Georgia — the place where the All-Star Game was pulled from because of their voter suppression laws, and where the Tomahawk Chop, Braves’ fans favorite cheer, has been under attack by Native American activists — like a maggot to a horse carcass, Trump showed up in Georgia on Saturday looking to score his usual lizard-brain points in his forever festering culture war. Trump claimed that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred — the man under fire from Trump supporters for pulling the All-Star Game in the first place — invited him to the game, but, as you are never going to believe this, that turned out not to be true. (Huh, you think you know a guy.) Trump was there because it poured fuel on an already-simmering fire. It’s what he does.

It was, I will confess, a bit annoying to have all my friends text me and ask if I’d seen Trump, and not just because I was on the other side of the stadium and certainly wasn’t looking for him anyway. I must say, I’ve enjoyed the last 10 months of not having Trump barge his way into every conversation I’ve had about anything, whether it was sports, movies, music, food, whatever. Trump’s signature skill is turning every conversation into a conversation about him: He may be as good at that as anyone has ever been at anything. But his ability to do so has dwindled considerably since he…