Justin Thomas reacts after draining a putt to win the RBC Heritage golf tournament, Hilton Head, S.C., Apr 20, 2025. (Jim Dedmon, Imagn, via Reuters)
On golf, the American order, Trump’s fitness, the city of Cleveland, Al Capone, Leonardo da Vinci, and more
‘Golf is a game of honor,” people have long said. It’s true. Here’s a headline from over the weekend: “Justin Thomas Calls One-Stroke Penalty on Himself While Leading RBC Heritage.” (“RBC Heritage” is a tournament on the PGA Tour.) The article is here.
What happened was this: Thomas — “JT,” as he is known — hit a drive into a waste bunker. As he was moving loose impediments around his ball, the ball moved, just slightly. No one saw this — except JT. And he called the penalty on himself.
This should be routine, unexceptional, unremarkable. It should not lead some guy’s Impromptus column. But honor can seem a scarce commodity, in life at large.
In 1925, Bobby Jones called a penalty on himself — in the U.S. Open. He wound up losing the Open by one shot. JT, by the way, ended up winning the RBC Heritage. Jones, when he was praised for his honesty and sportsmanship, retorted, “Sooner praise a man for not robbing a bank.”
Last month, during “Signalgate,” I had a post headed “Honor and the Nation.” This is a quality — honor — that nations and societies need.
• Vice President JD Vance likes to joust on Twitter, or X, and he put sneer quotes around “due process” last week. Many have written eloquently about this, including Jonah Goldberg, in a column. Jonah also spoke of sneer quotes around “classical liberals.”
One thing about due process, classical-liberal principles, etc.: You would miss them if they were gone. Maybe not the first day or even the first year. But eventually, when things cut against you, you would want them. Might even be begging for them.
Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald Trump was refusing to say he would accept the result of the election, Patrick J. Buchanan wrote that the “populist-nationalist Right” was “moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America they love.”
The thing about the “niceties of liberal democracy”? You may find that they are necessities, rather than niceties. Also: Trump won that year through the Electoral College — he won with 3 million fewer votes, nationally, than his opponent had.
Is the Electoral College a “nicety of liberal democracy”? Some people think so. One man who was vehemently opposed to the Electoral College, before 2016, was Donald Trump. He objected to the Electoral College in the most scalding terms.
In recent days, I’ve been reading about Mario Vargas Llosa, the great writer, who died earlier this month. In a piece I published in 2022, I quoted him as follows:
. . . it took me a few years to break with socialism and reassess the meaning of democracy. It was a period of uncertainty and reappraisal during which I slowly began to understand that the “formal freedoms” of so-called bourgeois democracy were not a mere appearance that covered up the exploitation of the poor by the rich, but rather the boundary between human rights, freedom of expression, and political diversity and an authoritarian and repressive system . . .
Yes. A beautiful and true statement.
Have you noticed that people like to use the word “muh”? This has sprouted up in the last ten years, I think. “Muh” is a sneering, mocking way of saying “my.” You hear it, or I hear it, from the “post-liberal” Right: “Oh, ‘muh principles’! Oh, ‘muh rights,’ ‘muh Constitution’!”
In an essay about conservatism, published in 2020, I quoted a prominent “post-liberal” who had written, “Republicans still cling to their ‘muh free markets’ dogmas.”
No more, alas.
Anyway, principles, rights, constitutions, free markets — they are all key to a good and healthy society, “muh” or no “muh.”
(My general view on “muh” is: meh.)
• Many times, I have quoted John Adams: “as a whale goes through a net.” It would have been natural for a New Englander to use such a simile. The worst qualities of men — “avarice,” “revenge,” and the like — “would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”
The lines that follow are rather famous: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
These words — all of them — come from a letter that Adams wrote to military officers in October 1798.
Back to the whale and the net. I thought of this image when reading a piece by David Brooks in The Atlantic. He quotes Asher Robbins, a senator from Rhode Island, who was alarmed by President Andrew Jackson: “When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it.”
• Since the summer of 2015, the fundamental question about Trump has never really changed: Is he fit to be president? Tens of millions say yes, tens of millions say no. This division is unbudging.
On Sunday, the president released this:
Screenshot
Is this the way a president ought to behave? Americans will never agree on the question.
Sitting in the Oval Office with a foreign leader — the Italian prime minister — Trump said, “Jimmy Carter died a happy man. You know why? Because he wasn’t the worst president. Joe Biden was.”
Is this “presidential”? Should our president act this way? Again, Americans will never agree — ever.
• A statement from a new Pentagon official:
I am excited and honored to announce I have been appointed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the DoD.
That is a worry that many of us have: that “our country is viewed as a force not to be reckoned with.”
Did the young man (age 23) mean to say “trifled with”? Anyway, we all make mistakes. I thought of something that William Safire wrote, many years ago:
I ran into an old friend whom I had not seen in too long. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, “I miss not seeing you!” No, I replied, he missed seeing me; not seeing me was what he had been doing. “I meant exactly what I said,” said my friend coolly, “but until this moment I never realized why.”
• “The Forest City” is new to me. Cleveland, I have known all my life, pretty much. But only this month did I hear about the nickname “Forest City.” It was conferred on Cleveland long ago. Wikipedia has an entry, here.
In his travels around America, Tocqueville noted that Cleveland was a city — a real city — heavily forested. Hence . . .
I had the pleasure of visiting the Forest City Brewery, in the Tremont neighborhood. Here’s a shot:
One more:
A place loaded with “color,” very congenial.
• Cleveland was named after Moses Cleaveland, who founded it. He was from Connecticut, and fought in our Revolution: as a general of the Connecticut militia. In the city’s name, the first “a” in “Cleaveland” got dropped.
Was Grover, who became president, related to Moses? Yes, apparently — distantly.
• The Tudor Arms Hotel opened in 1933 — but as the Cleveland Club. Al Capone was a denizen. A private pool was built for him in the club. He did not want to swim with others (or swim with the fishes, I suppose).
There is a tradition in America of liking, of rooting for, the bad guy. I wrote about this late last year, after a health-care executive, Brian Thompson, was murdered in New York. The killer became something like a pop idol.
Hope he hangs (or would, if I were for the death penalty).
Last month, speaking at the Justice Department, President Trump praised Capone as “great.” He said, “I was attacked more than anybody in the history of our country. Alphonse Capone, the great Alphonse Capone — legendary; ‘Scarface’ — was attacked only a tiny fraction of what Trump was attacked.”
I do not think Capone was great. I hate crime, and crime bosses in particular. Anyway . . .
We live in a land of mergers. I thought I was checking into the Tudor Arms. The big sign outside said “DoubleTree.” At the desk, there was a little sign asking, “Are you a Hilton Honors member?”
Was I staying at the Tudor Arms? The DoubleTree? Or the Hilton? I guess the answer was: yes.
• Many times, I have written about “Leonardo” versus “Da Vinci.” Leonardo da Vinci should no more be called “Da Vinci” than William of Orange should be called “Of Orange.” But this is a losing battle, in our country. (In other English-speaking countries too? Not sure.)
In the Cleveland airport, I spotted this:
If that sign had said “The American Leonardo,” I would have hugged it.
Thank you for joining me, my friends. Hope you’re having a good week. Talk to you soon.
