Donald Trump and the Astros

In 1919, the Chicago White Sox were bribed to blow a World Series. This massively enriched a New York gambler named Arnold Rothstein, who bet on the underdog Cincinnati Reds. Rothstein used his huge winnings to midwife modern American organized crime, feeding the rise of Donald Trump. 

More on that later.

In the lore of institutional sports writing, Chicago’s team was renamed the “Black Sox.” “Say it ain’t so,” wept an angry, disillusioned nation. 

Election cheating is an American tradition. In the current century, it’s primarily involved stripping millions of citizens — especially young people, poor people and people of color — from the voter rolls. 

Three years ago, the Houston Astros stole a world title. Using a banned system of signal theft, they knew what pitches were about to be thrown at them. 

The Astros, aided by this cheating, won the 2017 World Series in seven games. The team has spent the last few weeks since this larceny came to light trying to shrug it off. Some have even argued it didn’t really matter that the Texas hitters knew what was coming.

That’s nonsense. At the major league level, there are few things more likely to win you a ball game than having your batter know what’s coming.

Rothstein, the New York racketeer nicknamed “the Brain,” used his ill-gotten gains to lay the foundations of modern organized crime. The early mobster world was an anarchic mess of feuding families, divided along ethnic lines. Everybody was killing everybody else.

In the early 1920s, Rothstein corporatized much of the mob business. Murder for hire, gambling, booze, drugs, prostitution, protection and money laundering — all were taken to a new level under his tutelege.

In the 1950s, slumlord Fred Trump, the future president’s father, and The Donald himself had ties to New York mob clans, according to biographer David Cay Johnston and others. Fred’s father, a German immigrant, ran a bordello.  

With a six-figure income by the time he was six, the young Donald was mentored by Roy Cohn, the infamous mob attorney. Cohn also served the drug-addicted Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, whose witch-hunting anti-communism fueled the Red Scare of the 1950s.

In the 2016 “World Series” of American politics, Trump took the presidency with help from Planet Earth’s new Don Corleone, Vladimir Putin.

Election cheating is an American tradition. In the current century, it’s primarily involved stripping millions of citizens — especially young people, poor people and people of color — from the voter rolls. 

In 2000, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush de-registered tens of thousands of Floridians to enthrone his brother. In 2004, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (then co-chair of the Ohio campaign to re-elect Bush-Cheney) stripped some 300,000 people from Ohio’s voter rolls, guaranteeing George W. Bush a second term. 

In 2016, Putin’s apparatchiks infiltrated voter rolls, messed with electronic machines, and manipulated social media on Trump’s behalf. Everyone who’s paying attention knows they plan more of the same in 2020; in fact, it’s already happening.

The Democrats have shown no sign of being willing or able to fight back. Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton all walked away from questionable election results. Except for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, no Democrat now in the race seems likely to match the refusal of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams to concede a stolen election while fighting for election protection. 

Whether meddling was the decisive factor in past U.S. elections is as unknowable as whether the Astro’s signal theft won them the 2017 World Series.

But it’s not enough just to “say it ain’t so.” 

Trump has the GOP underworld, the American corporate elite and Putin’s Russian oligarchs to help him steal the presidency from the bumbling, supine Democrats. For the fourth time in the new century, cheating could play a decisive role in the outcome.

Like the Astros in 2017, we know what’s coming at us.