“Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser,” Vince Lombardi, a New Yorker (coaching at Fordham and with the Giants) before he went on to Green Bay and immortality, once said. Though the American form of good sportsmanship was almost invented in this city—the peerless Christy Mathewson of the early-twentieth-century baseball Giants was so honest that umpires were said to have consulted him on close plays—we can’t deny our own special traditions of sore losers. Leo (“Nice guys finish last”) Durocher was before Donald Trump’s time, but George Steinbrenner’s outrages and absurdities as the owner of the Yankees, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, presented Trump with a model for taking over an American institution and trashing it at the same time. Steinbrenner, whom Trump called “a great friend,” routinely pioneered new frontiers in poor sportsmanship, even berating his own best players. He sneered at his Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield—“I got rid of Mr. October and got Mr. May”—though Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, hardly had a pacific relationship with him, either. Steinbrenner’s quintessential sore-loser moment came in 1981 when, after the Dodgers beat the Yankees for a third straight game in the World Series, he claimed to have injured his hand beating up two much younger Dodger fans who had taunted him in an elevator—something that basically no one believed, assuming, instead, that he had punched a wall in a rage and hurt himself. (The Yankees went on to lose the Series, in New York.) That’s pretty much the working model for what Trump has done this month: lose, have a tantrum, and blame the opposition for his bruises. The difference is that New York sportswriters were skeptical of Steinbrenner’s stories, but Republican leaders are not, or pretend not to be, skeptical of Trump’s lies. Read More…