What did Donald Trump do today?

He made a federal case out of a rant about baseball.

Today, Trump declared that he would pardon disgraced baseball star Pete Rose.

Rose's lifetime ban from baseball and exclusion from the Hall of Fame has long been a matter of legitimate debate among fans. Some feel, as Trump does, that Rose's on-field performance was too good to ignore even given that he admitted to breaking baseball's cardinal law against gambling. (Even diehard Rose supporters don't claim, as Trump did, that there was no issue with Rose betting on his own team.)

The only thing Trump can actually pardon him for are federal crimes, and Rose is known to have committed two. The first is tax evasion, for which he served several months in prison. 

The second is statutory rape, which Rose admitted to but was never charged for because his victim, who was 14 or 15 at the time Rose had sex with her, did not come forward until after the statute of limitations had expired. Rose admitted to having sex with her as a 32-year-old man, but claimed he thought she was 16 (the age of consent in Ohio) and denied her claim that they had had sex in places outside of the state of Ohio—which would make him guilty of federal child sex trafficking. 

Rose was a vocal Trump supporter, but more importantly for his posthumous pardon bid, the crimes he committed were of the sort that Trump is known or strongly suspected to have committed himself. Most of the pardons Trump issued during his first term fit that bill.

Trump has his own history with baseball, most of it fictitious. He played for his private boarding school's team. Box scores from newspaper accounts of those games give him an atrocious career batting average of .138. But his terrible performance at a small private school hasn't stopped Trump from pretending he was a major league prospect, though. He claimed to have been invited to a tryout with future Giants Hall of Famer Willie McCovey. (This is an obvious lie: McCovey is eight years older than Trump and was in the majors while Trump was still in junior high school.)

 

Why does this matter?

• Trump has already pardoned enough child sex abusers.