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President Trump Not Throwing Ceremonial First Pitch at Nationals Home Opener, Apparently

The official reason is a scheduling conflict. The actual story... is probably about the same, but let's dig a little deeper anyway.

Two months and change into his presidency, it is perhaps too easy to say that Donald Trump has distinguished himself from his predecessors mostly if not entirely through his thermonuclear oafishness. There's an obvious reason for that, but for all his material success in signing executive orders that will restore profit-optimized amounts of mining detritus to Appalachian tap water and his more amorphous achievements in the war against the concept of objective reality, there is one achievement that Trump unquestionably owns at this point in his Presidency. No one that has previously occupied the office has ever made it so clear how difficult even the ostensibly easy stuff about the job is.

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One of the defining attributes of Trump's Presidency has been the speed and strangeness with which apparently simple tasks unfold their manifest difficulty in public. In previous administrations, Presidents have thrown out ceremonial first pitches on Major League Baseball's opening day. Sometimes they have done it well, and sometimes they have done it less well, but never has it seemed like a difficult thing.

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