Lost among the many colorful escapades of The Mooch this week was the new White House communications director's line about Donald Trump draining jump shots at Madison Square Garden. Anthony Scaramucci immediately and frequently professed his love for the president on assuming his new role, and part of that was explaining how "competitive" Trump is through a story—which Trump definitely did not tell him to tell—about Trump's athletic prowess.

The president, you see, is a cannon-armed quarterback and a top-coated sharpshooter and a...three-foot putter:

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Trump has long been thoroughly invested in convincing people he was—and maybe still is—a star athlete. In a taped interview for a book on his life in 2015, Trump described, in thorough detail, to interviewer Michael D'Antonio how he was "the best baseball player in New York" (and plenty else) when he was younger:

I was always the best athlete. Something that nobody knew about me. … I was the best baseball player in New York when I was young. … But I also knew that it was very limited, because in those days you couldn't even make a lot of money playing baseball. … Everybody wanted me to be a baseball player. But I was good in other sports too. I was good in wrestling, I was very good at football. I was always the best at sports.

Considering Mickey Mantle was playing centerfield for the Yankees around that time, we can safely assume Trump meant he was the best amateur player. Or can we? The indications are that Trump actually was pretty good at baseball, and that he's an above-average golfer now. (According to Samuel L. Jackson, he's also a less-than-honest golfer now. This led to one of the great campaign feuds, where Trump claimed both to not know Jackson or have ever played with him, and to know for sure that Jackson is bad at golf and is himself a cheater.) Previous presidents, including Trump's immediate predecessor, have been open about their love for sports, but none have ever been as invested in everyone knowing just how good they were.

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There's a ready example in that riff from the Mooch. He made the grave mistake of saying Trump "sinks three-foot putts," which anyone can see is an insufficient Trumpian boast. In the transcript of the press conference, White House officials changed it to 30-foot putts. Elsewhere, the endless praise for how "strong" the president is forms a constant drumbeat in media briefings and press conferences and #MAGA Twitter. Perhaps the best depictions of Trump the Athlete are in pro-Trump political cartoons, which unfailingly depict him as a svelte, muscle-bound 32-year-old who is physically dominating some group of social justice warriors or the PC police or some other brand of All-American Weakling.

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Ben Garrison is so horny for this old dude who eats McDonalds for every meal and has constant diarrhea pic.twitter.com/QdIiwe4riF — Alan (@findomearle) July 16, 2017

In reality, of course, Trump is conspicuously overweight and out of shape, probably due to some combination of his well-publicized diet and his deeply held belief that the body only has a finite amount of energy so it's important not to use it all up getting exercise. But that doesn't matter: a key part of Trumpism is the cult-like faith that he remains a physical specimen, capable of dominating the various Enemies. This kind of deep-seated physical and psychosexual anxiety permeates the "alt-right" movement that is Trump's ideological base. They don't call everyone "cucks" by accident. It is vital that The Leader be held up not just as a paragon of twisted moral and political strength, but of sheer physical strength as well.

That's why it's so important that the president can throw a tight spiral and sink a jump shot, and that he was once such a gifted baseball player. His followers need to believe they could've gone pro, too—if it wasn't for Those People.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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