What did Donald Trump do today?

He called for a baseball player who had sex with a minor as an adult to be admitted to the Hall of Fame… again.

Trump waded back into sports commentary today, demanding on his private microblogging site that Roger Clemens be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

 

Trump is correct about one thing: Clemens was undoubtedly one of the best pitchers in baseball history. But that's not the reason he hasn't been elected to the Hall of Fame. Clemens' suspected use of performance-enhancing drugs certainly doesn't help his case, and the case for that is a lot stronger than Trump is claiming, according to most experts and the eyewitness testimony of other players. (Barry Bonds, the most famous user of hypermodern PEDs, also never got caught by MLB's testing protocols, because the regimen he was on was carefully tailored to avoid detection.)

But there's a much more serious scandal that has tarnished Clemens' reputation in and out of baseball: his romantic and sexual relationship as a 28-year-old man with a then-15-year-old girl. Mindy McCready, who later became famous in her own right as a country music singer, confirmed the relationship in 2008 after the New York Daily News reported on what had long been an open secret among people who knew them.

Clemens never admitted to a sexual relationship with McCready while she was underage, but at first acknowledged that McCready was a "close friend" at the same time he publicly apologized to his wife for "mistakes" in his personal life. McCready committed suicide in 2013. After her death, Clemens tried to backtrack about the depth of their relationship, saying that his former "close friend" was just someone he'd met "a few times."

This makes the second time since returning to office that Trump has lobbied for a baseball player to be inducted into the hall of fame. The first time came in March, when he made a similar pitch for Pete Rose. Rose was banned from baseball over his gambling, but he also admitted to the statutory rape of a 14- or 15-year-old girl.

Of course, it's possible Trump—who is facing his own scandal over connections to a massive child sex trafficking ring—is simply a fan of Clemens as an athlete. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump actually is a baseball fan. He played on his tiny private school's team as a teenager, batting a miserable .138 in games for which records survive. 

But Trump also claimed that he was so good at baseball that he was scouted as a pro alongside Hall of Famer Willie McCovey—who was eight years older than Trump and already in the majors by the time Trump was in middle school.

Why does this matter?

• One way to get people to stop speculating about whether you had sex with underage girls is to stop complaining about how unfair life is for men who had sex with underage girls. 

• Trump being president doesn't make him a king, a god, or a voting member of the Baseball Writers Association of America.