If John Harbaugh wants to shake hands with a real leader, I have a suggestion.
Spend a few minutes with Youman Wilder, the Harlem youth baseball coach who recently stood between his teenage players and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who started asking questions about where they were from. In America these days, even children are not immune from being spirited off the street by masked forces to unknown detention facilities.
In a CNN interview, Wilder said he told his kids to get into the batting cages and he positioned himself at the only entrance. He told them, “Listen, I’m not gonna let them get through me.”
If you had a chance to meet a coach like Wilder, or a chance to meet Donald Trump, which would you choose? Which kind of leader would you like to get a picture with?
Harbaugh and his brother Jim ought to understand why their decision to visit the Trump White House two weeks ago has sparked no small amount of anger and disappointment in their fan bases. This president has a fractious relationship with Baltimore and Maryland, and people have reacted strongly to the visit. That’s why I felt compelled to ask the Ravens coach how he balanced being a representative of this city with the decision to go.
John Harbaugh leaned into the experience hard, taking issue with how the question was phrased before spouting effusive praise.
“I would frame the question as, ‘You got a chance to go visit with the president, man. What was that experience like?’” he said. “It was amazing. It was awesome. I promise you I root for our president. I want the president to be successful just like I want my quarterback to be successful.”
That metaphor might work if the president, like the quarterback, was rooting for his team to join in success. But Trump has lashed out against Maryland and Baltimore, the places Harbaugh represents, and appears to be rooting on our downfall even as he ostensibly is supposed to lead America forward.
Trump has called Baltimore “a rodent-infested mess” and “a place where no human being would want to live.” Far from making this state and its largest city more livable, his administration is hurting this region — denying education funding and flood relief and laying off thousands of federal workers who have made their homes here.
It is not politics as usual. Trump has weaponized his authority to lash out at political enemies unlike any president in the modern era, infusing the halls of government with an us-or-them mentality that penalizes the communities he’s supposed to serve.
John Harbaugh on visiting Donald Trump in Oval Office
It’s the difference between possessing power and possessing leadership — a difference you would think the Harbaugh family, which espouses coaching virtues with over-the-top exuberance, would understand.
On the Harbaugh Coaching Academy website, which features video interviews with coaches and people he and his brother admire, John talks about how leaders are like a rising tide that lifts all boats, or how real leaders “have to make it about everybody else — not about you.”
“People follow people who care about them and care about their success,” Harbaugh says in another video, titled “Care Is at the Core of Leadership,” “who are willing to be their believer, their motivator … who genuinely make it clear that they like them, that they care about them and that they’re concerned about their well-being.”
Does that sound like President Trump? Is his leadership the kind Harbaugh endorses?
There’s little mystery as to why Trump would want the Harbaughs to come to Washington: They’re winners on the field, which is the kind of brand Trump likes to associate with — the reason he refused to leave the stage at the FIFA Club World Cup as baffled Chelsea players waited to lift their trophy. Being around championship winners is a kind of shorthand that he, too, possesses winning qualities. There’s nothing Trump loves more than taking pictures with a trophy he didn’t earn.
But it doesn’t take a great deal of scrutiny to see how little the kind of leadership the Harbaughs espouse has to do with what’s happening in the White House. And Trump is willing to kick the place John Harbaugh calls home as much as possible.
From the decision to accept an invitation to the White House — not because of some formality like winning a Super Bowl, mind you, but because of personal connections — we can see where Harbaugh stands, or at least that the privilege of his position and wealth insulate him from understanding why that would upset a great number of fans of his team.
It’s not a defining moment for Harbaugh, who has done a lot of good service for the state and the city in nearly two decades here. But his judgment on this issue is certainly disappointing.
He called the visit “an amazing experience” he shared with his daughter, Jim’s family and his own parents.
“My mom and President Trump, the way he treated her was really meaningful,” John Harbaugh added.
Manners aren’t totally meaningless. But well-trained dogs also know how to behave around people’s mothers.
Meanwhile, some moms are being abducted by ICE and sent to hastily constructed concentration camps. Some moms are being fired from federal agencies, purged by the Trump administration’s demonization of “DEI” as a societal boogeyman. Some moms lost their children in floods and storms but won’t get help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been gutted for the most desperate Americans.
If Harbaugh measured Trump the way he measures other kinds of leaders, the president wouldn’t pass muster.
As much as Harbaugh might frame the decision to go to the White House with his family as akin to other meetings he’s had with presidents — two visits with Barack Obama, a tour in Iraq with then-Vice President Joe Biden, a photo op with Ronald Reagan — this visit was more divisive because Trump himself is a divisive person who constantly belittles and targets people he’s meant to govern.
For a principled person, an invitation to the White House is not an automatic acceptance. The office means only as much as the people occupying it. You don’t have to let a president who abuses power draft off your legacy as a Super Bowl-winning coach.
For someone who has laid out his vision of leadership so many times, you wish that Harbaugh would have a bit more discriminating taste. Even when it comes to the Oval Office, there are some circles where a real leader doesn’t need to be.
