A pass for Pete Rose highlights ‘The Purge’ for awful white men in Trump’s America

From a happy hour at the Pentagon for Fox News bad boy-turned-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to a U.S. government-approved Miami holiday for the alleged raping and sex trafficking Tate brothers, 2025 has been an all-night coming-out party for the world’s worst white men.

So you didn’t think a little thing like his death last autumn at age 83 was going to stop baseball’s degenerate gambler and accused statutory rapist known as “Charlie Hustle” from barreling headfirst into this monster mash, as if his well-deserved forever banishment was the doomed Cleveland Indians catcher Ray Fosse.

Make no mistake: Tuesday’s seemingly inevitable reinstatement of all-time hits leader Pete Rose by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred can’t be separated from the Donald Trump regime’s sequel to The Purge movies: A four-year-long get-out-of-jail-free bonanza for some of the worst people on earth.

(Radio narrator voice, at quadruple speed) “Offer not valid for women, Black and brown folks, the LGBTQ community, or anyone else who is not currently enrolled as a white, cisgender male.”

Roughly 8% of the way into a Trump 47 presidency that already feels like an eternity, the ceaseless drive to rehabilitate the Pete Roses of an America now racing around the basepaths to undo decades of well-deserved cancellations for sexual abuse and misconduct, racism, and homophobia, and just old-fashioned immoral conduct, isn’t some odd subplot. No, the bad (white) boy restoration is central to the entire MAGA project. And the forced redemption of Rose is its spikes-first exclamation point.

In 1989, Rose — then-manager of the Cincinnati Reds, where he’d won two World Series rings — was permanently (not “lifetime,” but “permanently”) banned from Major League Baseball after investigators found his large betting habit included wagering on his own team, a sin to which Rose himself finally confessed years later.

This offense was a red line for MLB, essential to maintaining the integrity (does anybody remember integrity?) of the sport after its early history of fixing games culminated in the “Black Sox” scandal of the thrown 1919 World Series. Even betting on victories for your own team is a gross perversion for a manager, since he might make decisions — burning out an overworked pitcher to win today, for example — that would hurt his team’s prospects and his players’ health down the road.

Then-Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti — a Yale scholar with a poetic passion for the pastoral sport that feels ancient amid the vulture capitalism of 21st-century athletics — was absolutely right to bring the hammer down on Rose. But baseball’s greatest spray hitter, with an unparalleled 4,256 career hits, didn’t do himself any favors with a largely unrepentant lifetime of low-class autographs-for-cash appearances, which led to a felony tax conviction. And all that was before the other cleat dropped.

In 2017, at the height of the much-too-short-lived #MeToo movement, a woman identified only as Jane Doe came forward in a legal filing to assert that Rose contacted her in 1973 when she was only 14 or 15 and initiated a sexual relationship that lasted for several years, both in Cincinnati and across state lines. The defense from Rose, who was married with two kids in the 1970s, was that they did have sex, but none occurred before the woman was 16.

“That was 55 years ago, babe,” Rose told a female sportswriter — my estimable Inquirer colleague, Alex Coffey — in 2022 when baseball’s hits king was, after much debate, allowed back into Citizens Bank Park to celebrate his other World Series win with the 1980 Phils.

At this point, it probably won’t shock you to learn that Rose’s reinstatement — which makes him eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame, if voters can get past his off-field antics — had no bigger advocate than America’s lout-in-chief, Donald John Trump.

Trump’s initial White House victory in 2017 came either in spite of — or arguably because of — the shocking revelations that he’d openly bragged about forced kissing and sexual assaults on women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, which opened the floodgates to roughly two dozen allegations of a range of sexual misconduct. In 2023, a New York jury found that Trump had sexually abused a Manhattan writer, E. Jean Carroll, in a changing stall of a swank department store.

For a lot of voters — especially young white men, who helped give Trump his plurality win in 2024 — Trump’s horrible behavior may have been a feature, not a bug. The grievance that movements like #MeToo, the Black Lives Matter marches that spiked after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, or trans rights had gone too far is the musky fragrance of MAGA Trumpism, and its avatar’s second coming has unleashed a mad race to overturn every trace of the modern pursuit of an equitable America.

The civil rights movement? Second-wave feminism? A revolution in rights for gay people, or even the disabled? To quote another icon of mid-20th-century loutism, Mad Men’s Don Draper: “It will shock you how much it never happened.”

The myriad examples of the Trump-flavored purge are highlighted by the gaggle of men accused of (and denying, of course) sexual misconduct working in or around the White House, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accused of groping a former babysitter; Elon Musk, the half-trillionaire DOGE king who, among other things, allegedly offered a flight attendant a horse in return for sex; and, of course, Hegseth, who paid a settlement to the woman who went to police accusing him of a hotel sexual assault in 2017.

Hey, that was eight years ago, babe. For Pete’s sake!

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In such an upside-down world, Rose’s sins — including his sports betting that today seems like flipping baseball cards compared to 2025’s massive crypto scams, which are not only encouraged by Trump and his family but perpetrated by them — seem more than just trivia to POTUS. If Rose is immoral, aren’t most of today’s so-called leaders?

Don’t answer that.

Trump, who accepted an autographed baseball from Rose in 2016 and has advocated for his reinstatement, his election to the Hall of Fame, and possibly even a presidential pardon ever since, was clearly the driving force in this week’s decision by Manfred. Indeed, the commissioner met Trump in the Oval Office just a month ago, and even called the president on Tuesday to let him know about the reversal of the ban that Manfred had affirmed earlier in his tenure.

Look, in full disclosure mode, I should confess that as a lifelong baseball fan, I’ve always hated Rose, beginning when I was a little kid in the late 1960s. His performative and over-the-top “Charlie Hustle” shtick always felt like a manifestation of his inner creepiness, peaking with a 1970s career-ending home plate slam into catcher Fosse in the glorified exhibition that is baseball’s All-Star Game. But even if you love that side of Rose — as do many Philadelphians still grateful for his role in that 1980 first-ever title — it’s still worth pondering how the Rose reinstatement is also a user’s guide to the deadly sins of these United States, including:

The only good news here is that — much like Trump’s still up-in-the-air push for an American monarchy — there is some faint hope for checks and balances. Rose still can’t get into the Hall of Fame unless he passes muster with the hall’s voters, who so far have steadfastly blocked the record-setters of baseball’s tainted steroids era.

That’s a reminder of why baseball is still truly our national pastime, because just like the American Experiment in democracy, the greatness of its idea has survived all the awfulness — the fixed games and segregation and performance-enhancing drugs — that have tried again and again to kill it off. The arc of baseball’s moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Let’s hope Rose’s rejection from the Hall of Fame is just around that curve.

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