Sunday Times 2
Do leopards change their spots?
View(s):With Donald Trump inaugurated as America’s president for a second term and Steve Smith being sent as captain of the Australian cricket team to Sri Lanka for a second time, I have been musing about this well-known saying about leopards not changing their spots.
Quite coincidentally, Trump was elected president for the first time in 2016—the same year that Steve Smith was sent here as captain of Australia for the Test series that took place from July to September. Trump lost his job when the American electorate voted him out in 2020, while Smith was sacked by Cricket Australia (along with players David Warner and Cameron Bancroft) after all three were found guilty of cheating in the 2018 international test match against South Africa in Capetown.
Subsequent to losing the 2020 election, Trump was tried in the New York Supreme Court, where the jury found him guilty of 34 criminal charges. Fortunately or unfortunately, in November last year, the American people elected this man—a convicted criminal—as their president. The judge, while upholding the decision of the jury, decided that due to the unique circumstances of the case, he would issue the man found guilty with an unconditional discharge with no fine, probation, or jail time. Guilty as charged but spared a jail sentence.
Smith got his old job back because Pat Cummins, who has proved himself a very successful captain who leads from the front, is remaining in Australia where his wife is due to give birth to their second child. The Australian selectors have decided to hand the captaincy to Smith—despite there being ample leadership talent (for example, South Australian Travis Head) in the visiting team. So now both Trump and Smith are back in their old jobs—entrusted with the same perks and responsibilities that they had before they were found guilty of their respective wicked deeds.
What does this say to the ordinary folk of this world like us?
Is it alright to do what Trump did—things like falsifying business records, bribing porn stars to purchase their silence, conspiring to overthrow election results, and illegally retaining officially classified secret documents in his private residence? Is it alright for the captain of Australia—a position that former coach Darren Lehmann once described quite seriously as ‘the second most important position in this country behind the prime minister’—to be a disgraced cheat? How can the Australian children who look up to their sporting heroes be told, “Yes, he cheated in an important Test match—but that is OK; all has been forgiven.”
Just as a leopard cannot change his spots and a tiger cannot change his stripes, so too will a felon and a cheat find it very difficult to tread the straight and narrow path.
Being now an octogenarian who has seen a lot during my span on earth, I worry for the world and the US in this time of Trump. Democracy is a form of government that requires a high level of trust and tolerance—or as President Premadasa used to say, consultation, compromise and consensus. Governing a country is not easy at the best of times—and the US currently remains a deeply divided nation. Trump’s “landslide’ victory last November was handed to him (thanks to the peculiarity of that country’s electoral college system) by 49.8% of the votes cast—with votes being cast only by 63.9% of the people eligible to vote! Thus, Trump received votes from less than a third of America’s voting public!
It is often said that if America sneezes the rest of the world will catches a cold. Trump is surrounding himself, like his friend Vladimir Putin, with a bunch of extremely wealthy loyalist oligarchs whose prime qualification is their loyalty to Trump. His first term was chaotic and his second will no doubt be even worse. Quite undeterred by the recent dreadful fires in California he is gearing his administration to tear up all the enacted climate mitigation measures and go ahead to “Drill Baby Drill” for oil and so accelerate global warming. Not only is he abandoning climate goals, but he is casting envious eyes at the Panama Canal, Greenland and even Canada. This past week he has even withdrawn the US from the World Health Organisation. As one of my friends drily observed last week, “The man is quite mad—and what is worse, he doesn’t know he is mad, and neither do the American people!”
Smith, on the other hand, is not mad. He is just a cheat, a weak man who could not or would not control his errant vice-captain David Warner in Capetown—or else a devious person who made the decision to go ahead and cheat but let young Bancroft (who was playing in only his eighth test match) do the dirty deed and take the blame. Hardly the behaviour of a leader a team or the sporting public can respect.
Trump is probably beyond redemption—but dare we hope that Smith has changed?
I must confess that I don’t know. I keep thinking of the proverbial leopard—and hoping that Smith does not get his hands on any sandpaper in Galle.