Yet the truth is that Trump can backslap with the best of them.

He can backslap and talk in colloquial English with American investment bankers and then discuss the details of new computer chips with the techies.

To him the crisis of the Church is a crisis of the liturgy, in which clergy and community too often backslap and celebrate each other and themselves, almost as if God did not exist.

On any given day, Steinbrenner will challenge authority - he filed a lawsuit last year against Major League Baseball over his right to strike an independent endorsement deal with Adidas - and then he'll backslap Selig, Beeston and Reinsdorf, making his brashness seem like nothing more than a kind of heavy-handed bonhomie.