For a moment, it almost looked like the current president of our kleptocracy was veering toward a good deed. Fortunately for every American who knows better than to ever get their hopes up regarding this kind of thing, he caught himself and swiftly tied that deed to something retrograde, smallminded, and cheap.
First, Old Squatty said he would interject himself into the potential Washington area football stadium, and do so in a way that was unkind to the owners of the local football factory. As with everything else Trump does or says, it was inevitable that there would be a catch, or just an angle for graft. But in the broadest strokes, it could almost have passed for some fiscal responsibility from the least responsible rich guy of them all.
But then Trump looked around and felt the warm wind of conscience, and started sweating like a man experiencing Indonesia's worst humidity. The catch arrived, and it turned out to be aligned to the president’s broader gambit of Making Everything 1989—Trump tied his threat of stadium-funding interference to an extortionate demand that the factory, a.k.a. the Washington Commanders, change their nickname back to the reprehensible one they abandoned five years ago alongside the enforced departure of Trump prototype/donor Danny Snyder as the team’s owner.
Huzzah! He's back! Never an act that cannot be profaned! Never an under-brained thought that doesn't make Satan rethink his mission!
Of course that isn't actually the timeline. Trump has never thought of doing an ethically defensible thing; this dreary twist or something like it was always coming. It was a stunt like so many others, one aimed at one of the few industries that is still finding money at a moment when so many others are not. It was America’s thirstiest man seizing the chance to become a player/irritant in the sport that has most often told him to pound mud, and to play at being a big shot.
None of it was anything new, really. The Glowering Pumpkin has offered opinions nobody asked for on a number of sporting conundrums, a proposed NIL salary cap for the NCAA being another recent one. But this one is the most Him of all, because it conflates Trump’s jealousy of the league that told him multiple times that his father's money was no good to them, his eagerness to make progressives dream of emigration, and to make the billionaires he otherwise sucks up to in thought, word, and deed quake at his every unhinged proposal. Envy, spite, and craven bullying—a trifecta of bilious crudity. That it was done in service of getting a racial slur back onto team merchandise is some typically tasteful extra gilding.
It is the nature of the modern marketplace that brutishness and clumsiness are no longer disqualifiers for behavior, and in fact are considered positive boons in business. That truth predates both Trump presidencies. But what is fascinating is that the president, or whatever oily little goblin is in his ear about this, is perceiving a benefit in using sports to distract his true believers from the policies that are actively wrecking them.
This can’t work in the long run—the price of milk is what it is, regardless of which name appears under the Eagles in the NFC East standings—but as a short-term ruse it has something of a track record. It worked when Trump scared Rob Manfred into freeing the late Pete Rose from administrative postmortem stasis and into a posthumous Hall of Fame candidacy. It may also work with his attempt to use Nick Saban to help establish a salary cap in college sports nanoseconds after NIL became a working compensation model for athletes.
In neither case did the nation ask for the president’s Attention To This Matter, or even for his opinion. Even his most ardents didn't care about his view on any of this, and the Rose issue had been molding inertly for years. It was Trump imagining injustices from the days when he did pay attention to the outside world, and in both cases his brain lesions on the subject lined up such that he was able to issue the unveiled threat that he could and would screw with these businesses through some old-fashioned personally-driven government intervention. In other words, Trump saw a chance to bully people with more money with him, which is the one drug that still gets him high.
The same dynamic is in play with the Washington football issue. The Commanders, under their new and less overtly noxious ownership, have been trying to get a new stadium built with other people's money in the traditional way. Because they operate within the District, Trump saw the opportunity to get involved by dragging up an old and well resolved issue—that nickname. In short, Trump is threatening to derail any public funding issue for said stadium unless the Commanders, who changed their name in 2020 and then again in 2022, change their name back to Redskins. In case you missed that particular dogwhistle symphony, Trump also took a swipe at the Cleveland baseball's team abandoning the name Indians and its accompanying troublesome iconography for the more generic and less offensive Guardians.
These were both long settled issues that only the maniac fringe pretended to care about, but Trump feels no call to accept anything that doesn't have his mitt-prints smeared across the label, and he sees the distractive power in invoking his twisted version of "the good old days." These threats play to his basest base in ways that some of his more substantive blunders—the mess he’s made of international trade, his extravagantly creepy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, even his not-very-unseen hand in the Stephen Colbert firing—don't. They're candy for diabetics, and they remind us that in offering distractions like the Commanders stadium Trump himself is just as easily distracted. As always, it seems less like some kind of grand strategy and more like he saw something on TV and got upset about it.
That's why the initial intriguing notion—questioning public funding for billionaires' playhouses—immediately became enlisted in his very different campaign to revert to a time when America wore its social in justices like a miner's hat. The Commanders had finally become a watchable football team selling football again last year behind the miracle-making powers of Jayden Daniels. Now they get to relive the nickname argument that distracted them to the point of burdening them during the bad old days. This is Trump’s whole movement in rancid miniature: extolling and bringing back the bad times, one reflexive trip on Beelzebub's hamster wheel after another.
The team’s owners, most of them Josh Harris and David Blitzer, have faced sufficient administrative and financial roadblocks to any new stadium plan since buying the team from Snyder; in fact the stadium plan long precedes Harris, Etc. They now get to navigate another—the short-attention-span whims of an underhinged and easily distracted thug. You almost find yourself rooting for the owner and his unjustified claims on taxpayer money just because of the mischievous brute trying to interfere with the plan.
And there's your boilerplate human dynamic for today—doing something wrong to interfere with something wrong, and leaving the rest of us to decide which is the wronger wrong. We will now wait while you look for a quiet place to throw up.
The answer that Harris et. al. should give is, "Fine, we won't build a stadium because we're not changing our nickname just to smooth your fevered ego." The shortsighted but equally muscular response is, "Fine, we'll move the franchise to a state where you don't get to screw with us." The third-place answer is, "We'll get the money another way so your blackmail will have no heft." None of these feel likely, though, because the one truly non-negotiable item here for the owners is not pushing back on Trump but making sure that the concept of public funding for private stadiums by hook, crook, or just plain took is accepted as the standard price of doing the entertainment bidness. How the rest of it shakes out remains to be sorted, but at least we already know enough to feel slightly dirtier for having to navigate it at all.
