Amid Epstein Chaos, Trump Turns to Football to Distract and Dehumanize
Trump is calling for the Washington Commanders to change their name back to a racial slur.
As Donald Trump’s followers formulate ever more fanciful reasons why their cult leader is definitely not a pederast, our authoritarian president is desperately grasping for news-cycle distractions. Now Trump is going with: “Don’t think about me sexually exploiting children with Jeffrey Epstein. Instead, think about making football racist again.”
On Monday, Trump posted a particularly toxic tweet, which I will not quote in full because of its use of a racist slur. In it, Trump called for the Washington Commanders football team to go back to their previous name, the R*dskins, a derogatory term that Indigenous Americans spent decades trying to change. Trump threatened to bar the DC City Council from using over a billion dollars of local public funds to build a new stadium unless the name reverts back to this dictionary-defined slur.
Trump also falsely claims that Indigenous people love the racist old team name. In fact, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) as well as dozens of tribal councils called for it to change. It’s a demand that goes back at least to the American Indian Movement, which launched in 1968.
Yes, Trump’s tweet is meant to be a distraction from his alleged attraction to children. Yes, this move dovetails with the contempt and racism he has long shown toward Indigenous people. But that’s not all. This power play furthers Trump’s agenda to end home rule in DC, something he has argued for by fueling crime hysteria and feeding racism.
It is also a sop to billionaire Trump-backer Dan Snyder. The almost universally loathed Snyder was forced to sell the Washington football team after accusations that cheerleaders had been sexually trafficked and for being a sweaty creep around the women he employed. (When it comes to his friendships, Trump certainly has a type.) Even other NFL owners couldn’t stand Snyder, maybe because he hired private investigators to collect “dirt” on them in case they ever tried to force him out. That was a bridge too far: Snyder could be a trash human, the owners’ message was, but don’t hack into our search histories. In one last humiliation, the belligerently racist Snyder had to announce that the R*dskins name that he so adored and defended would be retired. But it wasn’t decades of Indigenous activism that moved him. It was sponsors—particularly FedEx, which owned the naming rights to his PG County stadium stadium—who told him in 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd that they no longer wanted to be in the racism business. (If you want to know the history of how the most racist owner in NFL history, George Preston Marshall, conjured up the name “R*dskins,” read here.)
But this push to change the name back to a slur is not just about creating a distraction. It’s about dehumanization. Central to the Trump agenda is the rehabilitation of violent white supremacy as a guiding national principle. The only way to be able to justify his regime’s sick, smirking, gleeful torture of brown and Black immigrants is to dehumanize them in the eyes of the native-born. The masked, warrantless racial-profiling gestapo known as ICE have even been arresting Indigenous people in the “immigration” raids, detaining them “accidentally” and “indefinitely.” Returning this racist branding to the mighty NFL—a league whose spineless leader Roger Goodell seems physically unable to stand up to Trump—facilitates that agenda.
The name change would also help erase the ways that the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations pushed corporate power to reevaluate their own racist practices. Trump’s followers want to eradicate any legacy of the largest demonstrations in the history of the United States and the movement’s efforts to dismantle institutionalized racism.
In the great local symbol of this, Trump (with the willing participation of Michael Bloomberg acolyte DC Mayor Muriel Bowser) had Black Lives Matter plaza jackhammered out of existence. Calling for a R*dskins renaissance is an obvious next step. The White House wants its base to believe that by humiliating brown immigrants, we can return to a fantasy of the 1950s. It is fascist fan fiction.
Trump’s rant also muddies the real stadium debate taking place. The plan put forward by the mayor with team owner Josh Harris, who can afford his own damn stadium, is a terrible deal for Washington, DC. All football stadiums built with public funds are scams: Politicians send billions for structures that economic studies show do not provide a return on their investment and starve social safety nets. But even by NFL standards, this boondoggle is horrible. As DC council member Charles Allen said, “In stark financial terms, at a time when the district is facing a recession and tens of thousands of workers are losing their jobs, this proposal is asking DC residents to pay more than $4 million for each and every home game for the next 30 years, a proposal that doesn’t even include funding for a sorely needed Metro station expansion to give people alternatives to driving.”
If built, this stadium will accelerate displacement and gentrification, hurting residents of the neighborhood who could never afford $400 tickets to go to a game. Pro-stadium liberals will welcome a fight about the team name (a fight, I bet, they would surrender if push came to shove) instead of whether this is worth building at all.
It all points to the need for an anti-fascist left that not only stands up to Trump’s revanchist racism but also prioritizes the economic needs of working people—an anti-fascist left that won’t excuse or ignore the sexual exploitation of children.
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