When the country needed the sports world to speak out, most athletes kept mum—and a few openly embraced embraced Trumpism.
President Donald Trump and Ivanka Trump, left, watch the pre-game show before Super Bowl LIX between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 9, 2025.(Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images)
I began writing a Nation sports column in 2005, and every December, I take stock of the trends in sports and politics over the previous 12 months. Each year I try to explain how you can read the political pulse of this country by looking at social resistance in the world of sports. The great sports sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards has described athletes as “the canary in the coal mine,” meaning that the politics and struggles in sports prefigure what will come elsewhere in society. Think of Jackie Robinson integrating baseball nearly a decade before the Montgomery Bus Boycotts or Billie Jean King signaling the coming of Title IX legislation by standing for women’s liberation in a traditionally male and hostile space. Gay athletes like Glenn Burke and David Kopay showed that LGBT visibility was coming to the broader society. While I still believe the Edwards’ rule, I also believe that 2025 will be remembered as the exception: This year the canaries were rare.
Trump and his acolytes have turned this country upside down, but you would rarely know it come game time. 2025 was the most disappointing, depressing year of sports activism—whether by players, media, or the unions—in my professional lifetime.
This is not to say that the entire sports world remained silent. But the brave exceptions were as scarce as hen’s teeth. We can now see that the effects of Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 protests peaked with the response to the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. That was only five years ago, but it feels like 500. The summer of 2020 seemed like the beginning of a new era. Athletes went on wildcat strikes against police violence—but it turned out that was the capstone, not a foundation block.
Now, instead of players risking—and sometimes losing—their careers, we have even seen a few athletes cheerlead a regime that has claimed the right to throw their immigrant teammates into an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison. This public embrace of Trumpism in the sports world was almost unheard of during Trump’s first term. Back then, Kaepernick and company were taking a knee in the face of Trump’s rants that they be fired, denaturalized, and deported. Now, Eagles star running back Saquon Barkley and Lions wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown perform Trump-tribute dances in the end zone after touchdowns. Still the regime’s support within the sports world should not be overstated—right now it’s not the support of Trump that’s the problem, it’s the quietude that’s so damaging.
All the players’ unions have kept their heads down. Some are combative on economic questions, like the fighting WNBA Players Association, but none are standing up or speaking out on social issues in the United States—let alone genocide in Gaza. Neither are the leagues. Neither is the near entirety of sports media. And with very few exceptions, neither are individual athletes.
Sports should be understood as a political sphere—like the law, the university system, and the media. And in each of these realms, many of their major institutions capitulated to Trump this year—and with each capitulation, the power of the fascist Borg increases. The Borg feeds on silence and surrender, and in 2025, the sports world provided a feast. This time there was no LeBron James calling Trump a “bum.” No teams refusing en masse to visit what’s left of the White House. No one seems eager to pick up the baton from Megan Rapinoe or Michael Bennett or any of the resistance heroes of a decade ago.
The silence is particularly infuriating in sports, because Trump works overtime to plant his flag in this space. In January, Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl so he could stand over the crowd and in front of the country like some orange Il Duce. He then spent most of the year preparing to turn the 2026 World Cup—hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico—and the 2028 LA Olympics into fascistic spectacles of state propaganda. The aim is to use the spotlight earned by these great athletes to present himself as the authoritarian of all authoritarians
Then there is the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Trump, with assistance from UFC owner Dana White and diminutive podcaster Joe Rogan, has turned the sport into a recruiting ground for the far right. MMA has a tradition of radical resistance, which makes the Trump/Dana White hijacking of the spectacle for political gain especially abhorrent. Their partnership has been a prelude to Trump’s plan to stage an MMA card on what’s left of the White House lawn during the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations.
Trump also says he wants to change the name of football, because he is sliding rapidly toward incapacitation and a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency. And in almost every speech, however incoherent and no matter the context, he digresses to rail against trans kids who want to play sports.
Radical political traditions and movements have always shown the capacity to rise from the dead. We can understand them, like the Haymarket Martyrs taught us, as a subterranean fire that can never be put out. But this year the tradition of Muhammad Ali, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Billie Jean King has been gutted. And the fingerprints on the blade are not just from athletes—but from the agents, the media stenographers, the unnecessary executives, and. of course. the sports owners, many of whom help bankroll the Trump movement.
Fighting fascism is not a game. Through their indifference, most of the sports world is allowing a sacred tradition—born from people like John Montgomery Ward, Moses “Fleetwood” Walker, Alice Milliat, and Paul Robeson—to expire. The shame of that silence is that across the country people are resisting. Communities are physically pushing ICE out of their cities; trans people and their allies continue to fight against a tidal wave of vicious reaction; socialists are being elected as mayors—and yet athletes and the sports media refuse to reflect this reality.
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It’s easy to excoriate cowardice. The bigger question is why? Why, so soon after 2020, does silence rule the day in sports?
There is the larger political climate of compliance and with this comes fear. Athletes see the people being kidnapped off the streets by ICE. They watch others having their careers destroyed because they stood for Palestine or refused to sufficiently mourn a far-right, racist YouTube host. Even if they aren’t noticing, they surely have people in their ear who are.
Athletes, given the stakes, are burying their heads. These “stakes” in return for silence are massive. The sports world is now flush with billions due to the commercial seizure of our games by legalized gambling. The lucrative addiction economy is the reason that everyone from the players to the unions to the networks relentlessly selling us on betting lines avoid upsetting the apple cart.
The transformation of sports commentators into bookies has also been accompanied by a McCarthyite cleansing of their ranks. Once prominent ESPN voices—like Howard Bryant, Jemele Hill, and Michael Smith—that analyzed athletic resistance have been vanquished from the (Disney and now National Football League-owned) World Wide Leader in Sports. They have been replaced by near-interchangeable media-trained ex-jocks who are experts in talking loudly about nothing. The hosts who chose to remain and practice amnesia about what the network just recently was, might as well wear NFL jerseys with Vichy printed along the back.
The only politics allowed at ESPN now come from TV-performance artist Stephen A. Smith and the crown prince of stupid, Pat McAfee. Smith claims to want a future in politics and is trying to rant his way into carving out a space on the center-right. McAfee first became known by platforming vaccine denialist and RFK Jr. fanboy Aaron Rodgers and is now Trump’s ESPN yipping head of choice. The “no politics rule” of ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro has been thoroughly exposed as “no to a certain kind of politics.”
Then there is social media. A decade ago, athletes used this town square to speak out. Activists on social media organized the famous Cavs/Nets game after the police killing of Eric Garner where the players, including LeBron, wore shirts that read “I Can’t Breathe.” Ten years later, social media isn’t a town square. It’s a minefield. And tech oligarchs—especially the one who started 2025 with a Nazi salute—are manipulating the algorithms in ways that keep us at each other’s throats.
There also is the conservatizing effect of the billions of Saudi and United Arab Emirates money now flooding into professional sports. This tonnage of filthy lucre always comes with strings attached. This is the US sports world getting paid off to “sportswash” authoritarian, murderous regimes. When “Fly Abu Dhabi” is affixed to the Knicks uniforms, it’s not because the UAE thinks Vinnie from Queens is going to take the family to the Emirates over Labor Day weekend. It’s to normalize themselves as global leaders and acculturate us to disregard any notion of human rights. Petrol dictatorships are buying up teams and tournaments with nary a peep just as our own country descends into lawless authoritarianism.
In this hellscape, some of the best comments by athletes have come from Trump’s (soon to be literal) backyard. It’s UFC fighters. When MMA star Scott Strickland was asked if he’d perform at the White House UFC bash, he said, “I’d wanna do the White House if there was some kind of inclusion for fans, but like, just to go hang out with the fucking Epstein list? I’m good, dog. I’m good, dude.”
Or fighter Brandon Royval who said, “I don’t give a fuck about any of our political figures right now, and it’s like to fight in front of them seems like some fucking ‘Hunger Games’ type of fucking shit. I don’t give a fuck to fight in front of some fucking billionaires and rich people that could give a shit less about me. Probably throwing parlays. Fuck you guys. Also, I’m too Mexican-looking. [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is suspiciously arresting motherfuckers, and I don’t know. Who knows, bro? Next thing you know, I’m in Mexico, and I don’t speak Spanish.”
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No group of athletes is more familiar with Trump-world than the UFC fighters and familiarity, as is often the case with these political grotesqueries, is breeding contempt.
Athletes, their unions, and the sports media do not need to speak out for people to see a victorious resistance. As this rebellion grows, some athletes will honor and amplify the sacrifices by those fighting creeping fascism. Others will join the reactionary herd. But it seems like most will be silent. And history will not be kind to the people who failed to defend their fans, their teammates, or, in some cases, even their own families.
Dave ZirinDave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.