Lately, it seems Donald Trump’s scope of interests has narrowed to a few things: remaking downtown Washington DC in his gaudy image; wars he thinks he can win quickly and easily, even though he can’t.
Also, golf. Always golf. Ever golf.
We hear less and less about Trump’s plans to overhaul healthcare, reshore manufacturing jobs or address the budget deficit. Yet one other subject, aligned with his lifelong interests, continues to preoccupy him: sports.
And in this area, his ideological project has methodically and loudly – since nothing of consequence can ever be done quietly by this administration – made more gains than just about anywhere else.
Which is to say that Trump, or more likely those seeking to swim in the slipstream of Trumpism, are hard at work trying to put sports back to how it looked in the 1980s. After all, that’s when the president’s view of the world, and how it should function, ossified.
This manifests in ways big and small, in consequences intended and accidental.
Here’s a relatively small and surely accidental one. When Los Angeles FC sold Venezuela international David Martínez to Denmark’s FC Midtjylland for $8.4m recently, the club did not do so for sporting reasons – or not entirely. The winger, named to the Guardian’s 2023 Next Generation class, had difficulty adapting to life in Los Angeles after arriving as an 18-year-old because his family couldn’t get visas to visit him, according to the club.
If Trump and his goons had even heard of the now-20-year-old, which they almost certainly hadn’t, he would have hardly been a top target of their policies. But that they have driven him to leave the country will would satisfy them all the same. This is exactly what the administration’s travel bans and curbs on visas were intended to achieve: to put people off coming to the US, or staying here.
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Then there’s the big stuff.
The rolling campaign to “save” women’s sports from transgender athletes, who exist in vanishingly small numbers and are far from the threat those on the right would have you believe. This panic is propagated by a rabble who very proudly didn’t care about women’s sports at all until they spotted an opening to make a political profit from it.
Trump’s looming presence over the summer’s World Cup, and his active interference in it. His attendance at the NBA finals, the Daytona 500 and the Ryder Cup, appearances that seemed to curse his favored participants.
There’s the executive order attempting to unwind the decades-overdue gains made by college athletes in winning the right to be treated like every other American worker. They can finally be paid for their valuable labor and move (almost) freely between programs in search of the best opportunities – same as their coaches and administrators have always been able to do.
Foreign students and college athletes, meanwhile, find it harder and less attractive to come to and stay in the US on account of the same difficulties in bagging visas that chased off Martínez. That makes college sports more homogeneous and therefore, in Trump’s thinking, better.
In trying to rearrange things to how they once were – the exact moment in the past when things were great; a time that nobody can seem to pinpoint, but which you’ll no doubt remember with searing clarity – Trump has even gone so far as to issue an executive order to try to protect the Army-Navy football game’s exclusive TV time slot. The College Football Playoff’s lurching expansion threatened to creep into the second Saturday of December, traditionally and legally set aside for the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy.
“Such scheduling conflicts weaken the national focus on our Military Service Academies and detract from a morale-building event of vital interest to the Department of War,” the order reads.
Also apparently intended as a morale-building event was the much-panned UFC event on the White House lawn to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary, and, more pressingly, Trump’s 80th birthday. The first professional sporting event on the White House grounds managed to lose $30m, even though the fighters were apparently paid at least partly in cryptocurrency issued by a Trump company.
When he sensed he would be met by a friendly crowd, Trump became the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. In the same spirit, he traveled to a World Series game in 2021, when he was out of power, just to do the racist tomahawk chop with Atlanta Braves fans.
He more or less ordered an IndyCar race to be held in DC, the Freedom 250, which was well attended but severely disrupted car and plane traffic in the capital. The awkward layout of the course, meanwhile, meant that nearly half the cars didn’t finish all the laps. No matter, Trump took a lap around the track in his presidential limousine. With no other cars on the road, he finished first.
Then there are the unprovoked and untethered broadsides. Such as the time Trump suggested the National Football League change its name to accommodate soccer. Or suggested LeBron James was a racist because he doesn’t play golf with the president. Or when he plunged a cleaver into the culture war prime cuts of restoring the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians to their old, racist names.
Several of Trump’s golf courses have hosted events staged by LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed breakaway golf circuit that appears to be on life support. If it should croak, it would share this distinction with the last sporting venture that Trump was intimately entangled with: the New Jersey Generals of the old United States Football League. Trump, who owned the franchise, bungled it into bankruptcy and took the entire league down with him.
Yet the lesson that has stuck with him since childhood is that sports holds a privileged place in our national conscience, and that it serves as a powerful messaging conduit. Now, as president, his efforts have hardly been concerted or coordinated, but sports is the rare topic where Trump has succeeded in shifting the conversation to his preferred terms.
