Trump Demands Return of Redskins, Indians Names
A strange fixaton.
NPR (“Trump threatens to derail Washington Commanders’ new stadium deal over team name“):
President Trump is threatening to derail a plan to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C., for the Washington Commanders football team unless the team changes its name back to the previous name.
“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should immediately change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account. “There is a big clamoring for this.”
The football team dropped the longtime name in 2020 after many years of criticism that it was racist toward Indigenous people.
Trump also called for the Cleveland Guardians baseball team to change their name back to the Cleveland Indians. That name change was announced in 2021.
“Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” Trump wrote, without offering evidence. “Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”
Suzan Harjo, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes who fought for decades to get the team’s name changed, told NPR in 2022 that the “R-word” was connected to racist attitudes that perpetuated “emotional and physical violence” against Native Americans. “When I was a girl, you barely could make it through your young life without getting attacked by a bunch of white people — whether they were boys or girls or men or women. And they would always go to that word,” she said.
In a later post, Trump threatened to scuttle the Commanders’ plans for a new stadium, which would move the team from its current location in Maryland back to the nation’s capital after renovating an antiquated stadium on federal property.
“I may put a restriction on them if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington,” Trump wrote.
AP (“Trump threatens to hold up stadium deal if Washington Commanders don’t switch back to Redskins“) adds:
Trump said the Washington football team would be “much more valuable” if it restored its old name.
[…]
His latest interest in changing the name reflects his broader effort to roll back changes that followed a national debate on cultural sensitivity and racial justice. The team announced it would drop the Redskins name and the Indian head logo in 2020 during a broader reckoning with systemic racism and police brutality.
The Commanders and the District of Columbia government announced a deal earlier this year to build a new home for the football team at the site the old RFK Stadium, the place the franchise called home for more than three decades.
Trump’s ability to hold up the deal remains to be seen. President Joe Biden signed a bill in January that transferred the land from the federal government to the District of Columbia.
The provision was part of a short-term spending bill passed by Congress in December. While D.C. residents elect a mayor, a city council and commissioners to run day-to-day operations, Congress maintains control of the city’s budget.
Josh Harris, whose group bought the Commanders from former owner Dan Snyder in 2023, said earlier this year the name was here to stay. Not long after taking over, Harris quieted speculation about going back to Redskins, saying that would not happen. The team did not immediately respond to a request for comment following Trump’s statement.
[…]
The Cleveland Guardians’ president of baseball operations, Chris Antonetti, indicated before Sunday’s game against the Athletics that there weren’t any plans to revisit the name change.
“We understand there are different perspectives on the decision we made a few years ago, but obviously it’s a decision we made. We’ve got the opportunity to build a brand as the Guardians over the last four years and are excited about the future that’s in front of us,” he said.
This move is of a piece with the move to undo the Biden administration’s renaming (pursuant to an Act of Congress) of American military bases named after Confederate leaders. And I think the motivations are similar.
While it’s possible that outright racism is at work, it seems far more likely to me that two other factors are stronger pulls. First, the moves were made under pressure from the political left and seen by many on the right as an attack on American history. The names have been around a long time, after all, and generations of soldiers served on those bases and/or cheered for those teams. Second—and relatedly—there’s just an inherent resistance to chance. Why, the team was always called “the Redskins” and the bases were always called “Bragg” and “Benning,” and changing to new names is just disconcerting.
Indeed, I was pretty slow to embrace the changes for those last two reasons—which are more emotional than rational. I’m a longtime Cowboys fan, and the Redskins/Football Team/Commanders have been our rival since before I was born. “Redskins” evoked that team, not an old-timey racial slur. And, as I’ve noted many times, despite having trained on both Fort Benning (Airborne School) and Fort Rucker (Air Assault School), I didn’t even know who they were named after; they were just part of my personal history.
It’s all pretty silly, really. The fact of the matter is that a large number of Americans found the old/new names personally insulting to their heritage. Regardless of how one might justify it, naming Army bases after those who fought to preserve slavery is problematic. Cheering for a team with a cartoon Indian on the helmet or cap is problematic.
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Typical of today’s Republicans – they complain when their football team names are insufficiently racist, just like when their pancake syrup isn’t offensive enough.
The most important thing about this story is that Trump and Epstein may have raped children together, and now Trump is trying to cover it up with distracting nonsense.
It’s a greatest hits version of every single minor grievance that right-wing culture whiners have had issue with over the years. I don’t know if the issue is to distract from Epstein, or if this is just the stuff he understands and so gets fixated on it, but it’s really eye-rolling.
Bread and Circuses. I am surprised he is not demanding the Syracuse Orange return to the name Orangemen…Those his people! I facepalm daily nowadays
The only responsible answer to to issue a big FU as loudly and as obnoxiously as possible.
What’s next from this administration? Directions from the Dept of Education to teach Peter Pan as literature in the lower elementary grades with the musical add-on sing along, “What Makes the Red Man Red?
Is there any lane this asshat won’t drive in?
@Jc:
How about Stanford? Their sports teams used to be known as the Indians.
@Joe:
Self checkout or 10 items or less?
As there is always a tweet, Trump was against Presidents getting involved in renaming football teams before he was for it:
In Obama’s case, he stated a few times that the name should be changed but, as far as I can tell, didn’t apply direct pressure like this: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/259331-obama-teams-should-drop-native-american-mascots/
In his defense, Trump was always against the name change:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/10/05/trump-and-bush-find-common-ground-on-washingtons-football-team/
WRT to the racism component, again, I think this is all impact versus intent. It doesn’t matter if Trump is a racist–the name is now considered a slur within much of the Native American community. Wanting to return to it, even out of tradition, is moving in a racist/White Supremacy* direction.
— * White Supremacy here meaning that the feelings and opinions of White folks are ultimately what matter the most.
With every passing day Trump resembles Victor Orban less, and Col. Emilio Vargas more…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV4N2dk0cMk
How about renaming it the Washing Tacos instead?
@Kathy:
GMTA. I said the exact same thing at Political Wire last night. Which leads me to suspect thousands of people right now are independently coming up with the same joke, and it’ll probably be on one of the late-night monologues before long.
Back in 2022 during the infamous meeting with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-lago, I posted a comment at Political Wire that went like this: A Nazi, a white supremacist, and an anti-Semite walk into a bar, and the bartender says, “Here’s your Diet Coke, Donald.” Just a few hours later, a video from the Daily Show appeared on YouTube in which Trevor Noah used the exact same joke. For the briefest of moments my mind drifted to the idea that the Daily Show writers were scouring Political Wire for jokes to steal from anonymous commenters.
More likely, some jokes are just so obvious they practically write themselves.
I kind of feel like this whole episode can be summed up as “Look over there!”
@Tony W:
Yup, he is in distraction mode big time. I think of all the stories out there connecting Trump to Epstein the WSJ one got to him the most. The WSJ is one of the most respectable newspapers around, and it is most assuredly not a newspaper associated with the left, aka, the Deep State so he can’t just attach a lame nickname to the WSJ for reporting this story and let that disseminate through the right wing infosphere as a means to make the story yesterday’s news.
The Epstein story is not going away.
Regarding the subject of this actual post, not a sports guy but honestly, in the grand scheme of things I can care less that Trump wants the sports teams to revert to their old names. I want the media to move quickly past this distraction and continue to beat the drums about Epstein and Trump having once been pretty much BFF’s.
In Washington DC the head of the federal government, President Trump, wants to force professional sports teams to use the names he favors.
In Illinois the state government is trying to get Freeburg IL High School to drop the use of Midgets as their mascot.
Freeburg mascot fight in Springfield
@Kylopod:
The Taco thing seems incredibly obvious to me.
And for that we have Wall St. to thank. otherwise I’d have gone with something less obvious like the Washington Orange Crackers, or maybe the Washington Orange Douchebags.
Its another datapoint that MAGA is primarily concerned with soothing the wounded egos of white males, primarily of the Boomer generation.
@Kathy:
Voting by Blog is so easy.
Count me in for ‘Washington Orange Douchebags’
Thank you.
It is just another clear an example that he is a reactionary
And I think it is also a celebration of racism. His image of Indian is old school white people talk. It is all a show of racial dominance: the way white people talked about all of these issues in the 1950s is the way it should always be.
And BTW: I would love all the alleged “small/limited government” types to explain how they can support POTUS weighing in on local politics/private business decisions.
@al Ameda:
The Washington Draft Dodgers
The Washington Bone Spurs
The Washington Orange Grifters
The Washington Epstein’s Besties
The Washington Orange Crypto$
The Washington Orange Liar$
The Washington Pinocchios
And last but not least The Washington Orange Clap
@Steven L. Taylor:
Hypocrisy mixed with doublethink is a hell of a drug.
@Steven L. Taylor: it’s more of a small and petty government.
Hopefully Washington ownership has learned a lesson from Colombia/ABC/Law firms etc about giving it to Trump’s demands. I would like to hear a statement from Josh Harris along the lines of “We don’t take advice from a guy who drove a professional football league into the ground all by himself, and who is on record as hating the modern NFL”
Ignore this. He’s trolling.
In her substack today, Heather Cox Richardson cites several examples of people in social media, and elsewhere, using the various distractions to turn attention back to the Epstein clusterf**k.
For instance: ” “The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump(sic) is on the Epstein list,” one social media user wrote.”
I find this clever and worthy of emulation.
Dr. Novella’s skeptical take on the Epstein Clusterfu*k.
He goes descriptive and concludes with:
I’m kind of leaning that way, too, for one simple reason: this is not the first time El Taco wants to hide something. Remember his tax returns? When they leaked, what happened? There was no grand revelation.
But there’s the matter of El Taco’s long friendship with Epstein, and his known, and legally adjudicated, proclivity for sexual assault and harassment. So, his name might come up, perhaps frequently, even if this doesn’t implicate him.
Novella errs a bit by claiming positive knowledge from negative information. Specifically that the Biden administration did not release the Epstein files. I can think of many reasons for this, not necessarily that there’s nothing in them to damage El Taco. Partly, too, I think there was the Maxwell criminal case pending, which was insatiately related to Epstein’s case. A responsible DOJ would not want to poison the jury pool with prejudice.
It would also have been highly unethical to release the files, or even to leak selected portions, because they were damaging to EL Taco politically. But we don’t know what’s in them. Remember the dinosaurs on Venus.
One might be tempted to add surely there wasn’t anything to criminally implicate EL Taco, right? Otherwise the DOJ under Biden would have moved to prosecute him?
Yeah, remember who was in charge. The poster child for negative speed.
Following in the tradition of renaming bases back to their Confederate names with a fig leaf of naming them after someone with the same name, I propose the Washington DC football team name themselves after Redskin Potatoes.
Go Taters!
I demand that Trump immediately change his name back to Drumpf, the way it should be. Our great German-American people, in massive numbers, want this to happen.
@Gustopher:
Please. “Go Spuds!”
@Kathy:
My favorite completely unfounded argument on this is that Hunter Biden is in them. MAGA has been very well trained to respond to the words “Hunter Biden,” and it makes them so conflicted.
And notice that Biden’s autopenned pardon of his son is so broad that would cover any federal charges including sex trafficking. You really have to wonder why Trump is covering for Hunter. The two parties really are the same.
Well if were going back to original names, how about the GULF OF MEXICO!
I think we can all TOTALLY get the reason for this:
Because it’s the Washington Don’t-Pay-Attention-To-The-Epstein-Thing team.
And the Cleveland Hope-MAGA-Has-A-Short-Attention-Span team.
After all, President Hope-They-Don’t-Realize-That-My-Name-IS-The-List has to give the loyal Americans what they want.