Sleight of Trump: Forget Epstein! Get rid of ‘Commanders'!

Washington Post

22-07-2025

When the going gets rough, the distracter in chief cracks open a box of oldies but goodies and cranks up the loudspeakers. Donald Trump's long relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — a friendship that he once embraced and now denies — has become enough of a problem that the president is stealing a page from his enemies on the woke left: He's demanding control over what words Americans use.
The same president who stirs his fans at rallies with denunciations of the left's absurd insistence on language purity — 'pregnant people,' 'Latinx,' 'my pronouns' — insisted on Sunday that sports teams that had erased their Indian names now revert to those once-beloved monikers. The Washington Commanders must be the Redskins again, he said, and the Cleveland Guardians must reclaim the Indians name.
Trump grabbed center stage this time by deciding that he might just have the leverage to force the Washington football franchise and its fans to endure a third name change in five years.
In D.C. politics, all roads lead to stadiums, and just as a gung ho Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), a vaguely reluctant D.C. Council and a rabidly pro-stadium Republican Congress head into the endgame on a $3.7 billion deal to build a sports complex on the old RFK site, along comes the leader of the free world, playing municipal mischief-maker because he needed a nicely meaningless, divisive distraction.
It's clearly bothering Trump that 'nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics' who are seeking 'more, more, more' Epstein revelations, as the president posted over the weekend. He tried announcing that Coke was putting the sugar back in its soda (yay!), but that bought him only a few hours of attention. He tried touting his '6 Months of Winning.' He sued the Wall Street Journal for reporting on his alleged bawdy tribute to Epstein. Nothing quieted the Epstein furor.
When in doubt, Trump loves to dive into sports controversies. This is the guy who jumped into the fray when NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee rather than honor the national anthem, called on NFL owners to tell protesting players to 'get that son of a b---- off the field right now,' and uninvited Stephen Curry to the White House because the NBA star was less than enthusiastic about making a visit.
Trump's resentments against sports leagues stem from his failed efforts decades ago to buy an NFL franchise — perhaps the longest-running case of Trump yearning to join a club that simply would not have him.
Now, he threatens to slam the brakes on this summer's stadium drama in the District: Change the name or 'I won't make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington,' the president commanded.
Never mind that Trump praised the RFK site as the right solution for the Commanders less than two weeks before his latest threat. And never mind that the stadium deal involves zero role for the president. Congress and President Joe Biden already transferred the land around the old RFK Stadium to the city. Yes, Congress could theoretically try to reverse that action, and obviously Trump believes (with some reason, given the events of this year) that he can order Congress to do whatever he wants. Still, by ordinary rules, that would be a stretch.
But we are not operating under ordinary rules. Trump's favorite power mode is rule by decree. There's a convoluted scenario in which the president could use appointees on the Commission on Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission to block the stadium for years.
Trump clearly believes he has the people behind him. 'Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,' he posted. 'Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago,' when the Commanders and Guardians adopted their new names. 'MAKE INDIANS GREAT AGAIN (MIGA)!'
He's right about Indians' preferences. As a Post poll found before the name change, 9 in 10 Indians said they were not offended by the Redskins name. Recently, though, fans seem to have resigned themselves to the cumbersome 'Commanders' name, which team owner Josh Harris said this year is 'now being embraced by our team, by our culture, by our coaching staff.' A Washington Post-Schar School poll this spring found that 50 percent of local residents — and 62 percent of Commanders fans — either 'like' or 'love' the name. A winning season and a couple of playoff victories heal many wounds.
Many older fans miss the days of Chief Wahoo in Cleveland, Chief Noc-a-Homa in his outfield tepee in Atlanta and the various Indian tribute names attached to teams across the country. And there's still no consensus on what to do with such names: The Redskins and Indians are gone, but the Kansas City Chiefs, Atlanta Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, and numerous other school and minor league team names remain.
This is one of the oldest pages in the Trump playbook. He has spent half a century working to connect to the passions of sports fans. Mix in some nostalgia for the way things used to be, a dash of grudge against those who seek to inject a modern political sensibility into sports, and a sprinkle of threats and outrage — it's a surefire recipe for attention.
But it's not enough to box out the Epstein scandal, which features even more quintessentially Trumpian elements (conspiracies, sex, class resentments, dark powers.) Surely, Trump knows that.