Trump's racist name games are straight out of a totalitarian playbook

San Francisco Chronicle​

23-07-2025

At the beginning of any totalitarian regime, alteration of the past is a top priority, and President Donald Trump's first six months in office seem to be no exception.
This week, Trump called for the team names of the Washington Commanders and the Cleveland Guardians to be restored to the Redskins and the Indians, complete with the resurrection of the old Indians' mascot/logo Chief Wahoo, a thoroughly racist caricature.
'The Washington 'Whatever's' should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,' Trump wrote in a social media post that seemed designed to distract America's attention away from Jeffrey Epstein, adding, 'Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!'
The owners, of course, won't get it done. They know how that would play out after their multimillion-dollar rebranding efforts. As for Native Americans clamoring for going back in time, I'd like to see the polling on that assertion.
Oh, wait, a 2020 poll of Native Americans by UC Berkeley and University of Michigan researchers found that half believed the name 'Redskins' offensive, while 65% said they found the 'tomahawk chop' stadium gesture at odds with, you know, not being a racist.
No doubt Trump has conducted his own poll because he went further, vowing to block the Commanders from building a new stadium in the nation's capital if the team's owner refuses to make their racist name great again.
That threat to billionaire Commanders owner Josh Harris — who also has a stake in the NBA's Philadelphia 76ers and the NHL's New Jersey Devils — comes as his football team is scheduled to move back to the District of Columbia and a new stadium in 2030.
But after a decades-long pressure campaign that resulted in the 2021 name change, reverting to the old one will likely prove more difficult than repainting an end-zone logo.
Trump is also very offended that the name of Cleveland's baseball team no longer offends so many people and is pressuring the owners of the team formerly known as the Indians to re-offend.
So far, that doesn't seem likely.
'Not something I'm tracking or have been paying a lot of attention to, but I would say generally I understand that there are very different perspectives on the decision we made a few years ago,' Guardians President of Baseball Operations Chris Antonetti said. 'But obviously it's a decision we've made and we've gotten the opportunity to build the brand as the Guardians over the past four years and are excited about the future.'
Trump's pressing the issue of sports team names is part of a larger rebranding offensive designed to take the country back to the bad old days.
When Trump isn't threatening the NFL, MLB and network late-night talk show hosts, he's been busy erasing U.S. Army base names and renaming U.S. Navy ship names he doesn't like.
After the George Floyd murder in 2020, Congress voted to change seven Army bases named after Confederate generals, most prominently Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Benning in Georgia.
Braxton Bragg was regarded as one of the most incompetent rebel generals, but he happened to be from North Carolina, and Henry Louis Benning was a leading white supremacist who once said, 'If things are allowed to go on as they are … we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it supposed that the white race will stand for that?'
Our terribly clever secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, used a fascinatingly cute gambit to restore the base names: He found soldiers who had a connection to the bases while sharing their old names. Goodbye, Braxton Bragg, hello Roland Bragg, a World War II paratrooper.
Sen. Angus King, the Independent from Maine, told Hegseth the bases were named for 'people who took up arms against their country on behalf of slavery,' which didn't seem to faze the former Fox News weekend analyst.
'There is a legacy, a connection' for older U.S. Army veterans, Hegseth countered, to which King responded that his answer and actions were 'an insult to the people of the United States.'
Throw in the recent decision by Trump and Hegseth to change U.S. Navy ship names, most prominently those named after the late San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the late civil rights icon, Rep. John Lewis, and the at-best thinly disguised pattern is laid bare.
Want more? The Pentagon's pogrom/purge of alleged DEI promotion in its online presence and libraries initially wiped out any mention of Navajo Code talkers or the Tuskegee Airmen, a far greater affront than any sports franchise name.
All of this adds up to more than a diversion from the Epstein case.
If they do, we're history.