When the Detroit Lions players mimed the Trump Dance after scoring in front of both the president and a houseful of miserable Washington fans last Sunday night, it was hard to know whether they were merely giddy or taunting the locals. But the NFL isn’t known for its sense of irony and shortly afterwards, in contrite mood, wide receiver Amon-Ra St Brown, who led the celebration, said he was inspired by the fact that the president was sitting watching the game in the Fox broadcast booth.
“So, first of all, if I offended anyone, I do apologise. It was just – we were having fun. If any president was at that game, and they had a dance, I would’ve done it.”
The idea of all the American presidents – from Lincoln, to Roosevelt to LBJ and Nixon to Carter – having a signature dance that they would break out whenever the mood took them is intriguing, but almost impossible to imagine. In the age before Trump, the image-makers would have recoiled in horror at the thought of their candidate boogeying on impulse. But Trump has shattered all of the old conventions and restraints, and his slow, fist-pumping dance has become a staple celebration on NFL fields.
Jimmy Carter was the last president to attend a regular-season NFL game, a Monday Night Football occasion, when the Dallas Cowboys visited the Washington Redskins, as they were then known, in RFK stadium in 1978. History never runs in straight lines. In the first few weeks of his return to the White House, Trump pondered the wisdom of restoring the “Redskins” name to the Washington team, from the current Washington Commanders.
More recently ESPN reported that he was dropping heavy hints to the Commanders’ owner that it would please him if they would name their new stadium, set to open in 2030, after him. The $3.7 billion development will be built on the site of the RFK stadium, which has, since 2017, lain idle as a sad and deteriorating relic of better times.
The District of Columbia is to stump up $1 billion, and the project was signed off by Joe Biden on January 6th. Nostalgia and continuity would lean towards sticking with RFK Stadium but as an unnamed White House insider told ESPN, if Trump wants the new place named after him, it’s probably going to happen.
For decades Trump found the NFL a thornier proposition. His attempts to buy the Baltimore Colts were rebuffed in the early 80s. In 1983, when he bought the New Jersey Generals – a football team that played in the doomed United States Football League, conceived as a spring and early summer alternative to the autumn-winter playing schedule of the NFL – Trump immediately tried to leverage it by meeting with commissioner Pete Rozelle to float his true intentions.
“He said to him: I don’t care about the USFL,” said Jeff Pearlman, whose book Football for a Buck is the definitive chronicle on the brief existence of the NFL’s alter-ego.
“I want an NFL franchise. What do I have to do to get in the NFL? Basically offering to throw the USFL under the bus if it meant he could get an NFL team. And Rozelle said to him straight up: as long as I’m commissioner of this league, as long as my family has anything to do with this league, you will never be part of the NFL.”
Undeterred, Trump persuaded other USFL owners to take a lawsuit against the NFL, which they technically won. They were awarded a ceremonious $1, permitting John Mara, owner of the New York Giants, to ceremoniously take his wallet from his jacket, peel off a single dollar bill and hand it to Trump in the courtroom.
Other slights continued – Trump cast an eye over the Dallas Cowboys and decided to pass, telling Ira Berkow of the New York Times: “I feel sorry for the poor guy who is buying them.” Jerry Jones is now worth $21 billion while the Cowboys became known as “America’s Team” in the 1990s and are the wealthiest sports franchise on the planet.
So the NFL was yet another strata of elite American society that refused to permit Donald Trump into its inner circle.
Although a New Yorker, he has been skittish about supporting the local teams and has recently shifted his allegiance from the once mighty Patriots to the Kansas City Chiefs. In short, he likes whichever team is strongest – which has not been true of Washington since 1988. If indeed there is to be a Trump Dome in Washington, it will be the symbol of an NFL team with a rich losing tradition – and a fan base hostile to his presidency. But he need not go to the games. He need not hear the boos. By having the venue bear his name, he will, at last, be planting a flag in the NFL.
Stephen A Smith, the blustery sports broadcaster- who has hinted that he himself may attempt a run for the White House – tells a good yarn about Trump’s final shot at becoming an NFL made man. It was 2014 and the Buffalo Bills were for sale.
“He called me and talked about his desire to own the Bills,” Smith said earlier this year.
“The last time we ever spoke. And he said to me – and I’m quoting – talking about the NFL owners: ‘If them MF-ers get in my way, I’m gonna get ‘em all back. I’m gonna run for president’.”
