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Sports and politics have always existed at a very public intersection in American life, but never was the illusory firewall keeping them apart more nakedly exposed than over the past four years. Donald Trump’s political alchemy has always relied on his uncanny skill at leveraging the fault lines that divide us. It’s proven an essential tactic for someone who managed to capture the Republican presidential nomination despite failing to win a majority in the first 40 primaries and caucuses, who won the White House despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million ballots and whose overall approval ratings have never cracked a majority throughout his term.
From the earliest days of his administration Trump has found fertile ground in taking this fight to America’s last unifying arena: co-opting US sports as not merely a proxy battle in the culture wars that reflect a country’s deep divides, but the primary theatre. He’s always recognized sports as an inextricable stripe of the American experience: from owning a team in the upstart United States Football League in the early 1980s to hosting a series of major prizefights at his casino in Atlantic City before it went bankrupt, most notably the 1988 blockbuster between Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks, for which he paid a then-record $11m site fee. It’s these roots in boxing promotion, where misdirection and the manifold arts of emotional manipulation are the stock-in-trade, that served him particularly well during his stunning ascent to the White House. But it wasn’t until a rally in Alabama nine months into his presidency that he first seized on what became his favorite fountainhead of easy political points.
His sensational broadside on Colin Kaepernick was only the start. Before long Trump was jousting with NBA stars Stephen Curry and LeBron James over his decision to rescind the Golden State Warriors’ unaccepted invitation for the White House visit traditionally extended to championship-winning teams (eliciting the all-time burn from LeBron of “U bum”). He picked a fight with Megan Rapinoe, a proudly gay athlete with a taste for battle whose outspoken political views have made her a lightning rod for conservatives. He launched a baseless attack on Bubba Wallace over an incident this summer in which a noose was found in the team garage of Nascar’s only black driver. When then-ESPN correspondent Jemele Hill tweeted that Trump was “a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists”, Trump clapped back first through the White House press secretary, who declared the comments “a fireable offense”, then doubled down with a name-check on Twitter pegged to Hill’s two-week suspension from the network.
For the first few years it was a cost-free enterprise. The targeted demonization of these so-called elites, almost exclusively from minority or otherwise marginalized communities, was red meat for his base: a white guy talking tough in a country where white guys talking tough is still for many seen as something to be impressed by. It played to our worst instincts and our lowest common denominator. Depressingly, it was good politics.
But a funny thing happened on the way to a re-election that for years felt like a fait accompli given the historical power of the incumbency. With the sports world at a standstill due to the coronavirus pandemic and amid nationwide unrest over the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, the calculus changed. A strategy dependent on the highly instinctive command of thin margins began to tilt against its conductor. The accumulation of the president’s incessant counter-punching led to organization among professional athletes that not only drew attention to social and racial injustice – remember: Kaepernick only wanted to start a conversation – but brought about a high-water point of athlete activism not seen since the 1960s, when champions such as Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Kareem Abdul‑Jabbar risked their livelihoods to stand on the frontline of the civil rights movement.
In June, Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner who three years ago gifted Trump a decisive optical victory when he unveiled a policy requiring every player, coach, trainer, ballboy, referee and executive to stand for the national anthem or face punishment, admitted the decision was wrong in a stunning about-face that was seen as a snub of the US president. Goodell’s mea culpa directly followed a video challenge to the league from some of the NFL’s biggest stars – including Patrick Mahomes, Deshaun Watson and Odell Beckham – who spoke powerfully about the omnipresence of systemic racism against black Americans. More