Trump wants to force the commanders to return to a racist name. It is unlikely that he can | Washington Commanders

Have not fans of Washington commanders and Cleveland guards suffered sufficiently?

For decades, each team had to bear the twin unworthiness of futility on the ground and out of scope. Until last year, when they experienced a resurgence under the quarter recruit Jayden Daniels, the Washington NFL team won only one eliminatory match in the 21st century. The Cleveland baseball team has been competitive This Century, but they spent 41 years between the appearances in the playoffs (from 1954 to 1995) and came from the end of the “drought whose drought will end?” World Series of 2016, in which the Chicago Cubs won the championship for the first time in 108 years at the expense of Cleveland, whose time without the victory of the World Series is now at 77 years old.

Outside the field, the two teams faced a backlash on their names. Cleveland was known as the Indians until 2022, when a name change into “guards” came into force. Washington had a more disturbing name referring to the Amerindians until they become “the Washington football team” in 2020 and landed on “commanders” from 2022. The commanders took another step forward in 2023, when a consortium led by Josh Harris bought the Dan Snyder team, one of the most insulting team owners NFL. By coincidence – or perhaps not to have given the failures of Snyder – the commanders reached the conference championship last season for the first time since 1991.

But Donald Trump, whose quest to make intellectual and public courses miserable is a cornerstone of his presidency, decided that these two fans needed more suffering. On Sunday, he insisted on social networks that the teams should recover the names they abandoned after decades of pressure. His reasoning, as far as he could be discerned from his typically consciousness post, was that changing the names would be respectful towards the many Amerindians who found them offensive in the first place. “Our great Indians, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their inheritance and their prestige are systematically removed from them,” wrote Trump.

The first thing to say is that Trump often decides to pull a large in sports, when he seeks to distract other problems, going up his base or target groups for which he has contempt. See, for example, his attacks on the American national women’s team, the black players of the NFL who kneeling for the national anthem or the transgender athletes.

The second thing to say is that Trump is unlikely to get anywhere with his requests.

The guards immediately crushed any notion of return to the “Indians”, and Trump has no leverage to force them to make his auctions. The situation of the commanders is a little more complicated, but it is unlikely that Trump will prevail there.

Trump has suggested that it would force commanders to return to their old racist name if they want to be allowed to return to the District of Columbia from their current home in the suburbs of Maryland. The problem is that Joe Biden, during his last weeks as a American president, has signed a bill transferring the site in question of the federal government to the government of the city of DC. With the exception of creative legal maneuvers, the most of Trump could do would be to attack the municipal government on other fronts as an indirect way of putting pressure on commanders.

The new Potential House of the team at DC is occupied by the decomposition ruins of the RFK Stadium, where the team now known as commanders played from 1961 to 1996. The Nationals of Washington also played there from 2005 to 2007, when the Nationals Park was completed. Apart from that, the stadium was the home of DC United in Major League Soccer and other football events until 2017, when DC United moved to his new house in Audi Field. Even before United moved, the stadium was renowned for its decrepit state, although rates washer sometimes found it hospital.

The RFK stadium, however, had a lot to do. He was appointed for Robert F Kennedy, an eminent attorney general who could well have been elected president in 1968 if he had not been murdered during the campaign. The stadium had history. It was also an easy walk from a metro station.

The current household house, now known as Northwest Stadium, is nothing of these things. It is a stadium without charm, notable victories of the team at home and good transport options – even according to the standards of a city with brutalist architecture, sporadically successful sports teams and traffic obstacles. Shortly before his death, the owner of the owner of the time, Kent Cooke, convinced the American postal service to accept that the postal code of the stadium would be known as “Raljon” places, a combination of the names of his sons (Ralph and John), producing that the columnist of Washington Post, Tony Kornheiser.

At one point, the Washington NFL team had a long waiting list for seasonal tickets. Although the number of people on this waiting list at any time is strongly disputed, it is certainly true that the typical fan could not simply buy subscriptions without spending a few years waiting for the occasion. At the end of the reign of Snyder, even with the capacity of the northwest of the stadium from 91,000 to around 62,000, the waiting list no longer existed.

Thus, a return to the old RFK site would be very attractive for commanders and their fans. But they also have other options in the suburbs and exurves, and even without presidential opposition, some local politicians have raised objections to the proposed investment of $ 1 billion in the city in a new stadium.

And this question brings back to the federal government – which has the power to force DC to reduce its budget, even if local tax revenues are sufficient to cover it – and sometimes threaten to do so.

Thus, Trump and his allies in Congress could, in theory, reduce the DC budget of spite if the commanders refuse to change their name. But name changes and stadium development take a long time, and the clock on Trump’s mandate in office is running. By any other name, the Washington football team had been in the Metropolitan region of DC for almost 80 years before the arrival of Trump, and it will be long after having suitable for Mar-A-Lago or another destination for good.