Trump Demands Return of Redskins, Indians Names

NPR (“Trump threatens to derail Washington Commanders’ new stadium deal over team name“):

President Trump is threatening to derail a plan to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C., for the Washington Commanders football team unless the team changes its name back to the previous name.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should immediately change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account. “There is a big clamoring for this.”

The football team dropped the longtime name in 2020 after many years of criticism that it was racist toward Indigenous people.

Trump also called for the Cleveland Guardians baseball team to change their name back to the Cleveland Indians. That name change was announced in 2021.

“Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” Trump wrote, without offering evidence. “Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”

Suzan Harjo, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes who fought for decades to get the team’s name changed, told NPR in 2022 that the “R-word” was connected to racist attitudes that perpetuated “emotional and physical violence” against Native Americans. “When I was a girl, you barely could make it through your young life without getting attacked by a bunch of white people — whether they were boys or girls or men or women. And they would always go to that word,” she said.

In a later post, Trump threatened to scuttle the Commanders’ plans for a new stadium, which would move the team from its current location in Maryland back to the nation’s capital after renovating an antiquated stadium on federal property.

“I may put a restriction on them if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington,” Trump wrote.

AP (“Trump threatens to hold up stadium deal if Washington Commanders don’t switch back to Redskins“) adds:

Trump said the Washington football team would be “much more valuable” if it restored its old name.

[…]

His latest interest in changing the name reflects his broader effort to roll back changes that followed a national debate on cultural sensitivity and racial justice. The team announced it would drop the Redskins name and the Indian head logo in 2020 during a broader reckoning with systemic racism and police brutality.

The Commanders and the District of Columbia government announced a deal earlier this year to build a new home for the football team at the site the old RFK Stadium, the place the franchise called home for more than three decades.

Trump’s ability to hold up the deal remains to be seen. President Joe Biden signed a bill in January that transferred the land from the federal government to the District of Columbia.

The provision was part of a short-term spending bill passed by Congress in December. While D.C. residents elect a mayor, a city council and commissioners to run day-to-day operations, Congress maintains control of the city’s budget.

Josh Harris, whose group bought the Commanders from former owner Dan Snyder in 2023, said earlier this year the name was here to stay. Not long after taking over, Harris quieted speculation about going back to Redskins, saying that would not happen. The team did not immediately respond to a request for comment following Trump’s statement.

[…]

The Cleveland Guardians’ president of baseball operations, Chris Antonetti, indicated before Sunday’s game against the Athletics that there weren’t any plans to revisit the name change.

“We understand there are different perspectives on the decision we made a few years ago, but obviously it’s a decision we made. We’ve got the opportunity to build a brand as the Guardians over the last four years and are excited about the future that’s in front of us,” he said.

This move is of a piece with the move to undo the Biden administration’s renaming (pursuant to an Act of Congress) of American military bases named after Confederate leaders. And I think the motivations are similar.

While it’s possible that outright racism is at work, it seems far more likely to me that two other factors are stronger pulls. First, the moves were made under pressure from the political left and seen by many on the right as an attack on American history. The names have been around a long time, after all, and generations of soldiers served on those bases and/or cheered for those teams. Second—and relatedly—there’s just an inherent resistance to chance. Why, the team was always called “the Redskins” and the bases were always called “Bragg” and “Benning,” and changing to new names is just disconcerting.

Indeed, I was pretty slow to embrace the changes for those last two reasons—which are more emotional than rational. I’m a longtime Cowboys fan, and the Redskins/Football Team/Commanders have been our rival since before I was born. “Redskins” evoked that team, not an old-timey racial slur. And, as I’ve noted many times, despite having trained on both Fort Benning (Airborne School) and Fort Rucker (Air Assault School), I didn’t even know who they were named after; they were just part of my personal history.

It’s all pretty silly, really. The fact of the matter is that a large number of Americans found the old/new names personally insulting to their heritage. Regardless of how one might justify it, naming Army bases after those who fought to preserve slavery is problematic. Cheering for a team with a cartoon Indian on the helmet or cap is problematic.