Trump Should Kill Commanders Stadium Deal, but Not Because of the Team's Name
If Trump kills the deal over the team changing its name, he'd be doing the right thing but in perhaps the most corrupt possible way.
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump weighed in on an issue somewhat outside his purview as commander in chief: the name of his local professional football team.
In social media posts, Trump threatened to terminate a deal for a new stadium unless the NFL franchise in the Washington, D.C., area changed its name back to the one he prefers. Ironically, if he did scuttle the stadium deal, Trump would be doing the right thing, but in perhaps the most corrupt way possible.
"The Washington 'Whatever's' should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this," the president posted on Truth Social on Sunday. "Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them."
"My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way," he added hours later. "I may put a restriction on them that 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. The Team would be much more valuable, and the Deal would be more exciting for everyone."
In July 2020, the Washington Redskins football team announced that it would change its name. The name had been a source of controversy for years, often seen as a racial slur against Native Americans—though even that claim was itself a point of contention. A 2016 poll in The Washington Post found that 90 percent of Native Americans did not find the name offensive, though a survey in 2020 published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that while about half of Native Americans were offended by the name, it rose to 67 percent among those most heavily engaged with their heritage and tribal custom.
There is even a Wikipedia page dedicated to "Washington Redskins name opinion polls."
The team revealed its new name, the Commanders, in 2022. At that time, Cleveland's baseball team—which for more than a century had been known as the Indians, and whose longtime mascot was the offensively crimson caricature Chief Wahoo—had recently renamed itself the Guardians.
"They name teams out of STRENGTH, not weakness," Trump complained in 2020, "but now the Washington Redskins & Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they are going to be changing their names in order to be politically correct."
Admittedly, "Commanders" and "Guardians" aren't exactly inspired choices—personally, I prefer the time in between when the Commanders were known as the Washington Football Team.
Still, the decisions were made, and there were no signs of retreat. Earlier this year, Commanders owner Josh Harris said the name would stay. And over the weekend, Cleveland Guardians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti said the same about his team, adding, "We've gotten the opportunity to build the brand as the Guardians over the last four years and are excited about the future."
But Trump seems to feel he has a bargaining chip to force the Commanders to bend to his will.
Earlier this year, the NFL and the Washington, D.C., government announced plans to build a new Commanders stadium within the city, on the site of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, which has been slated for demolition since 2019; the Commanders' current facility is located in suburban Maryland. The project would cost an estimated $3.7 billion, of which the Commanders would contribute $2.7 billion and the district would kick in the remaining $1 billion.
But even apart from giving away $1 billion of district taxpayers' money to a sports team whose owner is worth more than 10 times that amount, the deal is a bad one.
The district will own the site and lease it to the team, "but the way these deals are written, the owner of the stadium gets to keep all the revenues and avoid all the taxes," Kennesaw State University professor J.C. Bradbury told Reason's Jason Russell. "That is valuable real estate that would be more valuable doing something else."
Indeed, stadium subsidies are a bad deal for the cities and states that make them. "Studies conclusively show subsidies create little to no new jobs and open gaping wounds to public finances," Americans for Prosperity wrote last year. "The fancy new stadiums might be a good deal for the teams and politicians who voted for the funding, but they are a terrible deal for taxpayers."
"Sports stadium subsidies are salient political gimmicks designed to appear as if politicians are providing tangible benefits to taxpayers," agreed Adam Hoffer, Joseph Johns, and Craig Depken of the Tax Foundation. "The empirical evidence shows repeatedly that stadium subsidies fail to generate new tax revenue and new jobs or attract new businesses."
As Russell noted when the deal was announced, Trump was a fan, posting on social media that it was "a HUGE WIN for Washington, D.C., and for the Team's incredible fan base" that would "boost Economic Development, create more Jobs and, hopefully, lead to less Crime in the area."
Now, as both local and national lawmakers are pressuring the D.C. Council to approve the deal quickly, Trump appears willing to scrap it altogether.
But Trump is not opposing subsidies for the Commanders' new stadium because he has wised up to the economic case against public funding for private projects.
No, Trump opposes the project—in his telling—because the Commanders dared defy his wishes by switching the team's name to one he doesn't like as much. It's a completely inappropriate use of his authority as commander in chief, wielding the bully pulpit to punish people or corporations that have personally offended him.
Then again, it's perfectly in line with the way he has operated since returning to office in January. This week, the Trump administration will appear in court to defend its decision to cut billions of dollars in research grants for Harvard University—not because Trump prefers federal fiscal rectitude, but because Harvard won't bend to his demands to police its applicants' speech.
Trump has also issued numerous executive orders designed to hurt or kill law firms that took cases against him or employed attorneys he did not like. Days ago, he filed a lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over a story it ran, and he recently concluded a lawsuit against Paramount that would rightly have been laughed out of court, but for his administration's ability to tie up that company's pending merger.
True to form, Trump managed to pick perhaps the single most corrupt and least defensible reason for opposing a deal that, at its heart, involves giving at least $1 billion in taxpayer money to an NFL franchise that could easily afford it.
