It is now confirmed that Donald Trump — presiding over a nation where many people are living without food and medical assistance, and many are snatched off of streetcorners by federal agents who cover their faces in shame — now wishes to discuss professional football and how the game should aggrandize his name.
He would like the new stadium in D.C. planned for the pro football Washington Commanders to be named “the Donald J. Trump Stadium.”
“It’s what the president wants, and it will probably happen,” a White House official told ESPN, which first reported the stadium story.
Here is a better idea.
Instead of naming the entire ballpark after Trump, why not just name a men’s room after him? Call it “The Donald J. Trump Room.”
I say this not only with disrespect for a man who would spend millions to party like Gatsby at Mar-a-Lago and build a White House ballroom while many go hungry. I say it also with a sense of history.
After all, when John Unitas owned his Golden Arm Restaurant on York Road, he plastered a name plate on the men’s lavatory which stayed there for years: “The Robert Irsay Room.”
Trump is a man who can’t see a product without wanting to slap his name onto it: Trump Tower, Trump Plaza, Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Shuttle, Trump Vodka, Trump Taj Mahal and the Trump Ballroom.
There’s even talk of a monumental arch across from Washington’s Lincoln Memorial, much like France’s Arc de Triumph, this one to be dubbed the Arc de Trump.
The new Washington football stadium would be part of an arrangement, announced last April, that the Commanders will return in 2030 to the nation’s capital from their current ballpark in Landover to the site of the old Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, where the former Redskins team played for about three decades and won three Super Bowl championships.
But three months after the stadium deal was announced, Trump tried to kill it. He insisted the team first change its name back to where it used to be — from Commanders to Redskins, a name considered offensive to Native Americans.
If the mix of football and racial politics seems a little strange, consider a brief history of Washington ballparks.
The original Redskins were the last of the National Football League teams to integrate. Their owner, George Preston Marshall, wanted it to remain segregated. He was forced to integrate in 1962 when the John F. Kennedy administration applied pressure.
Marshall wanted a new ballpark, to be located on D.C. federal land. Kennedy’s secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, issued an ultimatum to Marshall: Either you integrate your football team, or you don’t get a new ballpark.
Marshall said he wouldn’t do it. The Kennedy administration stood firm. Marshall slowly changed his mind. He started drafting Black players, and he traded for receiver Bobby Mitchell. All Mitchell did was make the pro football Hall of Fame.
That combination of sports and politics played along lines of sheer morality. This gesture of naming a ballpark for Donald Trump plays along the now-familiar lines of one man’s egomania.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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