What’s in a name? For President Donald Trump, enough fodder to stoke the cultural grievances that helped propel him back into office.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump and his administration have rechristened an oceanic basin, a mountain peak, and a naval ship. Now the president has set his sights on a pair of American sports franchises.
The NFL’s Washington Commanders and MLB’s Cleveland Guardians, Trump declared on Sunday, must restore their previous monikers.
“OWNERS,” he posted on Truth Social, “GET IT DONE!!!”
Both teams shed their former names—which were long decried as offensive to Indigenous people—amid a nationwide reckoning over racism and police violence in 2020 that followed the killing of George Floyd. Washington announced that summer that it would drop “Redskins” from its name and ditch the team logo. Later that year, Cleveland said it would do away with its “Indians” nickname.
Trump’s election last year was, in many ways, a reaction to that period, when sweeping protests and reforms aimed at redressing systemic racism sprung up across the country. In his post over the weekend, Trump said, “Times are different now than they were three or four years ago.”
Critics of Native American–themed team names have long employed a similar argument—that they belonged to a different time, one that was less sensitive and respectful to nonwhite cultures. In the fall of 2013, then president Barack Obama voiced concerns about the Redskins name, saying he would “think about changing it” if he were the owner of the team.
Two years later, Obama offered another show of solidarity with the Indigenous community when his administration restored Mount McKinley—the highest mountain peak in North America, named for the 25th president of the United States—to Denali, the name given by the Koyukon Athabascan tribe that translates to “the great one” or “the tall one.”
Trump wasted no time undoing that, signing an executive order on his first day in office in January that changed the name of the peak back to Mount McKinley. Under the title “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness,” the executive order also redesignated the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The administration continued its repudiation of Obama-era politics last month, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the removal of the name of gay civil rights icon Harvey Milk from a naval vessel.
While Trump was able to use his presidential authority to make those changes, it isn’t yet clear what levers he could pull to pressure the Guardians and Commanders to return to their prior nicknames. In a subsequent social media post on Sunday, Trump signaled that he might derail the Commanders’ plans for a new stadium in the District of Columbia unless they restore the Redskins name.
The Commanders formally unveiled the stadium project at a press conference in April, when the team’s controlling owner Josh Harris, DC mayor Muriel Bowser, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell shared details on a new, approximately 65,000-seat venue that is scheduled to open in 2030.
The plans for a new stadium accelerated in early January, when President Joe Biden signed a bill that transferred control of a 174-acre parcel of land—which encompasses the site of the team’s old stomping ground, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium—from the federal government to the city. Whether Trump is able to stymie the project remains to be seen.
