One of the great things about being an elected official, and more specifically about being president of the United States, and still more specifically about being Donald Trump, is that you can influence news reporting just by blurting out any half-formed thoughts that cross your mind, then watching as reporters reprint them and then ask other elected officials — and sometimes even regular people — to respond to them. It really is a superpower, and it’s one that’s entirely bestowed upon them by stenography journalism, maybe somebody ought to look into fixing that.
Anyway, it’s now Day 3 of “Trump Wants the Old Washington NFL Team Name Back,” and the media frenzy isn’t letting up:
- Someone asked D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser if she would pull her support of her own plan to give $7 billion in subsidies to a new Commanders stadium if the team changed its name back to the Redskins, and answered, “no.”
- USA Today asked seven random Washington residents and one tourist what they thought of Trump’s threat, and they all pretty much said, “Shut up, Donald Trump.”
- Nobody asked ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, but he proposed his own idea anyway, which is to build one stadium somewhere in Maryland for both the Commanders and the Baltimore Ravens, which promptly got its own news coverage because Stephen A. Smith is the next best thing to executive power.
- Jon Stewart theorized that the whole thing is just an attempt to throw red meat to woke-hating conservatives so they’ll lay off him about the Epstein files.
- In actual attempts at reporting, WUSA’s Eric Flack said that Trump could issue an executive order canceling D.C.’s lease on the RFK Stadium site, while the Washington Post said that no he can’t, Congress passed a law giving development rights to D.C. and only Congress can undo it. More research required there, maybe.
- Cleveland Guardians officials waved off Trump’s suggestion that they should also change their team name back to “Indians,” and avoided commenting on the president’s insistence that their ballclub is “one of the six original baseball teams,” which it very much is not, maybe Trump was thinking of the Chicago Black Hawks?
The most likely scenario for the Commanders remains that both Bowser and the D.C. council ignore the president, who either forgets about the entire thing or maybe just orders Google to label the team “Washington Redskins” and declares victory. Meanwhile, the D.C. council is preparing for next week’s hearings, including public testimony, on the actual nuts and bolts of Bowser’s proposal — we’ll see if the public’s opinions will carry any more weight than Stephen A. Smith’s, but one can always hope.
Maybe Trump will demand the Blackhawks return to their pre-1986 spelling, Black Hawks. Make spacing great again.
Now there’s a good use for Space Force money!
Flood the zone. That’s the entire ethos.
FWIW, Stewart (and others) is exactly right. The idiot in chief will simply keep spewing out random ridiculous statements so long as the media dutifully spends hours repeating them like trained monkeys instead of doing what they are actually paid to do, report on the links between Trump and Epstein.
As a noted republican said just a few days ago, “I can find pictures of many world leaders and business titans with Epstein if I try. But I can find HUNDREDS of images of Trump with him without any real effort at all”.
Assuming humanity survives, I believe that generations from now the utter failure of the media hold this (and most recent) administrations to account will be a major topic of study in institutions of higher learning (if institutions or learning survives…)
It is a remarkable thing that an idiot, a charlatan and a con man can lead the world’s media around like they have a ring through their noses. They should be (and in fact are) an order of magnitude more capable than he is. And yet here we are.
I would humbly suggest that Mr. Harris consider renaming the team… but not to it’s old name.
How about the Washington Orange Felons/Rapists/Fraudsters?
I also have some thoughts on a new mascot….
The Black Hawks were not an original member of the NHL either.
The first season of the NHL, during WWI, featured Toronto (no nickname that season) the Canadiens, another Montreal team called the Wanderers and the original Ottawa Senators.
If not the. Indians and Redskins, get rid of the Chiefs also.