Donald Trump, really, was only ever in the Donald Trump business.
Four years ago almost to the day, in the week of his inauguration, I published a piece recounting episodes in the sports industry that shaped, or at least showcased, the 45th president of the United States. His was a catalogue of misadventures across golf, football team ownership, cycling sponsorship, boxing and beyond.
The patterns were all there. Challenges were underestimated. Ambitions and accomplishments were wildly overstated, abilities even more so. When failure came, Trump denied responsibility, culpability, fault, and even the depth of his associations. He lashed out under any duress, his vanity, petty jealousies and playground bully insecurities shown up bolder and plainer than the name on his own buildings.
His notoriety consumed every atom of attention, the structures around it imploding into a void. Trump once described himself, in an infamous context, as a star, but maybe he was a black hole. Easier to imagine him as that than as a source of warmth and light.
Anyway, the object lesson from Trump’s hinterland was this: the man did not change. Only the stakes did. He has limited guile, beyond a weaponised shamelessness. He bears no trace of intellectual curiosity, and few animating principles apart from a thirst for personal vindication. But he does not flinch in protecting his self-image, at any cost, even in the face of overwhelming reality. This, and the fact others follow him for it, is all that ever made him worth talking about.
American athletes had his number early. Some sensed not just his toxicity but that incessant need to be at the centre of all things. Distaste for his views and intentions had their basis in a campaign that reeked of sexism and racism; an othering of honest opposition. Then in the opening months of his term, expounding on his platform of nurtured grievance, he called for elite athletes and sports media figures to be fired for acts of self-expression. Vice President Mike Pence was dispatched to an NFL protest, only so he could walk away in dismissal.
Trump did not make US sport political. He made it personal.
If sport is a minor part of a country’s life, it can at least be a point of unity. National leaders and especially American presidents have long taken respite in those small, unthreatening perks the arena provides: attending marquee games, beckoning champion teams to celebrate at the seat of government. Boycotts are not unprecedented, but these are meant to be moments where the office is separated from the person who holds it.
In the Trump era, more and more of America’s best found it impossible to make that distinction. A visit to the White House did not represent a professional zenith but a troubling endorsement, or at least cause to swallow doubt.
When teams and athletes did go, Trump often remained the story. This was sometimes absurdly true, as in when he greeted the student-athletes of the Clemson Tigers with a US$5,500 feast from Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger King. The presidential chefs were at home due to a government shutdown.
Others refused or pre-empted the invitation, from National Basketball Association (NBA) champions to Fifa Women’s World Cup winners. Most tellingly, and recently, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the days after Trump loyalists laid violent siege to Congress.
These athletes had surmised, in a manner of speaking, that the normal national leadership they might appeal to had been suspended. So when crisis hit, they sought instead to provide their own. In a tumultuous 2020, leading stars raised their voices, principally in calls for racial justice and equality. They earned the backing of teams and brands. Then they found the true source of their own power.
From emotional Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in June, there came a more functional, practical strain of activism. August’s NBA players’ strike after the police shooting in Kenosha of another black man, Jacob Blake, was parlayed into multi-league action on voter registration.
In the WNBA, after players campaigned for her opponent in her failed, ultra-conservative bid to retain a US Senate seat in Georgia, Kelly Loeffler is set to sell the Atlanta Dream. Teams have been pressed into reviewing hiring practices, and supporting minority-owned businesses. Wealthier stars like LeBron James are putting their money to use in their communities and their investments.
Joe Biden was once a talented high-school football player and has earnestly followed his favourite professional teams for decades. Kamala Harris, the first woman to serve as the US vice president, is a noted fan of the Golden State Warriors, the San Francisco 49ers and the San Francisco Giants. Yet according to biographer Evan Osnos, theirs will be a different kind of engagement with sport.
“You’re going to see very clearly that Joe Biden looks at sports as a natural form of American community, which means not necessarily that it’s quiet,” Osnos said. “It means that it’s contested. It’s a place for politics. It’s a place where we live out our differences as much as the things that bring us together. In the purest sense, I think he’s a guy that believes that you can kneel.”
The expectations are that Biden will be more sympathetic to some of the causes that have motivated athletes on a grand scale – as in his oft-expressed recognition of the need to address racial inequity – and in narrower settings. Last May, he threw his support behind the US women’s national team in their legal bid to secure equal pay to their male counterparts.
A Biden-Harris administration, though, will be measured not in personal interventions but the effectiveness of policy – beginning with efforts to subdue a pandemic that feasted on their predecessor’s neglect, and the economic consequences that came with it.
Washington’s dealings with media, capital and the tech sector will have consequences, as will a fresh perspective on energy and climate change. This new leadership will meet the world differently, perhaps more wholeheartedly, and not always in the interests of countries with lots of influence in the sports industry.
American sport will have a more international texture itself in the next few years. Two sets of Olympic Games are scheduled, for now, in the next 13 months. US athletes can expect plenty of opportunities to make their presence felt at the top of the podium, and diplomatic attitudes towards China’s hosting of the winter event will be scanned closely.
Next on the agenda will be the anti-doping implications of the Rodchenkov Act and readying a major US run of sports events, with lead hosting duties for the Fifa World Cup in 2026 followed by the LA 2028 Olympics. Still, at its root, the evolving relationship between sport and the White House will be felt domestically.
Beyond the disorder of the last four years, there are Americans who ache for sport to become a more neutral space. There are others who want to see athletes and organisations push further, using their leverage more directly on specific issues.
It is useful to set that against the wider task at hand, in the wider context. President Biden is going to disappoint people at times, even those who today greet a Biden presidency with relief. He will compromise too readily for some, and not enough for others. He will make missteps and faulty decisions, because that is life, and meet obstinacy and disinformation, because that is life in 2021.
He has the biggest personal mandate of any politician in US history, yet 74 million Americans still voted for his opponent. Not all of them were adherents to the cult of Trump – probably not many of them were – but they have contrasting ideas on how to solve their country’s problems and were happy to take their imperfections in a different form.
In other words, he and his colleagues must take on grim, generational challenges in an atmosphere of rancour and suspicion. And where sport wants to play its part, it also risks those centrifugal partisan forces.
Such is the messiness of the process, and of progress. The commitment to change will have come with that acknowledgement. The hope, still, is that the pursuit of it can reveal a common interest.
When politics and sport are not just about one person, they can be about everybody. That, at least, is a start.
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