Trump at the Super Bowl: how the NFL’s culture war ended in surrender
- Wonjeong Hong
- Feb 27
- 4 min read
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Article Summary
In 2016, Donald Trump criticized the NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of civil rights abuses. In 2024, after Trump returned to the white house after four years, he became the first incumbent president to attend a Super Bow, it seems that America’s most popular sports have kneeled against political oppression.
Trump attended Sunday's game between the New Orleans Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles. During the pre-game show, a pre-recorded interview by a Fox News anchor will air, and millions will watch it. The president also removed the message inspired by the diversity, equity, and inclusion(DEI) strategy.
For the first time after 2021, the “End Racism: a slogan that the NFL began to promote after George Floyd, which resists racism, will not be stenciled on the field in one of the end zones. The phrase also formed the Inspire Change, which is a community social justice initiative the league launched after the wake of the former quarterback, Colin Kaepernick’s activism to fix the racism and police brutality.
However, Trump strongly opposed these initiatives and slogans, so he urged team owners to fire the players who kneeled during the national anthem. NFL commissioner Roger Goodwell commented that Trump’s command was disrespectful to the NFL. After the inauguration, Trump signed executive orders to eliminate DEI initiatives in the federal government, foreshadowing the disappearance or weakening of DEI policies in the US.
Furthermore, Trump has also recently signed an executive order to ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports as an extension of the “keep men out of women’s sports” campaign.
The American tradition of the commander-in-chief watching a baseball game started with William Thaft, but Trump's attendance at a Super Bowl game as president is unusual. The reason Trump is more interested in other sports than baseball is assumed to be his getting booed in 2019 while attending the Washington National World Series game three miles away from the White House.
The US will host the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games, and Trump has a friendly relationship with FIFA president Gianni Infantino. Brandon Rottinghaus, a political professor at the University of Houston and co-director of the President Greatness Project Survey, anticipates seeing the president connect with people through sports and culture, as Barack Obama did in the past.
The professor also added that infusing politics into culture and sports is another way to prove victory, and eliminating the DEI at government agencies is another way to hint at how various industries, including the NFL, should react.
Trump’s complicated relationship with the NFL, formed by various backgrounds, such as his failure to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014 and multiple frictions and disagreements with NFL management and policies, shows the current president’s complicated relationship and influence with the NFL.
Reflection
‘Crazy Dictator, ‘Malignant Narcissist,’ Uncontrollable Populist.’ Americans often use these words to describe Trump, especially his extreme and unconventional words and actions. At the same time, he is also getting fanatical praise and deification from his supporters, which brought him success in the 2024 presidential election. Although the public has conflicting and polarizing opinions about Trump, the fact that the new president will bring changes to America that are completely different from the former presidents is undeniable. President Trump has already given a preview to the ‘Greater’ America that he will make through 76 executive orders and controversies around the Greenland purchase. One of the most significant social impacts that Trump will bring is the reduction and the banning of the DEI, diversity, and inclusion policies. The DEI policy officially started with John F Kennedy’s executive order in the 1960s, and it was primarily driven and empowered by Obama and the recent Biden administration. However, on January 20, 2025, Trump officially announced the executive order to end ‘Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing’ on the official Whitehouse website. Donald Trump has also blamed Obama and Biden’s harmful DEI policy for the DC Plane Crash. His orders and actions have caused lots of controversies.
Trump’s DEI ban order has led several big companies, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Walmart, to roll back their DEI policies. Apple had friction with Trump because it is one of the tech companies that refused to reduce the DEI policy. The ban has also impacted sports, and the NFL is now removing the ‘End Racism’ slogan from its Super Bowl end zone. The effect of banning the DEI policy does not end there. It is also affecting the field of art. According to Hyperallergic, two exhibitions that were planned in Washington DC AMA on March 21st were canceled due to the revocation of the funding and support from the US government by anti-DEI policy.
The reason why the Republicans are against DEI is because they argue that DEI policies trigger reverse discrimination, especially for white people. They also suggest that DEi makes employers hire people for their race and identity, not the qualifications. However, that is the thing that does not change without the DEI policy; only the group that gets benefits changes. Without the DEI policy, there would be natural disadvantages to the racial and cultural minority groups, and the traditional white Anglo-Saxon cisgender male would get more chances and opportunities. DEI policy was just a tool to balance this structural reality and problems in society so that the greatest benefit to the least advantaged can be achieved, following the different principles of social justice by John Rawls. When criticizing the inequality and unfairness of the situation, people must have an open mind to understand and learn about the history of that problem and other’s points of view. Without those efforts, the next step discussion would be impossible.
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