US president Donald Trump has turned back to the National Football League in a vain attempt to deflect attention from the various controversies dogging his second term in office, demanding that the Washington Commanders revert back to their own contentious past.

In a social media post over the weekend, POTUS insisted that there was a ‘big clamoring’ for the Commanders to wind back the clock and begin using the Redskins nickname that they ditched in the waning years of the Daniel Snyder regime. The club has been known as both Washington Football Team and the Commanders since 2022, and co-owner Josh Harris has repeatedly said that there are no plans to reverse course.

Since posting his demand, which he also reworked with a baseball twist to insist that the Cleveland Guardians once again assume the ‘Indians’ nickname, Trump has threatened — much as is his wont with tariffs — to block plans for Washington to build a new stadium on the site of their former home in the capital.

“I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’,” he posted on his own TruthSocial site. “I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.”

While he has limited ability to dictate what happens in the District of Columbia — largely due to predecessor Joe Biden signing the RFK Stadium land over from the federal government to the District of Columbia — Trump has repeatedly shown since his re-election that his imagination knows no bounds, almost immediately telling the press that ‘we should take over Washington, D.C.’, a claim he recently repeated along with hints that he would consider annexation of New York City if he didn’t approve of the outcome of a mayoral vote. With Canada and Greenland having also fallen into his sights in the last few months, the capital may seem like small fry in comparison, but continues to play a part in an ongoing charade as the ‘most powerful man in the world’ attempts, unsuccessfully, to turn the public gaze away from his trade policies, deportations, the ‘big beautiful bill’, his public fallout with Elon Musk and, of course, the highly-apparent desperation to erase the ‘Epstein Files’, the first real cause of division not only within Trump’s Republican party but also, crucially, amongst his often cultish MAGA followers.

Conveniently, this latest push on team names fits neatly with a renewed effort to roll back changes made in a period of cultural sensitivity and the search for racial justice. Both Washington and Cleveland faced mixed reactions to their decision to rebrand, and some quarters still insist that the native populations had no qualms with the original team names.

Underlining that belief that he is firing wildly into the abyss, Trump mistakenly posted another missive over the weekend, claiming that “The Owner of the Cleveland Baseball Team, Matt Dolan, who is very political, has lost three Elections in a row because of that ridiculous name change.”, overlooking the fact that, while a candidate in the Ohio Senate elections in 2022 and 2024, has played no part in the baseball franchise for almost ten years…