President Donald Trump’s plan to bring back the Presidential Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition — and with it the Presidential Fitness Test — has a healthy, get-off-the-couch ring to it. For as long as anybody can remember, the youth of America just isn’t getting enough exercise; if a White House-backed fitness regimen can inspire (cajole?) kids to put down their phones and pick up a pair of running shoes, that’s a societal gain, is it not? The council features an All-Star cast of sports c
The council features an All-Star cast of sports celebrities, including Wayne Gretzky, Bryson DeChambeau and Mariano Rivera, as well as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. And WWE superstar-turned-executive Paul “Triple H” Levesque, because nothing says health and fitness like professional wrestling.
Trump loves being part of the professional sports world. However, his fandom is no longer limited to photo ops and shtick, as seen that night in 2007 when he took down Vince McMahon during the “Battle of the Billionaires” at WrestleMania 23. From inserting himself into the ceaseless Pete Rose Hall of Fame discussion to calling for the NFL’s Washington Commanders and MLB’s Cleveland Guardians to revert to their old, racist names, Trump seems intent on being America’s Commander in Chief of Sports, imposing his worldview on an area of society that has heretofore resisted such efforts.
And he’s succeeding. Consider the role Trump played in MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s history-making determination that baseball’s “permanently ineligible list” no longer applies to anyone who has since passed away. Rose, banned in 1989 over a gambling scandal, died last September at age 83. Thanks to a dose of presidential persuasion — Trump hosted Manfred at the White House in April — Rose could be up for Hall of Fame consideration as soon as December 2027. Manfred has said his meeting with the president was a factor in his decision to change the policy.
But the question isn’t solely about whether Rose should be elected to the Hall of Fame. What’s also at issue is how we got here.
Bob Costas, winner of 26 Emmy Awards in a sports broadcasting career that dates back to 1973, was referring to the Trump-Manfred meeting when he told The Athletic, “It’s reasonable to wonder what the content of their conversation was and what, if any, pressure the president brought to bear beyond just expressing his view that Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame.”
Trump is no stranger to controversial sports takes. During his first term, when NFL players were following the example set by Colin Kaepernick by taking a knee during the national anthem as a symbolic statement aimed at racial injustice and police brutality, Trump said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired!’”
Trump says Triple H and the rest of his sports commission "will be working on college football in terms of, uh, what happened. It's a mess. What they're doing with college football and the fans are upset about it. Players are being taken from team after team and traded around… pic.twitter.com/N38OHxacM4
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2025
Now, a little more than halfway through the first year of his second term, Trump doesn’t limit his sports takes to the occasional quip, or to saying things to energize an already supportive crowd. Based on what we’ve seen so far in 2025, the president’s sports fandom falls into three basic categories:
• White House visits by sports celebrities and championship teams.
• The desire to see and be seen at major sporting events.
• Bringing his political agenda and culture wars to a ballpark, arena or stadium near you.
Yes, White House visits by sports stars are a tradition that goes back more than 100 years. And for most of those 100 years, the meet-and-greets were treated as non-political events. When George Halas and Red Grange of the Chicago Bears visited President Calvin Coolidge at the White House in 1925, nobody in the press felt the need to ask the two football celebrities how they thought Silent Cal was handling the coal strike. And on it went like that, for decades.
However, things changed in the 21st century, with athletes opting out of joining their teammates for White House visits, presumably due to the politics of the sitting president. And then times changed again. When the 2024 World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers visited the White House in April, the entire traveling party was in attendance. That included outfielder Mookie Betts, who was a member of the World Series champion Boston Red Sox but not a member of the traveling party when the Sox went to the White House during Trump’s first term.
“It’s not a political stance that I’m taking,” Betts told reporters before this year’s visit. Betts said he regretted not being with his Red Sox teammates in 2019. “I made it about me,” he said. “This is not about me. This is about the Dodgers … Me not being there for (the Red Sox) at that time, it was very selfish.” This time around, Betts earned a special shout-out from Trump.
Dr. Harry Edwards, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in the connections between race, sport and society, has his own thoughts on why opting out of White House visits seems to have gone out of fashion.
“Athletes have no broad-scale movement to encompass the dynamics and character of today’s situation,” Edwards told The Athletic. By way of example, Edwards cites the outspokenness of Black athletes in the 1960s, notably Jim Brown, Bill Russell and Muhammad Ali, as well as Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two track and field athletes whose raised fists during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1968 Summer Olympics is an image that remains seared into the American consciousness.
“These are things that do not occur in a vacuum,” Edwards said. “They occur as part of a process. Tommie Smith and John Carlos … that was all part of the Black Power movement.”
And Kaepernick taking a knee, in Edwards’ view, was an outgrowth of Black Lives Matter. In that spirit, with no movements to embrace, Edwards can’t fault athletes who are accepting invitations to visit President Trump at the White House.
“Why would they not go under these circumstances … ” Edwards said, “since their refusal to go in the past was framed up by political circumstances in the broader society.”
Today, said Edwards, “… conditions have not generated the scaffolding necessary for athletes to step forward with some degree of confidence that their sacrifices are going to make a difference and be acknowledged as being contributory.”
So the invites go out, and the athletes come in.
Just as Trump’s White House visits with athletes are in keeping with past presidential norms, so, too, is his desire to show up at all the big, beautiful games.
Trump attended (and was booed at) the recent FIFA Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in which Chelsea claimed a 3-0 victory over Paris Saint-Germain, after which he hung around and presented the trophy to team captain Reece James. And then he continued to hang around, awkwardly meandering on the stage as Chelsea players celebrated. But let’s not get in a snit over that; President Jimmy Carter looked no less awkward when he appeared in the clubhouse of the victorious Pittsburgh Pirates after Game 7 of the 1979 World Series and was dwarfed by the championship trophy hoisted directly in front of him.
Trump is hardly the first president to step into the sportscast. And it’s not always a bad thing when it happens. Could anybody find fault with President George W. Bush for throwing out the first pitch before Game 3 of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium? The United States was still reeling from the 9/11 terrorist strikes, and Bush’s appearance was looked on as a symbolic show of strength and unity. Besides, Bush threw a beauty.
With the 2026 FIFA World Cup to be hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States (with the final set for MetLife Stadium) and with Los Angeles hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics, it makes sense that President Trump will be a significant presence. And not merely as a fan. Trump will have plenty to say. And he’ll expect people to listen and act.
Trump grew up rooting from the stands. In adulthood, he sat in the owner’s suite with the late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and was known to pop into the clubhouse after games. He then took his fandom to the boardroom as owner of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League, both of which came into being in 1983 and went out of business in 1986.
Trump has an oversized presence in golf, both as the owner of resorts and as a frequent duffer who’s rather proud of his game. He has hosted meetings in the Oval Office with the PGA Tour and Saudi America’s Public Investment Fund (which funds and oversees LIV Golf) about a possible merger. Speaking on the “Let’s Go!” podcast with Jim Gray and Bill Belichick on the day before Election Day in 2024, then-candidate Trump said, “I would say it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.”
Unlike the meeting with Manfred to settle Pete Rose family business, a deal between the golf tour merger has yet to be done. But Trump’s Miami golf course is getting a PGA Tour event next year.
In the UFC world, meanwhile, talks are going along just fine. Trump is a big fan, so much so that he has spoken about holding a UFC event on the White House lawn. On July 4, 2026. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence.
As is the case with many of Trump’s sports takes, it’s reasonable to speculate that holding a UFC event at the White House would be primarily about appealing to his base. If that’s too delicate a way to put it, try this: It would be red meat to the MAGA crowd. Which brings us to the third rail of Trump’s sports fandom: Pushing his political agenda through sports. This is when Trump having fun at the games no longer is fun and games. This is when people who look to sporting events for escapism from “the real world” run the risk of being exposed to some of the very political dramas they’re looking to avoid. Nowadays, those dramas are practically printed in your game program.
In sports as in politics, Trump sometimes uses the same playbook. His campaign for the Washington Commanders to go back to being called the “Redskins” and for the Cleveland Guardians to bring back their old “Indians” moniker is on par with actions the president has taken to undo a bipartisan Congressional effort in 2020 to remove the names of Confederate generals from military bases.
Trump has gone so far as to threaten a deal announced earlier this year by Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser and Commanders ownership to build a new stadium on the site of RFK Stadium, the team’s home from 1961 to 1996.
Washington’s NFL team hasn’t been called the Redskins since 2019. And Cleveland retired the Indians after the 2021 season. The franchises have moved on, with marketing campaigns that reflect their new identities. Bob DiBiasio, senior vice president of public affairs for the Guardians, responded with a one-word answer when asked if the team has any plans to revert to the Indians: “No.”
To talk about bans being put in place to keep transgender women athletes from being on women’s sports teams is to be mindful that a little more than two weeks after being sworn in for his second term, the president signed an executive order, titled “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports.” It called for banning transgender girls and women from taking part in girls’ and women’s sports.
To talk about what’s wrong with college athletics in an era of “Name, Image, and Likeness” and pay-for-play is to be mindful that Trump signed an executive order, titled “Saving College Sports,” aimed at prohibiting third-party, pay-for-play payments.
And to hear ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith talk about the WNBA and what he perceives as unfair treatment of Indiana Fever superstar Caitlin Clark, it’s easy to conclude that it’s just a matter of time before President Trump appears on the court. Referencing a column by Sean McLean of the Wall Street Journal on a potential probe of Clark being a victim of civil rights violations, Smith has used his platforms to speculate about potential Trump involvement.
“If that man,” Smith said, referring to Trump, “decides that this is something that can feed his base, that can ingratiate himself with that kind of audience that is protective of a Caitlin Clark and what she stands for and what she represents, and they come to a conclusion that they believe she is being unfairly treated, that is going to be a problem for the WNBA.”
Smith is a media megastar with a long record of mixing politics with sports, so much so that he’s occasionally dropped breadcrumbs about making a presidential run of his own. Other big names in Smith’s line of work take a more measured tone when they talk politics.
Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, who ascended to sports-talk royalty on New York’s WFAN and now hosts “Mad Dog Unleashed” on SiriusXM, put it this way: “Half my audience are Democrats, half are Republicans. If I go one way or the other, I’m going to lose half the audience. So for me, personally, I try to keep politics out of it. I’m not always successful, but rarely do I get into it.”
When does Russo get into it? The Donald Trump-Pete Rose discussion gets him into it.
“I don’t look at that as a political issue. And, yes, I do know about Trump and Manfred. I get that. But we’ve been arguing Rose forever,” Russo told The Athletic.
Sports fans are entitled to their opinions. That’s always been part of the arrangement, and not just on such boilerplate arguments as to why the coach elected to punt on fourth-and-3, or why your 21st-century baseball team doesn’t understand 20th-century fundamentals. But while we may refuse to believe it, we’ve been mixing politics with sports since forever.
When Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, thereby erasing baseball’s color line, there was absolutely a political angle — especially when one takes into account that it happened a year before President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the military.
“‘Stick to sports,’” said Costas, “almost always means stick to sports unless you’re saying something I agree with. ‘Stick to sports’ is just a way of not considering what the other person has to say.”
It’s just that we now have a president of the United States who can’t, and won’t, stick to politics.
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photos: Alex Grimm, Jim Watson / Getty, The Washington Post)
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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