Our grotesque slob of a president attended the football game Sunday between the Detroit Lions and the Washington Commanders, held at the far-flung hell-hole of a suburban stadium that Commanders owner Josh Harris is in the process of abandoning. The occasion was the team's annual "Salute to Service" game, a time when the Commanders do more than the usual amount of pandering and flag-humping. The Trump administration reportedly contacted the Commanders last week to coordinate this appearance, with enough lead-time for Harris to reinforce his owner's box window with a wall of bulletproof glass. Trump was joined in Harris's box by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and by Republican Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House.
The timing almost could not have been worse. For one thing, Donald Trump is not generally popular in Washington, D.C., or in Maryland, where the stadium is located, and is even less popular lately, with the DOGE RIF massacre and the shutdown of the federal government still crushing the local workforce. For another, the Commanders are playing like shit, their only authentically good young player is crabbed, fans are feeling pretty miserable, and the team was likely to lose Sunday and to be booed for it. Also, significantly, this is not a time when people around D.C. are conditioned to feel anything but bad about the sight of uniformed military members, not while little roving patrols of armed National Guardsmen are being deployed to oppress and intimidate the city's residents.
A bad football team playing a home game they are likely to lose at a stadium everyone hates, and without their one cool player, and against a team whose fans cannot usually be counted upon for a takeover, usually cannot expect a large crowd. In a place like, oh, Nashville, Trump might expect his presence to draw thousands of his own supporters and to beef up the crowd with people who are there to cheer for him personally. Right now, in the D.C. area, people who are drawn to a scheduled Trump appearance are far more likely to be Trump antagonists. Under other circumstances, the majority of people in the stands of a football game will roll their eyes but applaud politely for yet another tacky performance of appreciation for military service members. On Sunday— with nothing on the whole planet going right, with the crowd swollen with angry locals, with the score already 25–10 to the visitors, and with the big greasy goon himself reciting the oath of enlistment over the stadium's public-address system—the overwhelming majority of fans used the saluting service-members portion of "Salute to Service" day to loudly vented their disapproval:
It wasn't all overt hostility. People seated in front of Harris's booth were photographed waving and smiling at Trump. Lions receiver and anti-ACA activist Amon-Ra St. Brown celebrated the president's scheduled appearance by doing the "Trump dance" after a first-quarter touchdown, before Trump had arrived at the stadium but after Air Force One rattled the stadium with a low flyover. Fans booed the flyover; the White House called it "epic" on social media; Trump, naturally, referred to it as "the greatest flyover ever."
Later in the afternoon, the Fox broadcasting booth invited Trump to participate in a few minutes of on-air commentary. He fared somewhat better nearer to his wheelhouse as a glorified television personality, bantering with Kenny Albert and Jonathan Vilma through a garbage-time Commanders drive, even daring to be self-deprecating about his own brief football days. The booth talked right over a 37-yard completion so that Trump could praise Drew Brees, Vilma's former teammate, as a quarterback who "threw a ball that you could catch." Albert later invited Trump to do play-by-play, whereupon the horrible doofus immediately revealed that he'd formed the mistaken impression that he was speaking to hometown broadcasters, and then shared the penetrating insight that a red-zone sequence for the trailing side of a 22-point game represents "an important couple of plays." Albert and Vilma of course lapped this right up.
You could almost think of this ugly afternoon appearance as another indignity in a continuing run of bad form for Trump, except that hours later Senate Democrats caucused and worked out a politically palatable course for capitulating on the shutdown, screwing millions of low- and middle-income people and stamping out the tiny little flicker of momentum and good vibes that was kindled last Tuesday. Send Chuck Schumer to the next Commanders home game.
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