Donald Trump is close with the National Football League. He has made that clear for years, even attempting to buy the Dallas Cowboys and Buffalo Bills on two different occasions.
Now he is ready to see on NFL team change their name.
Breaking: Donald Trump “Approves” Name Change For NFL Team (Report)
There has been a wave of sports teams that have changed their names to remove Native American references in recent years. Trump doesn’t support it:
Trump called the name changes “degrading to the Indian population.”
“I think it’s degrading to the Indian population, and it’s a great population, and they like when they’re called by various names,” Trump said.
Trump declined to say whether he would try to get the Washington Commanders to change their name back to Redskins as a condition for building a new stadium on federal property. However, Trump did say he believes Redskins was better than the team’s current name.
“I can tell you that I spoke to people of Indian heritage who love that name and love that team, and I think it’s a much superior name to what they have right now and it had heritage behind it, it had something special,” Trump said.
The Washington Post released a poll in June that found that 58% of fans of Commanders fans said they do not like the team’s new name.
Trump also lambasted the decision to rename MLB’s Cleveland Indians to the Guardians after the end of the 2021 season.
“They changed the name of the Cleveland Indians. Why would you take the name ‘Indians’ off the Cleveland Indians? And now it’s called the Cleveland something else,” Trump said. “So it just doesn’t make sense to me.
“I think it really is demeaning to Indians. But to change the name of the Cleveland Indians to the Cleveland Guardians, for example, to the Cleveland Guardians is not the same, and I’m sure it has an impact on the team.”
Meanwhile, in Long Island, Massapequa High School’s nickname is the Chiefs, but New York law states that schools must remove logos that are related to indigenous people by the end of the year.
The Massapequa school district sued the state, but a federal judge ruled against the district.
Trump previously spoke out in support of the school’s right to maintain its name.
“I agree with the people in Massapequa, Long Island, who are fighting furiously to keep the Massapequa Chiefs logo on their Teams and School,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
