It has become increasingly common: an NFL player scores a touchdown or an athlete in some other sport has a success of some kind, and you’ll see him start to pump his arms back and forth, his hands balled up in fists, in imitation of Donald Trump’s little dance to the music at his rallies. As the “Trump dance” has become the latest craze in the sports world, the NFL has done the unexpected: it has actually declined to clamp down on the dance, as it was widely expected to do in light of the fact that it has, like all the major sports, gone down the woke road in a big way over the last few years. Is this another sign that the cultural tide is turning? Why, yes. Yes, it is.
CNN reported Tuesday that the Trump dance “appears to have taken the sporting world by storm, after multiple U.S. athletes across the country brought it out to celebrate plays this weekend.” It’s true. NFL player Brock Bowers, who is one of the players who did the Trump dance, explained: "I’ve seen everyone do it. I watched the UFC fight last night and Jon Jones did it. I like watching UFC, so I saw it and thought it was cool."
Not too very long ago, there would have been establishment media news features about “racism in the NFL” and calls to ban the dance. Indeed, the NFL has been widely expected to ban it. Now, however, Front Office Sports has disclosed that NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said: “There’s no issue with a celebratory dance such as what took place yesterday or the previous week with the 49ers on November 10.” After CBS edited the dance out of their coverage of a recent NFL game, McCarthy added: “It’s up to the networks to cover them as they see fit.”
This laissez-faire attitude is a sharp contrast to the situation back in 2016 when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to take a knee during the playing of the national anthem. At that time, Front Office Sports reminds us, the NFL added “end-zone stencils with messages such as ‘End Racism.’” No one would have expected the woke NFL to add “Make America Great Again” stencils to end zones, but it’s astonishing that they’re allowing the Trump dance at all, rather than prohibiting it as political speech.
Brian Urlacher, a football Hall of Famer, former Chicago Bears star, and strong Trump supporter noted the change. "People were scared for a while. You don’t want people to talk bad about you, how we’ve been talked about the last four years if you’re a Donald Trump supporter," he said. "I think now, no one’s scared anymore. It’s nice to see these guys coming out and everyone who’s a silent Trump supporter – he under polls always. … I think they’re just excited now that he got the job done, and he’s gonna get the job done the next four years."
Tom Jones of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies argued that the NFL had to allow the Trump dance simply for the sake of consistency:
I don’t see how the NFL could stop these Trump-dance celebrations. Like any celebration, as long as it’s not significantly disrupting the game, the NFL should allow it. If you were to stop this celebration, you would seemingly have to ban all celebrations. I’m sure the NFL isn’t crazy about celebrations with a political bent, but putting a ban on them would open up a whole other set of problems. My guess is it’s all just a fad that is going to fade pretty quickly anyway. The NFL is probably thinking that, too.
They probably are. They also might be taking note of the prevailing winds. The American people are sick to death of wokeness, of the cancel culture, and of the left dictating what can be said and done and what cannot, on pain of professional and even personal ruin. The general fatigue with humorless wokescolds goes far beyond just the Trump dance and will last longer than the dance does.
Related: Cultural Tide Turning? AOC Removes Pronouns From Her Bio
Another NFL Hall of Famer, Brett Favre, said it best: “I think people have had enough. They’re coming out of the woodwork right and left.”
People certainly have had enough. It is heartening to see so many people openly defy the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable opinion. If we see much more of this, all patriots should do a little Trump dance, by way of celebration.
