What Trump can — and can’t — do to make Washington’s NFL team change its name

Despite the many national and international challenges he faces, President Donald Trump on Sunday let the world know he had something else on his mind: the name of Washington’s NFL team.

In a pair of posts on Truth Social, Trump demanded that the Washington Commanders revert to their old name, the Redskins, which was retired in 2020 after years of complaints that it was racially insensitive. “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should immediately change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team,” he wrote. “There is a big clamoring for this.”

But Trump didn’t just leave it at that. “I may put a restriction on them if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’” he wrote. “I won’t make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington.”

Trump was referring to a proposal for the Commanders to return to D.C., where the team would play in a new 65,000-seat stadium only a few miles east of the U.S. Capitol. But as with many things Trump says, there was a kernel of truth — and plenty of bluster.

Let’s start with the bluster. The deal to build a new stadium for the Commanders isn’t his to make — in fact, it’s mostly being made without him.

In late April, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Commanders unveiled a $3.7 billion deal to bring the team back to the city. Under the agreement, the team will foot most of the bill for the stadium’s construction and the city will kick in $1 billion, mostly for infrastructure. The stadium would be located on the site of the aging Robert. F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, where the team lived its glory years before decamping to the Maryland suburbs in 1997. The deal is now before the D.C. Council, the city’s elected legislature, and a vote to approve it could come as soon as August.

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Now, it is true that the plot of land that the new stadium sits on is owned by the federal government. But, even there, Trump doesn’t have absolute control over its fate.

After years of lobbying by the city, Congress passed a bill late last year that gave the District of Columbia more control over the 190-acre riverfront plot. The 99-year lease the city signed gives it an expanded menu of options of what to build there — housing, retail, parks and yes, a new football stadium. The lease includes a number of requirements the city must abide by, but a team name that’s acceptable to the president isn’t one of them. (The lease doesn’t even require the city to build a stadium on the site; it’s just an option.)

Now, the kernel of truth. One would be foolish to rule out the unexpected; Trump largely has taken a maximalist view of his own power, coupled with a significant disdain for anything that seeks to stand in his way. And he does have some regulatory levers he could pull to make life hard for the Commanders.

The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) and U.S. Commission on Fine Arts (CFA) — two federal advisory bodies that weigh in on all matters of design in the city — will have a role in deciding what the stadium looks like. Three of the NCPC’s 12 members are presidential appointees, while the CFA is entirely chosen by the president. Trump could instruct his appointees to stall any approvals until the team’s ownership comes around to his demands. (Three of Trump’s new appointees to NCPC have already been seated, and recently raised questions about a renovation of the Federal Reserve building that has embroiled Fed Chair Jerome Powell, of whom Trump has been critical.)

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But there’s reason to believe that Trump wouldn’t push that far. He may well think that the Commanders were better off as the Redskins, but bringing up the issue now could also just be a means to distract people from less favorable stories about his administration. (Jeffrey Epstein comes to mind.)

More importantly, though, derailing the entire stadium deal just isn’t in his broader interests. The president has expressed a desire to, as a March executive order put it, “Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful,” and it’s easy to see that he wants nothing more than a beautiful new stadium only 4 miles from the White House. Just earlier this month, Trump called it a “great piece of property” and said he would be willing to help seal the deal to build a new stadium there.

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Regardless, you can bet that Bowser, the Commanders and the NFL will quietly, yet aggressively, lobby to prevent any unexpected delays or hiccups, largely because they can’t spare much time — the team wants the stadium to be ready by 2030, after all. And the city and the team have their own levers to pull: there’s development rights for parts of the site that will be used for homes and retail, what the stadium ultimately looks like and even what they choose to name it.

And maybe, just maybe, they can hope Trump will come around on the team’s new name. A few more winning seasons could do that, just as it did with the team’s fan base. According to a Washington Post poll, in mid-2024 34% of D.C.-area fans said they liked the new team name. A year later, after an incredibly successful 2024 season, it was already up to 50%.

If there’s anything that Trump loves to associate with, it’s winners. And, of course, flattery. That’s something that team owner Josh Harris clearly understood when he joined city and league officials at the White House in May to announce that the NFL draft would take place on the National Mall in 2027. “You are the ultimate Commander,” he told Trump after gifting him a personalized jersey. Maybe that’s not something Trump wants to change.