U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to pause the development of a new stadium for Washington’s NFL team if it does not agree to his demand to revert to its old “Redskins” title.
The president called on the Commanders to change their name on Sunday afternoon, writing on Truth Social, “I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.”
The team retired its name in 2020 and rebranded in 2022, as the original title was considered offensive to Native Americans.
In the same Truth Social post, Trump said Cleveland’s MLB team, the Guardians, should change its name back to the “Indians.”
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“Cleveland should do the same with the Cleveland Indians. The Owner of the Cleveland Baseball Team, Matt Dolan, who is very political, has lost three Elections in a row because of that ridiculous name change,” he wrote.
Dolan is a former Ohio state senator who served from 2017 to 2024.
The Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians have had their names for three years now, and neither team intends to change them.
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Owner of the Commanders, Josh Harris, who took over in 2023, said earlier this year that the rebranded name would remain.
According to The Associated Press, not long after taking over, Harris shut down speculation about going back to the old name, saying that would not happen.
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Chris Antonetti, the Guardians’ president of baseball operations, said before Sunday’s game against the Athletics that their current name was here to stay.
“We understand there are different perspectives on the decision we made a few years ago, but obviously, it’s a decision we made. We’ve got the opportunity to build a brand as the Guardians over the last four years and are excited about the future that’s in front of us,” he said.
Cleveland announced in December 2020 that it would drop its Indians name. It announced the switch to Guardians in July 2021. In 2018, the team phased out “Chief Wahoo” — long viewed as racist — as its primary logo.
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Trump claimed the Commanders would be “more valuable” if they restored their old name.
The team announced it would drop the Redskins name and its former logo of a Native American man’s head in 2020 during a broader reckoning with systemic racism and police brutality.
The Washington Commanders’ new logo on the helmets during OTA on-field practice.
Jonathan Newton / Getty Images
The Commanders and the District of Columbia government announced a deal earlier this year to build a new stadium for the football team on the site of the old RFK Stadium, the arena the franchise called home for more than 30 years.
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Trump’s ability to hold up the deal remains to be seen. Former president Joe Biden signed a bill in January that transferred the land from the federal government to the District of Columbia.
Trump’s demands come as he attempts to quiet growing calls from his supporters to release unseen documents related to former financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, with whom he was friends for over a decade.
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2:09
Trump sues Wall Street Journal for $10B over article tying him to Jeffrey Epstein
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On Thursday, Trump threatened to sue the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) after it published a note that it says Trump wrote to Epstein on his 50th birthday. The note includes a sexually suggestive hand-drawn sketch of a naked woman signed by the president.
Trump denied the note was of his creation and, according to the WSJ, said the letter was “a fake thing.”
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he added. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
News of the letter broke after Trump targeted his own supporters pushing for the release of the Epstein files, saying they were “weaklings” for demanding to see the documents, and attempted to place blame on Democrats, who he claimed created the Epstein files narrative as a “hoax.”
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The president spent years building political support from those who have stoked claims of a coverup of Epstein’s 2019 death, which conspiracists claimed was ruled a suicide to protect the former financier’s wealthy friends from incrimination.
— With files from The Associated Press
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