Let Athletes Do the ‘Trump Dance’ in Peace

If you haven’t yet come to terms with this month’s catastrophic election results, you may currently be using sports as an escape hatch. This, of course, has always been one of sports’ primary utilities: Whatever your worries and stresses, you can lose yourself in a silly game for a few hours and forget the real world for a while.

And yet the real world has a way of intruding. On Monday night, the United States Men’s National Team beat Jamaica 4-2 in the semifinals of the CONCACAF Nations League semifinals. It was an incredibly fun game — and the perfect way for new team manager Mauricio Pochettino to begin his tenure. It had everything: a raucous St. Louis crowd, one goal each from Tim Weah and Ricardo Pepi, and two from U.S. star Christian Pulisic, who, at 26, is almost certainly already the greatest American soccer player ever. What a night, right? USA! USA!

Except that after Pulisic scored his first goal, he did this:

For those not familiar, that’s the “Trump Dance”: a celebration inspired by the lurching, arrhythmic movements our president-elect has displayed at his rallies and at Mar-a-Lago for years, often to the tune of “YMCA.” Over the last two weeks, the Trump Dance has become all the rage among athletes after scoring a goal, reaching the end zone, or beating up a guy in an octagon. UFC champion Jon Jones did it (with Trump in attendance), as did an LPGA golfer  and several NFL players. But Pulisic doing it in an international competition, alongside several of his teammates, has clearly elevated the Trump Dance. It is now, undeniably, a thing.

Trump supporters are loving this — though, as with many Trumpian phenomena, it’s less something to be sincerely enjoyed and more just another way to own the libs. But it’s worth noting that the athletes themselves are all claiming the dance isn’t political at all. Pulisic, when asked about it after the game, said, “Well, obviously that’s the Trump dance. It was just a dance that everyone’s doing. He’s the one who created it. I just thought it was funny … It’s not a political dance. It was just for fun.”

If you really don’t want more reminders of what’s coming down the pipeline in America, it’s hard to know how to react to something like this. One is to get all upset and vow that you’ll never cheer for Pulisic or Jones or Brock Bowers ever again, to thunder that History Will Judge Them All Poorly. I understand the visceral urge here, and hey, if need be, you can snarkily remind Pulisic of his dance when you run into him in the fallout shelters around 2027. But the other is to maybe just let this one go. I’d recommend the latter.

Let’s acknowledge that it’s annoying to hear athletes claim this has nothing to do with politics, considering the guy they’re imitating has been at the center of American politics for a decade now. I’m reminded of the man I ran into at a Georgia football tailgate a few years back, who was wearing a MAGA hat, with the G in the shape of the Georgia logo. In a playful tone (I thought so anyway), I told him his hat sucked, and he shot back at me, “Why do you have to make everything political? We’re at a football game!” I dunno, man: You’re the dude wearing the fuckin’ hat. Sports figures have a way of making political statements but demurring when challenged, like when 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa showed off his “Make America Great Again” hat on national television after a game but, when questioned about it in a press conference, said, “I’m not gonna talk too much about it.” The most galling example here has to be UFC president Dana White, who, after essentially spending the last six months attached to Trump at the hip (and blasting out claims that Kamala Harris couldn’t “complete a sentence”) in an attempt to deliver Trump young male voters, now says he’s “tired of politics” and wants to stay out of it moving forward. If only he could have taken this vow of silence a few months ago.

But in the same way that I do not believe that every person who voted for Trump explicitly wants the return of fascism and chickenpox, I’m pretty sure doing the Trump Dance isn’t the same thing as donning a MAGA hat or screaming for mass deportations. Pulisic — who, it should be said, has shown Trump-friendly tendencies before — said he decided to do the dance because, “I saw everyone doing it yesterday in the NFL, I saw Jon Jones do it. We’re just having a bit of fun, so I thought it was a pretty fun dance.” This is how information spreads among young people (which athletes are, remember), and particularly the so-called “low-information” voters who delivered Trump back into office. They saw a dance, they thought it was funny, they repeated the dance. When you strip the context away — which you shouldn’t do, but is exactly what they’ve done — it is a funny dance. That’s why we all made fun of it in the first place.

Is it annoying that the best player on the soccer team that represents my country, a player I enjoy watching so much that I and both my sons own jerseys with his name on the back, is celebrating in a way that ostensibly honors a man I find abhorrent? Yes! It is very annoying! But I and anyone else riled up by it should probably just chill out.

Look: It has been a rough couple of weeks. It is going to be a very rough four years. Pacing oneself is important. There is a lot scarier shit to be worried about right now, and a lot more useful things to fight against. Getting upset about a dance — a dance, I bet, you’ll see even more in college football and the NFL this coming weekend, and quite probably over Thanksgiving — isn’t helping anything. We’ve got a long way to go, people. There are many battles to fight moving forward. Let’s try to pick the right ones.

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