Donald Trump is easy to please and impossible to satisfy. You can praise him publicly, kiss up to him privately, and adopt his positions so quickly you pull every muscle in your body, and he will smile and love it for about 10 minutes. Then he will want something else. He will find some reason you disappointed him. He might even pretend you didn’t do the thing you did just for him. It doesn’t matter what it was. The high he gets for making people bow before him will wear off, he will be unfulfilled and he will blow up at you.
Everybody in sports should understand this, because Trump loves to use sports as a cultural wedge. He has done it before and he will do it again. So pay attention, Roger Goodell and Rob Manfred and Charlie Baker and Adam Silver and Jay Monahan. Regardless of your political beliefs, this Elon Musk–Trump brawl is instructive.
Just a few weeks ago, Musk was Trump’s closest ally, and now they are sworn enemies, intent on destroying each other. It is a strange development, but we have seen other backers find themselves on the outs before, with Mike Pence, Michael Cohen, Nikki Haley, Mitch McConnell, John Bolton, Jeff Sessions, Lindsey Graham, Anthony Scaramucci, Betsy DeVos, Lindsey Graham, John F. Kelly, Bill Barr, Kayleigh McEnany, Lindsey Graham, Ron DeSantis, Ivana Trump, Jim Mattis, Omarosa Manigault Newman, Chris Christie, Stephanie Grisham and Lindsey Graham.
Manfred should have realized this before he weakened the ethical authority of his position and undid a century of precedent by reinstating Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson.
Manfred admitted this week that he “paid attention” to Trump’s support of Rose before reinstating him. He should have paid more attention to Trump’s former supporters. Manfred might think he stayed in Trump’s good graces by reinstating Rose. But what he really did was signal that he will cave to presidential pressure.
Goodell has learned this lesson already—or at least, he should have. In 2016, Trump threw an enormous fit over Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. The NFL—a league built on incredible levels of toughness—freaked out. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said in ’17 he’d bench players who didn’t stand during the anthem. Owners met to discuss the issue. The NFL passed a new anthem policy in ’18, requiring players to stand or stay in the locker room during the anthem, then never implemented it when the players’ association objected.
This was all a huge win for Trump. The goal was not really to get everybody to stand for the anthem. It was to make his base angry, because angry supporters are the most loyal.
The NFL got played. Trump made it seem like there was no middle ground, but of course there was. The NFL could have said, “We proudly play the anthem before every game, but we pay players to play football. If a few choose to kneel during the anthem, that is their choice.” Or … the NFL could have not said that, and just weathered the attacks until Trump moved on to something else.
The fear that millions of people would abandon their fantasy football teams midseason was always overblown. More importantly, from a strategic perspective: Once Trump saw that he could make the NFL bend, he tried to break it. In 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, Goodell admitted he should have listened to Kaepernick in the first place.
To be fair to the NFL, Kaepernick started kneeling in 2016, so the axiom wasn’t quite as obvious then. But it is obvious now: You can please Trump, but you will never satisfy him.
Leagues cannot avoid Trump entirely. He is the President of the United States. He is even more eager to use the power of his position to settle personal vendettas than he was the first time around, and he has an extraordinarily loose definition of the power of his position.
But when Trump comes calling, executives should remember who is on the other end of the line. Surrendering their dignity isn’t just wrong; it’s a miscalculation. Why give Trump what everything he wants, when he will just come back for more?
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Sports Commissioners Should Take Heed of Elon Musk’s Fallout With Donald Trump .