According to the website, the White House's efforts to have the new stadium bear the president's name raised eyebrows, compounded by his visit to the current Commanders Stadium on Sunday, during which the president was loudly booed by the crowd. ESPN was the first to report on Trump's efforts, according to which behind-the-scenes talks are taking place. A White House official quoted by ESPN said that “this is something the president wants and will probably happen.”
Why does the White House want the stadium to bear Trump's name?
What were the reactions to Trump's visit to Commanders Stadium?
What made it possible to build a new stadium in Washington?
What other properties are named after Trump?
The reports were indirectly confirmed by White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.
“It would certainly be a beautiful name because it was President Trump who made the construction of the new stadium possible,” she said in a statement to The Hill.
As noted by the conservative columnist of the Washington Post, Jim Geraghty, in fact, the construction of the new stadium of the capital team was made possible by Joe Biden, who signed a bill ordering the return of the land of the old stadium. Robert F. Kennedy to the city authorities. Kennedy Stadium – named a year after the assassination of the former president's brother and the current health minister's father – has been closed for years, but a new facility is to be built in its place, which is expected to be ready in 2030. The team will have the right to name the facility, but the name must be approved by the Washington local government and the National Park Service, which owns the land.
According to The Hill, although this gives Trump leverage over the owners of the Commanders, such a decision would not make business sense due to the lost revenue from naming rights (most NFL stadiums are named after corporations that pay hundreds of millions of dollars for them) and Trump's deep unpopularity in the Capital Region. In the 2024 election, Trump received less than 10 percent. votes in the capital.
President Trump has been an avid sports and American football fan for years, and as a businessman in the 1980s, he tried to buy the Baltimore Colts team. When he did not obtain consent, he bought a club in the new, alternative USFL league, which, however, went bankrupt after only three seasons. After taking power for the second time, Trump repeatedly demanded to restore the original name of the capital team, Redskins, which was changed in 2019 due to its racist overtones. Back in July, he threatened that he would not consent to the construction of a new stadium if his demand was not met.
As Geraghty noted, many properties across the country already bear Trump's name. In Hialeah and Palm Beach, Florida, city streets were named after Trump, in Oklahoma, a section of a national road, and in Nevada, a complex of courthouses was named after him. In the Golan Heights, the Israeli government named one of the Jewish settlements after Trump, and the corridor running through Armenia connecting Azerbaijan with its exclave of Nakhchivan is to be called the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity. According to reports, Trump also planned to name a ballroom being built on the White House grounds after himself (though the White House denies this) and several times called the capital's Kennedy Center concert hall “Trump Center”.
