When President Donald Trump demanded that the Washington Commanders change their name back to the Redskins — a slur that the team dropped as a moniker in 2020 — it should have surprised no one.

Not only because he’s shown that he can’t resist a culture war skirmish, but because for decades, the nation’s most popular sport has been leveraged by presidents to bolster their standings. During his first term, Trump knew the play. He ran it successfully against NFL players who knelt during the National Anthem.

His attack on the Commanders, however, suggests that he’s losing touch — demonstrating that he’s out of step with the values of younger sports fans and the sponsors eager to reach them. In short order, he’s becoming that rare American president who doesn’t know how to talk football.

Sports have always expressed the identity, aspirations and values of a culture. President Theodore Roosevelt embraced the relationship as tightly as any national leader. Football, he wrote, requires “the greatest exercise of fine moral qualities, such as resolution, courage, endurance, and capacity to hold one’s own and stand up under punishment.”

Invoking these traits aligned Roosevelt with a brash, young nation’s up-and-coming sport, reflecting both the country’s ambitions and self-image. Subsequent presidents followed his lead, conjuring football’s fabled history, as well as its physical qualities, to signal fortitude and a common purpose.

Of course, not every president has used America’s love of football to bring people together. During his tumultuous presidency, Richard Nixon, a serious football fan, used the sport to signal alignment with middle-class fans in the “silent majority,” a voting bloc he coveted. It was a successful gambit that helped him run up a landslide re-election victory in 1972. Nonetheless, his football-based divisiveness could be crass. For example, on November 15, 1969, the country was convulsed by massive anti-war protests. Nixon, determined to signal his embrace of more orderly values, told reporters: “It was a good day to watch a football game.”

The gesture outraged the marchers and even some of Nixon’s own aids. But his point — that he embraces “regular” Americans and their love of football — was made concisely.

Trump seems to have learned something from Nixon. In 2016, a Yahoo/YouGov poll found that only 28% of Americans believed it was appropriate for Colin Kaepernick, the then-San Francisco quarterback, to kneel during the National Anthem to protest systemic racism. Trump, always in search of a wedge issue, invoked Old Glory and argued that no player should “be allowed to disrespect our great American flag.” It was an appeal to the nostalgic patriotism of his MAGA base, and the NFL, which initially stood up for its players, took a reputational hit.

By October 2017, the league — usually a unifying force — had joined Trump Hotels, MSNBC and Fox News on a list of most polarizing brands and companies, according to Morning Consult data from the time. Democrats still viewed the NFL favorably, but over 60% of Republicans didn’t. The Trump-driven division was likely one reason for the roughly 10% drop in viewership during the 2017 NFL season (injuries and cord-cutting also played a role). It also played a role in the league’s May 2018 ban on kneeling during the anthem.

But something unexpected happened following the initial kneeling frenzy: Americans started to come around to Kaepernick’s way of thinking. By 2020, a Yahoo/YouGov poll found that 52% of Americans believed it was acceptable for NFL players to kneel in protest of police killings of African Americans. In that same poll, a whopping 68% of Americans 18-29 agreed with the sentiment.

Some of that shift was due to the national reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd that year. But even before then, sports fandom was undergoing significant changes because of the media consumption patterns of younger fans. Gen Z tends to engage with sports by following athletes on social media — not by watching entire Sunday afternoon football games, for example.

Many players, especially those in the same generation, understand what the new audience is looking for and use their platforms to promote social justice, activism and politics. It’s good business and branding. If fans align with the values being expressed, they’ll typically engage more deeply with the athlete — and, likely, that player’s team, sport, league and merchandise. The rise of women’s sports, in particular, has been fueled by this kind of values alignment. But women’s sports are hardly alone.

Marketers and companies hoping to appeal to young NFL fans have acted on this insight for years. That’s why, in 2020, as controversy swirled around the then-called Washington Redskins, sponsors, including FedEx Corp., Pepsi Co., Nike Inc. and Bank of America Corp., demanded a name change. On social media, where new fandoms are being made, branding with a slur is no longer acceptable.

It would take two more years for the team to debut a new name, and while “Commanders” was initially unpopular, it is now viewed favorably by nearly two-thirds of the fanbase (aided by a breakout season). Meanwhile, only 25% of fans surveyed in a new YouGov poll strongly or somewhat approve of Trump’s threat against the team.

A president tuned into the shifting values of today’s football fan would look at these numbers and find another wedge issue. But Trump is stuck on the sidelines, watching as the game and the culture rush past him.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."

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