President Trump’s Comments on Washington Football Team Name Sparks Outrage from Indian Country as Massepequa High School Urges Executive Order Protecting Native Mascots
By Darren Thompson
Washington—On Sunday, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social suggesting that the Washington Commanders National Football League franchise revert to its offensive former nickname, drawing ire from Native American leaders. In his post, the president suggested he may stop a deal that would eventually build a stadium for the Washington Commanders if they fail to change the name back to the Redskins, which was retired in 2020 after years of protest from Native communities. He further stated that the Cleveland Guardians—who stopped using the “Indians” nickname in 2020—should change their name back and said “MAKE INDIANS GREAT AGAIN.”
The comments sparked responses from many who have been entrenched in changing race-based mascots for decades, including the National Congress of American Indians, Chase Iron Eyes of the Lakota People’s Law Project and Sacred Defense Fund, and Suzan Shown Harjo, who led a legal effort against the use of Washington's former name that began in 1992.
Suzan Shown Harjo was the keynote speaker at the American Indian Religious Freedom Summit in the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs’ assembly room in Washington, D.C. on November 19, 2024. Photo by Darren Thompson.
"He’s … now openly trying to pressure the NFL owners and the D.C. government to take a ginormous step back into bigotry,” said Suzan Shown Harjo on Facebook late Sunday night. “This comes just as the Commanders are playing like champions, without carrying that burden of bad karma. Remember, as the R-word team owners—awash in their claimed privilege to call us hateful names, mock our cultures and rewrite history—the team’s last Super Bowl was in 1992 (for the 1991 season).”
Washington retired its old name in July 2020, not long after the death of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Officer in May 2025. The team's previous owner, Dan Snyder, said he would never change the team name, and the use of the name sparked movements to eliminate race-based mascots throughout the country.
Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, White Earth Ojibwe, spoke outside the Minneapolis American Indian Center on July 13, 2020 applauding the retirement of the “Redskins” team name with leaders of the American Indian Movement and the National Coalition on Racism in Sports & Media. Photo by Darren Thompson.
“We’ve been demanding the elimination of offensive mascots and team names for years,” said Iron Eyes to LRI Native News. “It’s really pretty simple. If you want to know whether something is offensive to Native people, just ask us. The president, just like any other non-Native person, isn’t the ultimate authority on this matter.”
The effort to change the team name was decades long, and the legal effort began on Sept. 10, 1992, when Harjo led a petition with seven other Native Americans, including the late Vine Deloria, Jr., with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB).
“He, like many others who sling racial slurs, jump to the conclusion that we object to the color red—although it would be invidious discrimination to reference only Native Peoples in sports, especially when there are no Whiteskins, Blackskins, Brownskins or Yellowskins in American sports and never have been,” Harjo said.
Their petition aimed to cancel six trademark registrations owned by Pro-Football, Inc., the entity that operated the Washington Redskins, including its logo. TTAB granted the petition, but Snyder appealed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The court overturned the cancellation. The U.S. District Court said that the party failed to demonstrate that the use of the original name was disparaging, and the petition was barred by laches, meaning the court determined the petitioners waited an unreasonable amount of time to file a claim. Pro-Football, Inc. registered its trademarks in 1967.
Despite the ruling, Harjo's efforts started a series of challenges. After the the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal in 2009, Diné activist Amanda Blackhorse and five others brought a new case against Pro-Football, Inc. in 2012. TTAB ordered that the name’s registrations be cancelled in June 2014, determining that they violated the Lanham Act. TTAB said the petitioners established that the R-word was disparaging of Native Americans, and that laches didn't apply to the “Blackhorse defendants.” The decision was appealed, but it was upheld by the U.S. District Court of Eastern District of Virginia in July 2015.
Massepequa Chiefs and Trump
Many states, like New York, have passed laws requiring public schools to eliminate their use of “Indian-themed” names and mascots, penalizing those who failed to make a change with a loss of funding. Earlier this year, Trump weighed on New York’s law banning the use of American Indian mascots and made a comment on Truth Social saying that Massepequa High School, located in Long Island, must be allowed to continue using their Chiefs nickname.
President Donald Trump poses with a Massepequa “Chiefs” shirt in the Oval Office on April 28, 2025. Trump publicly voiced his support for the continued use of the name “Chiefs” at a Long Island school district in New York, where the state passed a law in 2023 banning the use of Native-themed mascots and names by June 30, 2025. Photo courtesy of Instagram/realdonaldtrump.
In his post regarding Massepequa, Trump then directed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to weigh in on the issue. One month later, the U.S. Department of Education alleged that the policy violated civil rights law, because other racial or ethnic groups such as the “Dutchmen" and the "Hugeunots" are still permitted in the state. The state of New York declined to rescind the policy. U.S. Sec. of Education Linda McMahon then referred the case to the U.S. Department of Justice, which is reviewing whether or not the state law violates citizen’s civil rights.
Yesterday, the Massapequa school district took its quest to save its nickname to another level by urging President Trump to issue an executive order that would protect the use of Native American names and images across the country. Kerry Wachter, Massepequa’s school board president said to the New York Post, “It’s about not erasing, but instead educating about Native Americans and keeping them on the forefront."
President Trump also included in his comment on Sunday that a majority of “Indian people” support his idea to revert the Washington football team’s nickname. However, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI)—the oldest, largest, and most representative American Indian organization in the country, founded in 1944—issued a statement on Monday condemning Trump’s call to reinstate the name. The organization has been opposed to the use of Native-themed mascots and names for decades and has passed several resolutions asking for the end of Native mascots, names, and stereotypes.
“Contrary to President Trump’s assertion that '[o]ur great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,’ Indian Country has repeatedly come together to condemn the unsanctioned use of harmful Native ‘themed’ mascots, particularly those which sexualize, stereotype, or dehumanize American Indian and Alaska Native people,” the NCAI said in a statement on Monday, July 21.
Others have pointed out that the timing of Trump’s comments are suspect, as they come in the midst of scrutiny over his possible connections to the Jeffery Epstein investigation. Many lawmakers and Trump's supporters have called for the release of all of the investigation files, rather than the select amount sanctioned by the president and administration officials. The administration previously promised to release all of the files, which could detail the links between many high-profile people and the notorious child sex trafficker. Trump and Epstein were known associates, and the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a memo on July 6 that they would not release any additional files on Epstein until further notice.
“Trump gutted Medicaid, after school programs, and food assistance to give him and his cronies even more tax breaks and now tries distracting us by resurrecting some nostalgic racism that Natives fought for 60-plus years,” said Not Your Honor founding member and Ojibwe attorney Tara Houska in a statement to LRI Native News. “Native peoples aren’t your mascots, nor your shield for poor governance. Release the Epstein files. Stop sending bombs overseas. Focus on universal healthcare instead of disappearing families Indigenous to the Americas.”
NCAI also said in its conclusion issued yesterday, “We are not your mascot. We are not your distraction.”
Darren Thompson is the Managing Editor of Last Real Indians Native News Desk and the Director of Media Relations for the Sacred Defense Fund, an Indigenous-led nonprofit organization based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’s an award winning multimedia journalist enrolled at Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, where he grew up. He can be reached at darren@sacreddefense.org.