Last month, in a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the San Francisco 49ers’ star defensive end, Nick Bosa, celebrated a routine sack with a cheerful and ungainly series of hip-swivels and fist-pumps, not unlike the movements of an automaton gaining sentience.
This is what has become known as the Trump dance.
For Bosa — who had just been fined $11,255, or .033 percent of his $34 million-a-year salary, for sporting a “Make America Great Again” hat on the field weeks earlier — it was, evidently, an emphatic if tongue-in-cheek salute to the president-elect. The lumbering gestures of politicians rarely trickle down to the football field, but this instance made for a strange kind of harmony: Trump, after all, has perfected in politics exactly the kinds of gloating theatrics we expect from athletes after just about every net-positive play.
The Trump dance has become a phenomenon in the world of sports, where the president-elect has long vied for purchase. Sometimes it suggests a resounding endorsement of Trump himself; sometimes it’s just about the pleasures of stiff gyration. Following Bosa’s lead, the Las Vegas Raiders tight end Brock Bowers celebrated a recent touchdown with the dance, pumping his fists in the gleefully stodgy manner Trump has at so many rallies. So did Christian Pulisic, a star of the U.S. men’s national soccer team, who clarified that he was not declaring his support for Trump but merely “thought it was funny.” When the heavyweight fighter Jon Jones introduced his own variation of the shimmy, Trump himself was looking on from just beyond the ring like a proud father, flanked by his associates Kid Rock and Elon Musk.
This time, the scolding, humorless masses don’t seem to mind.
It’s hard to say exactly how the move originated; over the past decade, no small number of Trump campaign events have harnessed the galvanizing power of impromptu dance. What we can say is that Trump frequently greets the playing of “YMCA,” a staple of his campaign playlist, by darting his arms back and forth in the fitful style of an inflatable tube man outside a highway car dealership, often swinging an imaginary golf club as a kind of grace note. One notorious example came in October, at a Pennsylvania town-hall event that was twice interrupted by medical emergencies, prompting Trump to request the song — “nice and loud,” he called to the on-site D.J. — before initiating his signature twist. After roughly 39 minutes of idle movement alongside Kristi Noem, the immigration hard-liner who would become Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, the candidate finally left the stage to the sound of “Memory,” the maudlin 11 o’clock number from the musical “Cats.”
News coverage of this town-hall-turned-listening-party seemed to misunderstand its appeal. It was cited as evidence of Trump’s generally odd and excitable nature, or perhaps as a sign of his declining mental faculties. But here he was as his supporters see him: not as a vengeful and unserious authoritarian or threat to American democracy, but as an affable geezer so secure in his masculinity that he is consistently roused to movement by a campy old disco trifle. (Putting aside, for the moment, that this particular classic has endured among gay men as a paean to cruising for sex.) If the dance were not so obviously a reflection of Trump’s genuine enthusiasm for “YMCA,” you might even see it as a clever bit of branding, an appeal to the everyman’s struggle to find the beat. Like his pretend shift at a McDonald’s or the mug shot taken after his Georgia indictment, the Trump dance was reproduced online until it became an inside joke and then a meme, a signifier of cocky defiance of the haters and the losers.
It was not until after the election that the dance resurfaced in the world of sports, where social media and round-the-clock coverage have conspired to make victory celebrations and general nose-thumbing more or less compulsory. Early examples of the form — Homer Jones’s 1965 invention of the touchdown spike, or Billy Johnson’s funky chicken, introduced a decade later — seem positively quaint when viewed alongside more recent innovations. These days, athletes prefer elaborate riffs on internet trends (the griddy) or deliberately inflammatory demonstrations (the snarling “too small” gesture favored by N.B.A. players). One who intends to troll has a number of options: going “night night” like Steph Curry, or smugly flashing the peace sign (most often directed at a defender in helpless pursuit), or pointing to a ring finger (as Angel Reese did to Caitlin Clark in the closing minutes of L.S.U.’s N.C.A.A. Championship win over Iowa last year). All of which is simply to say that the animating spirit of the modern athlete celebration is a kind of schoolyard boastfulness — or “taunting,” as it’s referred to in the rule books — retrofitted for the age of TikTok.
Sports, then, are not unlike the most internet-pilled quarters of conservative punditry, where points are scored by inflicting maximum humiliation. For those pundits, the popularity of the Trump dance marks the death of an era of athlete activism — one stoked, at least in part, by Trump himself, who admonished N.F.L. players for kneeling during the national anthem and disinvited the Golden State Warriors from the championship-winning team’s customary visit to the White House. “In a world of Colin Kaepernicks,” one conservative podcaster tweeted, in reference to the former quarterback’s protests against police brutality, “be a Nick Bosa.” On Fox News, the dance was treated as a decisive victory in the culture wars — never mind Trump’s actual victory in the presidential election. Laura Ingraham, who famously responded to LeBron James’s criticism of Trump by telling him to “shut up and dribble,” interviewed an exultant Hulk Hogan, who boasted that he was actually the first to ape Trump’s moves. On the same network, Jesse Watters spoke of the athletes as folk heroes: “Everybody feels an infectious courage,” he said, “because there is no more stigma about being MAGA.”
But the dance — as compulsively reproducible as it is knowingly dumb — isn’t really an act of ideological bravery; it’s part of a tradition of snide, petulant, occasionally amusing provocation that has come to characterize both professional sports and, increasingly, American politics. Its many imitators may indeed love the president-elect, but the act of parroting him feels designed to ruffle the feathers of an imagined establishment — the “liberal” media, or Democrats, or perhaps a referee, who’s always liable to throw the penalty flag for unsportsmanlike conduct. It operates much like the cheeky rallying cry of Trump’s time out of office: “Let’s Go, Brandon,” a slogan whose winking, coded profanity allowed Trump supporters to feel as naughty as children armed with whoopee cushions.
This time, though, the scolding, humorless masses don’t seem to mind. So accustomed are we to a politics of mischief and defiance that there has been little of the liberal pearl-clutching that serves as lifeblood for the right-wing commentariat. It feels especially pointless to note how many of the talking heads who are now gloating once groaned over athletes daring to oppose the former president. Not even the N.F.L., which takes a perverse pleasure in doling out fines for celebrations it deems political, violent or sexually suggestive, could be bothered to feed the outrage machine. The league, its spokesman stated last month, takes “no issue” with the dance. If anything, the move’s popularity marks a new frontier: Trump as the mainstream, no longer an outsider but a figure so banal and impervious to scandal that people can muster no more than a sigh — or, perhaps, a little wiggle — when they encounter him, suddenly, on the field.
Jake Nevins is a writer in Brooklyn and the digital editor at Interview Magazine. He has written about books, sports and pop culture for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Nation.
Source photographs for illustration above: Evan Vucci/Associated Press; Chris Carlson/Associated Press; Tom DiPace, via Associated Press.
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