For decades, our strongest public symbols — the larger-than-life figures who gave ordinary people a little lift — came from the stadiums. I grew up with that: my father and I watching Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle at Yankee Stadium, and my father reminding me that he’d seen Babe Ruth. Those men weren’t just great athletes; they were, for many of us, touchstones — brief, shining embodiments of aspiration, distraction from hardship, proof that someone could be brilliant on a public stage.
Lately it’s felt as if that pipeline of sports icons has dried up. The cultural role once occupied by the “Top Jock” has, in my view, been largely absorbed by one figure: Donald J. Trump. He commands attention the way a superstar used to, but he does so not by inspiring or elevating, but by dominating the spectacle. Trump wants to be the GOAT — the Greatest of All Time — and, whether he’s earned that title or not, he has succeeded at turning public life into an ongoing contest in which he is always the most valuable player.
This is not praise. It’s an attempt to understand a shift. From Babe Ruth through Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and beyond, athletes have served as emblematic characters in the American story. Even when their off-field lives were messy or morally complicated, these figures often carried a kind of symbolic weight. They distracted and delighted. They offered narratives about triumph, identity and aspiration.
Sports still produce stars — LeBron James, Serena Williams, Tom Brady — but none seem to command the broad, cross-cultural obsession those past figures did. Athletes now often get boxed in by niche fandoms, savvy branding, or controversy that limits their crossover appeal. Some are denied canonical honors on moral grounds; others become the targets or tools of political battles. Meanwhile, Trump has turned politics into a kind of perpetual sporting event: trash talk, team identities, binary rivals, and constant televised drama.
My work over the past two decades as a Jock Culture correspondent pushed me to look for patterns linking sports and broader culture. I discovered, strangely, recurring references to Trump in essays nominally about games: from columns about football and baseball to reflections on NASCAR and the Super Bowl, his portrait kept appearing. Was this my obsession showing through? Or has Trump actually soaked up so much national attention that he displaces the athletes who used to occupy that symbolic space?
There are signs that he has. The story of Colin Kaepernick illustrates one dynamic: pro football, with its macho tribalism and glorified violence, helped prepare a cultural terrain on which a Trump-style leader could thrive. Yet the same sport supplied one of the clearest resistances to racial injustice when Kaepernick knelt during the anthem. The reaction to Kaepernick — he never played again in the NFL — shows how the sports world can be quick to side with team conformity and slow to defend dissent when power and commerce are at stake.
Trump’s own relationship with sports started long before the presidency. He tried to be a builder and owner in the football world, buying into the USFL in the 1980s and pushing for a merger with the NFL — a legal battle that resulted in a symbolic victory and a $3.76 damages award that has become a punchline. Golfers and others have labeled him a bully on the course; critics have called him the “Commander in Cheat.” Yet he retained a kind of celebrity clubhouse status, drawing attention and co-opting imagery from sport when it served him.
The Trump administration has used sports imagery aggressively: military actions edited next to pro and college football hits, the blunt suggestion that physical violence on the field can be mapped onto war. Some athletes objected — a Nebraska receiver who was disgusted that a hard block from his college days was shown beside bombing footage called the montage sickening — but such complaints rarely led to broad institutional pushback. Sports leagues, wary of political retribution or commercial consequences, often tread cautiously.
Then there are the Epstein files and other scandals that revealed who circulates in which power networks. Famous athletes are not the most visible names in that world; financiers, politicians, academics and entertainers appear more often. There are exceptions — some owners and executives show up — but the pattern is a reminder: athletes may have symbolic power, but they are not always central to the circuits of elite influence.
So what does it mean that Trump has taken on the cultural role once filled by sports heroes? First, it suggests that our appetite for a single, charismatic cultural avatar hasn’t vanished; it’s just been redirected. We still crave figures who seem to stand for an era’s dominant feeling. Second, the character of that avatar matters. When it’s someone whose appeal is built on grievance, outrage, and performance rather than on craft or moral example, the public conversation shifts toward spectacle, conflict and personality-driven loyalty.
Finally, there’s a practical concern: when one person monopolizes national attention, other potential sources of shared meaning — local heroes, team narratives, even honest debate about sports and society — get crowded out. We lose places where collective hope and civic pride used to surface in less corrosive forms.
I don’t pretend to have a tidy solution. Maybe new kinds of heroes will emerge from changing leagues, from women’s sports, from athletes who use their platforms differently, or from entirely new cultural arenas. Maybe we’ll get a song that asks, in a new key, “Where have you gone, [fill in the blank]?” For now, it’s worth recognizing the shift: much of America’s spectacle has migrated from bleachers to rallies, from locker rooms to press rooms, from fields of play to tweets and trials.
If a society wants better avatars, it will have to demand them: celebrate athletes for consequence and character as well as performance; defend dissenting voices; resist the transformation of everything into an arena for domination. Until then, Trump will keep trying to be the MVP of our moment — and we’ll have to decide whether we’ll keep watching the game he’s running or try to write a different halftime show.