The Sports and Entertainment World Will Celebrate Nation's Birthday Without Trump

Diverse and pluralistic cultures are incompatible with White Nationalism

Over 77 million Americans cast a ballot of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. It’s no surprise that you can find people in every area of entertainment who supported him, and still support him. You can find them in Hollywood, in the music industry, and throughout the sports world.

But these creative types are in general a diverse lot who embrace pluralism. Cinema and theatre have their own unique culture which is highly tolerant of religious differences and the LGBT community. The American music scene has long been a hub of racial integration and cross-pollination of different worldwide musical traditions.

And consider sports. Eighty-two percent of the NBA is non-white, as is 73 percent of the NFL and 40 percent of Major League Baseball. Even many of the white athletes in these leagues are not native born Americans, particularly in the NBA. The UFC, is 50-55 percent non-white, and only half of its fighters are American. Many of the white fighters are Russian or Australian.

The MAGA movement’s ideal of a white, straight, native-born, conservatively Christian nation doesn’t align with the values of the sports and entertainment world. Sure, there are pockets, like NASCAR and parts of the country music scene, that are compatible with MAGA, but even there it’s truer of the audience than the athletes and artists.

Three events this past week showed how this works in action. President Trump announced that he will headline the Great American State Fair on the National Mall to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, after more than half of the announced musical acts canceled their announced appearances. These artists did not want to be associated with Trump or his policies.

Separately, a federal judge, Christopher R. Cooper, ordered Trump’s name removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Cooper also put a temporary halt to scheduled renovations and a plan to close the arts center for the next two years.

Trump announced the closure of the arts center after one act after another canceled in response to him taking over the board and renaming the center after himself. Once again, creative types simply refused to be associated with him. In response, Trump has threatened to abandon the center and transfer all responsibility for its operations back to Congress.

The third incident involved the NFL’s New York Giants. The team’s young quarterback, Jaxson Dart, a white Mormon from Utah who grew up in a conservative family, accepted an invitation to introduce Trump at a campaign rally for a New York congressman. This caused another young star player on the team Abdul Carter, who is both Black and Muslim, to question Dart’s judgment on social media.

Dart did not necessarily know in advance the exact nature of what the Trump administration wanted him to do and says his intent was patriotic rather than partisan in nature. The management wasn’t pleased that he represented the team at a rally, but the bigger problem was with Dart’s teammates. They held closed meetings to hash things out and agree on expectations of players for the future. Dart emerged at a press conference, visibly shaken and chastened. While it’s not clear what happened behind closed doors, it is very clear that he got an education about how Trump and his policies are viewed by the mostly Black roster of the Giants.

He shouldn’t have been caught so off-guard. During Trump’s first term, he rescinded an offer for the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles to visit the White House after most of the team indicated they would boycott. The New England Patriots visited twice, but a substantial number of players boycotted in both cases. The Kansas City Chiefs invitation was spiked by the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2025, the Eagles did attend but many players including quarterback Jalen Hurts very publicly declined the offer. Star running back Saquon Barkley received so much criticism for showing up and golfing with Trump that he felt compelled to say he had previously golfed with Barack Obama and, "Maybe I just respect the office, not a hard concept to understand."

So far, no invitation for the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks has been announced. This is unprecedented, but probably an indication that the Trump administration did not want to risk another boycott.

This pattern has been repeated in other sports. In the NBA, the champion Golden State Warriors, Toronto Raptors, and Oklahoma City Thunder all refused White House invitations, while the WNBA champions’ hostility resulted in no invitations at all. The U.S. women’s Olympic hockey and U.S. World Cup Soccer champions boycotted.

This isn’t even a complete list. Simply put, just like the music industry, the sports world is too diverse and pluralistic to have anything to do with Trump, at least not without massive disagreements among the teams’ athletes.

One final example of this can be seen in reporting from the Washington Post on the UFC cage-fighting event Trump has scheduled at the White House to celebrate both his birthday and the birthday of the U.S. Army. Unable to fill the seats, the Pentagon is asking low-ranking service members from the military to attend. Naturally, the White House is asking them to pay their own travel expenses.

The UFC’s chief executive, Dana White, claims there will be 4,000 people, mostly military, at the event. He predicts thousands more will nearby in the Ellipse. We’ll see if his predictions come true.

The UFC audience is much younger than the audience for other sports, and it’s remarkably diverse, reflecting the global nature of the fighters. Mixed martial arts might seem like something that suits the typical MAGA male, but this perception is overblown and young people are among the most disillusioned with Trump’s second term in office. The UFC crowd is certainly more conservative than average, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to a desire to associate with a president whose approval numbers are in the toilet.

As this administration relentlessly pursues a white nationalist agenda and attempts to draw most of the Black representation out of Congress by rolling back the achievements of the Civil Rights Era, it’s increasingly difficult to be pro-Trump or even neutral about Trump in the pluralistic sports and entertainment industries.

It didn’t used to be this way. At the 1976 celebrations in Washington DC, which happened under Republican President Gerald Ford, Johnny Cash served as the Grand Marshal of the Grand Bicentennial Parade.

I think we all know what Johnny Cash would think of Trump, but we can also ask his children, Rosanne, Kathy, Cindy, Tara, and John Carter Cash.

Following the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white supremacist was photographed wearing a Johnny Cash t-shirt. Because President Trump’s response to the rally—stating there was “blame on both sides”—became a massive national controversy, Cash’s children issued a public statement clarifying where their father would have stood.

In a joint statement on Facebook, they explicitly asked that his name be kept out of partisan and exclusionary politics:

“We were sickened by the association. Johnny Cash was a man whose heart beat with the rhythm of love and social justice... He would be horrified even to have his name co-opted by white supremacists or klan members... We ask that the Cash name be kept far away from destructive and hateful ideology.”

Fifty years is a long time. A very long time.

Back then, many were absolutely infuriated with President Ford for pardoning Richard Nixon, but that didn’t prevent them from putting aside their disgust to celebrate the country’s bicentennial, including in events organized by Ford’s administration.

Today, we will try to celebrate in every way we can, but supporters of pluralism and diversity will have nothing to do with Trump or his plans.