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The Psychology of Resistance
What famous experiments really teach us about fighting authoritarianism today.
Jul 06, 2025
In my last article, I detailed how U.S. President Donald Trump misunderstands the fundamental truth about human nature. He projects his own transactional worldview onto all of us, imagining that we're all determined to step on others to rise. I pointed out that our true nature is represented by the millions who have taken to the streets to speak out against injustices, by people like Mahmoud Kahlil (finally free!), and the mothers and fathers facing deportation whose children cry out as masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials abduct them outside schools. Our fundamental nature is rooted in care for one another. We are not killers but carers.
But what do we do with that information? How does that help us resist what's happening now?
To answer this, I want to talk about psychology, my disciplinary home, and what we can learn from some foundational studies about manipulation, power, and resistance. If you've taken psychology in high school or college, you've likely learned about these three infamous experiments: Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, Sherif's Robber's Cave Experiment, and Milgram's shock experiments.
If evil is inevitable, then resistance is pointless.
The rudimentary takeaway from each might sound like this: Ordinary people will do extraordinarily evil things in certain circumstances. This conclusion reinforces a cynical view of humanity that is both lazy and tragically disempowering.
Cynicism about human nature, fueled by the findings from these experiments, is lazy because it stops us from asking harder questions about systems, power, and how change actually happens. If we're all monsters deep down, then there's no point in organizing, no point in building better institutions, no point in fighting for justice. We can just shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, I guess this is who we are," and watch each other burn.
This kind of fatalism is exactly what those in power want. It lets us all off the hook, we don't have to show up for each other, we don't have to do the difficult work of dismantling harmful systems and speaking truth to power, we don't have to take responsibility for preventing the continuation of harm. If evil is inevitable, then resistance is pointless.
The cynical view, supported by the "findings" of these experiments, is dangerous propaganda that serves authoritarians.
What Really Happened in Zimbardo's, Sherif's, and Milgram's Experiments
Let's first correct the record on each of these studies, because the actual truth reveals something very different about human nature and gives us a roadmap for resistance.
Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment supposedly showed that people become sadistic when given power over others. In 1971, Zimbardo recreated a prison environment in Stanford's basement, paying students to act as guards or prisoners. It quickly devolved into what appeared to be guards relishing their role as violent dominators, torturing and abusing the "prisoners." Zimbardo, who had given himself the role of the warden, allowed it all to happen and instigated much of it.
Zimbardo, Sherif, and Milgram all built their careers on lies about human nature that serve authoritarians.
While the narrative pushed by Zimbardo, that good people will become evil in certain roles, made him famous, the truth revealed by the experiment is that we will try our best to meet the parameters of an assignment that are articulated to us. The students were acting because they wanted to make Zimbardo happy. They weren't revealing some dark truth about human nature; they were trying to be good research participants, following what they thought were the experimenter's expectations.
Sherif's Robber's Cave Experiment claimed to show how easily children form hostile groups. Sherif brought boys to summer camp and arbitrarily organized them into two teams with the exciting names of the Rattlers and the Eagles. The story, according to Sherif, goes that they quickly degenerated into "wicked, disturbed, and vicious bunches of youngsters," burning flags, raiding camps, and inventing weapons made of socks and rocks.
When psychologist Gina Perry dug into the archives, she found that this was a manufactured narrative with the boys actually wanting to be friends with each other. To get the outcome Sherif wanted to report, the one that could make him famous, he had to manipulate everything, rigging games, tearing down tents themselves and blaming the other group, stopping the boys when they tried to make peace symbols for their T-shirts. When the boys figured out they were being manipulated, the experiment collapsed.
Milgram's shock experiments supposedly proved that 65% of people will follow evil orders, delivering potentially fatal electric shocks to strangers when told to do so by an authority figure. For decades, this has been cited as proof that we're all potential Nazis, just waiting for the right circumstances.
But when researchers finally got access to Milgram's archives, they discovered he was more director than scientist. Anyone who deviated from his script was bullied and coerced. The man in the lab coat would make eight or nine attempts to force people to continue, even coming to blows with participants who tried to stop.
Not only that but a large percentage (44%) of the participants didn't believe the study to be real, they didn't actually think they were delivering real shocks. Among those who did believe the shocks were real, the majority refused to continue.
So how did Milgram get his results? Psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher discovered that participants weren't submitting to authority; instead they were trying to help with what they believed was important scientific research. When told their contribution would benefit science, participants expressed relief: "I am happy to have been of service" and "Continue your experiments by all means as long as good can come of them." It turns out people weren't mindlessly obedient. People were being tricked into thinking they were doing good.
The Real Lessons: How to Resist
What can we learn from these manipulated experiments? The true lesson isn't about human evil, it's about how some people will do anything to establish fame and power for themselves. Zimbardo, Sherif, and Milgram all built their careers on lies about human nature that serve authoritarians.
But buried in their own data is the real story of resistance. When researchers analyzed who successfully resisted in Milgram's experiments, they found three key tactics:
- Talk to the victim—Connect with those being harmed;
- Remind those in power of their responsibility—Hold leaders accountable; and
- Repeatedly refuse to continue–Don't give up after the first "no."
We can develop these capacities through practice and education. This is one reason we must fiercely protect our universities; they are critical sites where communication skills, critical thinking, and moral courage can be cultivated. It is not surprising that college students are often on the frontlines of fighting for justice, from the civil rights movement to anti-war protests to today's demonstrations for Palestinian liberation and immigrant rights. It's why being in community and knowing our neighbors is a necessary strategy of survival and resistance. It's evidence that calling our representatives and holding them accountable actually matters. We can resist questionable authority just as those participants in Milgram's studies who refused to continue did. And we can get better at it.
Why This Matters in Trump's America
My discipline of psychology has repeatedly told us lies that benefit men seeking power. As I shared in my previous article, Trump is exploiting a myth about us being fundamentally evil because it serves him to have us believing that, even though we are actually wired toward care. When we find ourselves in situations where we're asked to dehumanize someone, to cause someone harm, we now know what to do. When psychologists peeked into the actual archives of these famous experiments, that was the truth that was revealed.
As Trump's administration invents cruel ways to tear apart our communities, as they bomb Iran to distract us from domestic cruelties, as they tell us that entire populations are threats to justify dragging us into wars, we must remember the true lessons of these experiments. Powerful men will mislead us and try to convince us to act against our nature. Elon Musk and others who hoard wealth and power tell us that empathy is weakness, that caring is "civilizational suicide," that we must choose between compassion and survival. But the protesters and a few brave lawmakers standing between ICE agents and families know better. They understand what those manipulated experiments actually prove: that our instinct is to refuse to cause harm, to protect each other, to resist when asked to participate in cruelty.
Taking a lesson from the real truth behind these experiments, we must always reach out to those who are being hurt, know them, see them as fully human, refuse to let anyone talk us into dehumanizing our fellow community members. We must relentlessly remind those in power of their responsibility to the collective good. And we must refuse, refuse, refuse to be complicit in systems of harm, no matter how they're justified to us.
Now is the time to reach out to our trans community members under attack. Now is the time to create mutual aid networks and join ICE watches in our communities. Now is the time to call our senators and refuse to let this country be dragged into war with Iran. Now is the time to refuse to give up our democracy, to refuse to turn on our immigrant community members, to hold on tight to our LGBTQ beloveds. Keep protesting. Keep refusing. Keep holding on to one another. Keep being true to our human nature.
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What We Can Learn From Trans People in the Fight for Dignity and Democracy
Given the position of exclusion and criminalization in society, trans people know how to fight and it’s a massive fight that we need to wage right now.
Jun 07, 2025
This year, Pride Month arrives at an especially dire moment for the LGBTQ+ community. Under the second Trump administration, homophobic vitriol and violence are on the rise. On Elon Musk’s X platform, a “deepfake” video of President Donald Trump canceling Pride Month has gone viral. And even as Pride celebrations continue as planned (in many places without as many corporate contributions), the attacks against LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, seem to be on steroids. After all, since taking office a second time, Trump has issued executive orders that ban transgender women in sports and transgender troops in the military, while limiting federal recognition to two genders. And his executive actions are only the spear tip of a significantly larger legislative attempt to target and scapegoat transgender people, who make up just over 1% of the U.S. population.
Believe it or not, so far this year, 701 anti-trans bills have been introduced in American legislative bodies at both the state and federal levels. More than $215 million was spent on anti-trans television advertisements during the 2024 election season alone. Now, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” barely passed by the House and at present in the Senate—which would gut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other lifesaving safety-net programs—takes explicit aim at gender-affirming care for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) patients. If the Senate passes it, the result will be devastating for trans people, who are already twice as likely as the general population to be unemployed and unhoused and four times as likely to live in extreme poverty. It should be no surprise, then, that almost half of transgender adults in this country have already relocated or are considering relocating to more trans-affirming places.
While executive orders, budget cuts, and other attacks threaten all trans and nonbinary people, the most vulnerable are, of course, at greatest risk, including the poor, people of color, the young, the disabled, and the incarcerated. In a recent report, the American Civil Liberties Union offers a horrific insight into this reality:
Some of the most immediate impacts will likely be felt by the more than 2,000 transgender people currently held in federal custody. [One] order specifically calls on the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to ignore the guidelines of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and enforce a blanket policy forcing transgender women into men’s prisons and detention centers against their will. This puts them at a severely heightened risk of sexual assault and abuse by other incarcerated persons and prison staff. The order also mandates that BOP withdraw critical health care from trans people in federal prison.
The overwhelming majority of anti-trans bills target trans and nonbinary children, youth, and young adults by taking away their sense of safety and belonging in healthcare locations, libraries, schools, sports, and so much more, while only accelerating anti-trans bullying and hate. In fact, according to a study from the Trevor Project, “When states pass anti-transgender laws… suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth ages 13 to 17 increased from 7% to 72%.”
It’s important to note that none of this is happening simply because Donald Trump himself is a bigot or because the Republican Party is just deeply cruel. It’s happening because there is a highly connected, well-funded, and strategically positioned Christian nationalist movement pushing forward anti-trans policy and its accompanying social violence.
But in the struggle against religious extremism and political oppression, trans people know what losing strategies look like. Preemptive compliance from the institutions we have often relied upon—including healthcare providers, colleges, and philanthropic foundations—has been a losing strategy. Submission to divide-and-conquer rule, theological idolatry, and biblical distortion, as well as silence from supporters and allies, also loses the day.
Given the position of exclusion and criminalization in society, however, trans people also know how to fight and it’s a massive fight that we need to wage right now. Trans people, who have always had to live with their backs against the wall, are now being joined by those from all walks of life. Indeed, as Trump and the Christian nationalist movement attack everything from decent healthcare to decent housing, more and more people are poised to enter a struggle for survival. In the fight for dignity and democracy, trans people have much to teach everybody.
A History of Resistance
Transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people have long resisted unjust laws, as well as mistreatment and oppression from those in power. The Compton Cafeteria riot in August 1966 sparked transgender activism in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, years before the Stonewall Uprising. Police violence was common in San Francisco then, and the staff at Compton Cafeteria called the police on poor trans women and drag queens who were harassed, subjected to genitalia checks, and subsequently arrested for crossdressing, which was illegal at the time. Tired of the constant oppression, violence, and harassment, trans women resisted arrest, sparking resistance throughout the Tenderloin district. This led to a picket-line presence at the café, as the establishment continued to ban drag queens and trans women.
Evidence of this early trans resistance was nearly erased from historical memory. Thanks to the work of transgender historian Susan Stryker and other activists and organizers, however, the important legacy of such organizing was confirmed to have indeed occurred.
It could not be more important to invoke this powerful lineage of protest and resistance today, not just for the trans and nonbinary community but for everyone.
Three years later, across the country in New York City, the Stonewall Uprising was led primarily by poor people, particularly poor, gender-expansive folks of color, who faced continual police harassment, violence, and discrimination. The Stonewall Inn, a dingy bar reputedly owned by organized crime and frequented by those in the poor gay and trans community in New York’s West Village, was raided by the police in June 1969. The liberation movement that followed saw heroic activism, organizing, and community care by poor, unhoused trans women who resisted constant erasure and violence from the government (and even from within the gay rights movement). Some of those leaders, including Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Maxine Feldman, Bobbie Lea Bennett, and Miss Major Griffin Gracy, were as much a part of the movement to end poverty as they were of the gay rights movement.
Both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were poor, unhoused trans women and sex workers, as well as organizers advocating for deep social transformation. In 1970, they founded S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) House where they worked to meet the material and community needs of poor trans youth. They held monthly political education meetings, offering support for queer folks who were arrested and couldn’t pay bail. They provided both jail and street support in tough times, while working to organize poor trans folks into a larger movement for transformational change.
The story of S.T.A.R. House is replete with lessons for anyone committed to resisting political violence, systemic immiseration, and authoritarian-style rule. In their melding of community-care and political activism, Johnson and Rivera successfully modeled ways to organize and build power in the shadow of extreme state repression. They insisted that everyone in their community had a right to live with dignity and that even the most marginalized among them should have a role in all movements for collective liberation. Through their work, they developed and protected a new generation of queer grassroots leaders, at a time when no one else was willing to do so. Theirs was a political ethic rooted in a deep understanding of the classic movement slogan: “When you lift from the bottom, everybody rises.”
Today, 2025 Pride organizers are doubling down on that radical history of protest and resistance. In fact, NYC Pride has made “protest” its theme of the year. As Kazz Alexander, its co-chair, explained:
The challenges we face today, particularly in this political climate, require us to stand together in solidarity. We must support one another, because when the most marginalized among us are granted their rights, all of us benefit. Pride is not merely a celebration of identity—it is a powerful statement of resistance, affirming that justice and equity will ultimately prevail for those who live and love on the margins.
Unholy Attacks on Children, the Poor, and the Vulnerable
It could not be more important to invoke this powerful lineage of protest and resistance today, not just for the trans and nonbinary community but for everyone. In the Trump years, the slew of homophobic and transphobic attacks has been inseparable from the rise of Christian nationalism and religious extremism. In many ways, the contemporary legislative, executive, and judicial attacks on trans and nonbinary people closely parallel a decades-long strategy of the Christian right to politicize abortion access, an issue previously not considered political by a majority of Americans, including a majority of Christians.
An eerie argument about “defending innocent children” is being deployed by Christian nationalists in their war on gender-affirming care, despite overwhelming medical evidence that such care saves young people’s lives. In fact, denying such care is part of a growing Christian nationalist mission to remake this country as an extremist Christian dominion, starting with our children.
For example, Oklahoma Senate Bill 129, introduced in 2023 to ban gender-affirming care to anyone under the age of 26, was named the “Millstone Act.” That title reflected an unsettling, even violent interpretation of Matthew 18:6 in the Bible, falsely asserting that gender-affirming care harms children and insinuating that anyone providing it should have “a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
In January, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty released its annual report, “The State of Religious Liberty in the United States.” It identified five areas of critical concern: immigration, antisemitism, in vitro fertilization mandates, parental choice in education, and scaling back “gender ideology” laws. It directly took up the rhetoric and politics of the soon-to-be-in-office Trump administration on trans rights and more.
Indeed, there is nothing innate or organic about the rise of anti-trans and anti-queer hate in the United States. As the research of Translash Media has made clear, organizations like the National Christian Foundation, the DeVos Family, and the Council for National Policy have been instrumental in funding, developing, and workshopping anti-trans and anti-queer sentiment, policies, and theology. Fundamentalist Protestant organizations like Focus on the Family, the Family Policy Alliance, and the Family Research Council have also been crucial to the launching of the anti-trans movement within the last decade, including the drafting of the first anti-trans legislation at a Summit on Protecting Children from Sexualization conference in 2019.
Such Christian nationalist-fueled attacks aren’t just about hurting the queer community. They are also a key way of wielding supposedly “traditional” values and identities to discipline dissent and nonconformity in Christian ranks as well, while sowing distrust of “the other” in this all-American world of ours. All of this, of course, played out in the 2024 elections, when trans rights were weaponized into a hot-button and divisive issue by the Trump campaign (with only the most half-hearted pushback from the Biden-Harris crew), despite the trans community being such a microscopic minority of the population.
What the Bible Really Says About Gender Justice
Christian nationalists like to weaponize the Bible as a primary way of justifying their attacks on trans and nonbinary people. And yet, like all Christian nationalist theology, theirs is heretical when it comes to actual Christian scriptures and the subject of Jesus’ teachings.
After all, the creation story in Genesis is fully inclusive of God’s greatness—from the creation of light and darkness to the nonbinary sunrises and sunsets in between. It should be a reminder that all of us are created in God’s image. While the anti-trans crew has sought to use the biblical phrase “male and female God created them” from Genesis 1:27 in defense of exclusionary violence, some of the oldest interpretations of that text hold that God created the first human beings to contain both “maleness” and “femaleness” inside one body. Indeed, the Bible repeatedly names third-gender people as important.
If Christian nationalists insist on using the Bible to underwrite their social and political violence, those of us who call ourselves Christians must be willing to defend LGBTQ+ people with fervor and theological rigor.
In Isaiah 56:3-5, for instance, God affirms not only the sanctity but the spiritual importance of people who exist outside of the gender binary, in essence promising LGBTQ+ people, “an everlasting name, a name better than sons and daughters.” The Book of Esther, for instance, identifies no fewer than 10 gender non-conforming people, some of whom are identified as playing a role in assisting Esther’s defense of her people against imperial violence. The Jewish Talmud reflects a similar affirmation of gender diversity, legally recognizing no fewer than seven genders.
This inclusivity carries through to the New Testament and the stories about Jesus as well. In Matthew 19:12, Jesus teaches that there are human beings who exist outside of the gender binary from birth. Acts 8:26-39 explicitly lifts up the spiritual leadership of gender nonconforming people of African descent in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. In our time, that eunuch would have been far more welcome at the Stonewall Inn than at the Family Research Council’s annual summit.
There are numerous other biblical examples of gender diversity and of Jesus’ celebration of and identification with gender nonconforming people. The point is that if Christian nationalists insist on using the Bible to underwrite their social and political violence, those of us who call ourselves Christians must be willing to defend LGBTQ+ people with fervor and theological rigor.
This is a “Kairos moment” for faith communities that affirm the dignity and rights of LGBTQ+ people—especially trans and nonbinary people. Christian nationalism’s spiritual and political attacks on LGBTQ+ people are also an attack on our deep belief in God’s inclusive love. Isn’t it time, especially in the age of Donald Trump, to leverage our public witness, our pastoral presence, our theological voice, and the power of our institutions in defense of the surviving and thriving of all people?
For too long, religion has been used to attack LGBTQ+ people. Today, Christian nationalists are amassing power by claiming a monopoly on morality. But beneath theological distortions and manipulations exists an untarnished gospel that teaches love, inclusion, diversity, and justice. We must be brave enough to proclaim this gospel for all to hear.
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Your Designated Sports Break From Trumpalooza
Here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Then it’s time to get back in the game and face down the bullies.
May 10, 2025
If the overwhelming deluge from the Trumpian firehose of lies, threats, incompetency, illegal actions, and surreality is sweeping you off your feet, driving you to bedridden depression, leaving you passive and breathlessly unable to mount a response, much less resistance, please get into the huddle, take a time-out, and listen up to your Jock Culture coach. (That’s me, of course!)
You need some distraction.
Have you noticed lately how few sports stories are making their way to the top of the news beams? That’s because sports—once upon a time our most reliable source of outrage; speculation; cultish behavior; and lessons in domination, smackdown intimidation, and faux masculinity—has been replaced by a remarkable series of presidential half-time horror shows. It’s now all Trumpiana all the time.
Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.
We need to get back to sports. So here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Of course, since only he truly sells in this numbed media moment of ours, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that we’ll need sports stories with Trumpian subtexts.
Number One: How did some high school athletes suddenly get so rich? There are million-dollar quarterbacks lining up at the NIL pay window waiting to start their freshman year in college. In case you don’t already know it, NIL stands for name, image, and likeness—from which sports gear companies, universities, and the college sports ruling body, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), have traditionally profited enormously, even though those athletes were prohibited from benefiting commercially. But in 2021, a series of state court judgements led to a unanimous Supreme Court decision that lifted the ban and it was suddenly pay-off time for “student-athletes.”
It all seems fair enough, although the new system is evolving with shady deals in which colleges and their boosters help organize “collectives” to recruit teenage high school athletes with the promise of booty that ranges from extra shoes to millions of dollars.
The top 20 money-making college athletes are bona fide millionaires, while the average starting pay-off for the top 100 is $583,000. University of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, son of the former National Football League star Deion Sanders, leads the list with an estimated $4.7 million.
The Transfer Portal
Boosting the growing transactional nature of “amateur” sports is the newly installed “transfer portal,” a computerized system that makes it easier for college athletes to switch schools without having to sit out a season. Money may well change hands there, too.
So far, the Trumpsters have seemed more than okay with all this, but there could be a future glitch. While the current major beneficiaries are the expectables—football and basketball players—let’s welcome crowd-pleasing gymnast Sam Phillips, the first University of Nebraska athlete to come out as gay, now performing at the University of Illinois. Could this turn out to be a rainbow flag for the homophobic Trumpniks? Will they say nil to NIL (at least if it goes to the “wrong” people)? Stay tuned.
Number Two: Even though they’re a microscopic percentage of the varsity athletic population, transgender jocks have been getting an inordinate amount of attention lately, most of it grimly malevolent.
President Donald Trump’s order barring transgender girls and women from playing on women’s teams at federally funded educational institutions, even if followed, will have little effect on overall sports participation. Symbolically, of course, as The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin points out,
Diverse teams can help communities and families stop seeing marginalized people as an “other” and start seeing them as part of the same whole. Sports at its best can challenge the hate constantly generated by the right-wing media machine.
There are certainly reasonable arguments against situations in which trans athletes might physically overwhelm cis-athletes, but the climate is simply too charged right now for a reasonable discussion. This may just have to wait for Trump to be cut from the team.
Number Three: When I started writing about sports in the late 1950s, two of the premier American ones were boxing (the sweet science) and thoroughbred horse racing (the sport of kings). Both were romanticized, distinctly corrupt enterprises run by oligarchs and gangsters on the backs of poor boys and animals. They did well when they produced superstars (Muhammad Ali or Secretariat) but faded in the 21st century. Since then, football and mixed martial arts have provided more reliably entertaining violence, while state lotteries supplanted parimutuel betting as a way to tantalize the desperate with pie-in-the-sky jackpots. Pro wrestling (if you consider it a sport at all) is the only athletic entertainment that comes to mind as more truly Trumpish.
Horse racing is barely hanging on, mostly thanks to influential rich folks (including Arab oligarchs) who own and breed the best horses and the rentable state governments that provide subsidies for the sport. Boxing and horse racing seem to exist mostly to offer some of the saddest sights in sports: punch-drunk former prizefighters without pensions or health coverage and drug-abused horses killed on the track after breaking down in a race. Putting down both sports would be merciful.
The Spread
Number Four: Sixty-odd years ago, at Madison Square Garden, covering my first pro basketball game, I was mystified when the crowd began cheering for the visiting team. At least theoretically, these were, after all, rabid New York Knicks fans.
“Don’t they want their team to win?” I asked the seasoned reporter sitting next to me in the press box.
“It’s the spread,” he replied all too casually.
That was the beginning of the end of whatever innocence I had when it came to big-time commercial sports.
As that seasoned reporter, visibly amused by my naiveté, then explained, the point spread is the predicted margin of victory by the favored team in any given game. If the bookies have established that the favorite is expected to win by, say, 10 points, you could bet on the underdog to lose by less than 10, and be a winner. On the night of my tutorial, those in the audience who bet against the spread could have had a double victory, since the Knicks actually won the game, while their opponents lost by fewer points than predicted and so won the spread.
In those days, except in Las Vegas, sports betting was illegal and considered a threat to the game. Most legitimate newspapers avoided any mention of odds, and the professional leagues they covered inveighed against gambling as an existential danger. In highly publicized examples, they punished players caught betting, even stars, not to mention retired superstars working as greeters for gambling casinos.
At the same time, the sports world constantly flirted with gambling, offering odds disguised as informed predictions and, for a dozen years, a gambler, Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder, was featured on a TV football show until he was fired for claiming that Black athletes excelled because of how they had been bred during slavery (and that the only jobs left for whites in sports were as coaches).
All such hypocritical righteousness seems quaint in these Trumpalooza days as professional leagues, including the National Football League, promote their “official” gambling sites, while betting on games is acknowledged as an intrinsic element of fandom (as, in truth, it always has been). No gambling, no sports. Bet on it!
The Summer Games
Number Five: In March, President Trump established the 2026 FIFA World Cup Task Force, made up of the usual suspects (Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and Marco Rubio), perhaps to reassure his followers that the gang will indeed all be there when soccer’s major event is held in the United States, especially should the Trumpunks decide to use a classic soccer match to lure immigrants to an abduction party.
Meanwhile, this country seems like an ever less welcoming place for the rest of the world’s favorite sport. As Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins has pointed out, the United States may be anything but a safe haven for international athletes (not to speak of so many Americans). After all, should some foreigner get a little too fast or strong, maybe he or she could be checked for drugs, chromosomes, or challenging thoughts, and sent to a maximum security locker room.
And while we’re worrying (all too justifiably) about the World Cup next year, don’t forget that the U.S. will be hosting the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Number Six: The New York Yankees are growing hair. When the team played for owner George Steinbrenner, self-ordained as “The Boss,” a blustering, narcissistic bully and liar who was considered a mentor to the young Donald Trump, no moustaches, beards, or hair below the collar were allowed. The son of a shipping magnate from Cleveland, Steinbrenner postured as a standard-bearer for masculine American values. Why did working-class guys buy that?
As a New York Times sportswriter covering Steinbrenner, I was bewildered walking on the street with him when construction workers and cabbies hailed him warmly as a man of the people. They loved the way he bossed those jocks around. In retrospect, it was a portent of the authoritarian cultism around Trump—the urge for people who feel weak or marginalized to embrace a tyrant.
George’s son, Hank, a milder man who avoids the spotlight, runs the team now. His decision this year to allow Yankee players to grow hair where they pleased was generally applauded. Still, maybe George wasn’t as bad as I once imagined. After all, he had only one felony conviction compared to his mentoree’s 34. Steinbrenner’s involved illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential election campaign and, yes, President Ronald Reagan pardoned him.
The Draft
Number Seven: The opening of the NFL season is months away, but the recent draft of rookie players cracked through Trump’s curtain of sound for a day or so, reinforcing pro football as America’s 21st-century pastime. The biggest newsflash was that Shadeur Sanders, the $4-million-dollar NIL player, wasn’t taken in the first round. Football executives evidently found him too brash and self-promoting, possibly overrated, and too… dare I say it?… Trumpish.
I’ve never forgotten that the first time I met Donald Trump, as a CBS “Sunday Morning” correspondent in the 1980s, he lied to me about pro football. He owned a pro team back then, the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League (USFL), which played during the NFL’s offseason. Many people thought the USFL was a conspiracy to force the NFL into a merger or to get several of its teams into the league. That would have been important to Trump, then still a minor-league real-estate magnate from Queens, pushing his dream of making it into the major leagues, the New York City market.
When I interviewed him about that, he swore such a merger wasn’t on his mind. Later that week, he emerged as the principal plaintiff in an antitrust suit against the NFL. It was the kind of early lesson that people like me didn’t learn. We were too smart for that buffoon, right?
Number Eight: Maybe the best that can be said about the “manosphere,” that trendy Trumpian hodge-podge of websites, podcasts, online forums, and blogs promoting misogyny and the false masculinity of “bro culture,” is the relatively small role sports seems to play in it. Sports, after all, initially evolved as a bastion of fair play, and even its sometimes questionable interpretations of class and honor are hardly major aspects of Trumpiana.
Early on, the president touted himself as a good high school baseball player, but when his further posturing as a championship superstar was mostly ignored, he seemed to lose interest in promoting his athleticism, except in bed.
The anti-feminism of Trump’s base has always been predicated on the understanding that once women achieved equality, much less equity with men, the game would be over for the mediocre male. And yet current laments about boys and men losing out to women in educational and employment competition obscure the fact that men, particularly white men, still rule the roost. Trumpy attacks on liberals often emphasize their womanly “weakness.” The tough-talking handmaids in the president’s cabinet are borderline cartoonish.
As it turns out, one of the most consistent opponents of Trumpian anti-feminism is 60-year-old former football player and long-time activist Jackson Katz. He’s sounded his particular call to action in a book, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue.
He recently told Ammar Kalia of The Guardian: “We can’t tell boys that bullying is bad and then equally reward bullies like Trump in power. There’s a lot of fear in the face of a right-wing populist government, but we need men to loudly oppose him, otherwise real people will be harmed. We’re living in a different world now, and it’s urgent.”
It’s urgent indeed, and this has been enough of a distraction. So, suit up and get your game face on. Do something. Donald Trump is beatable if you keep your eye on the ball and don’t pull your punches.
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