March Madness is under way, and The Masters is twenty days away. The NFL Draft is next month, too. Baseball began this week with the Dodgers and Cubs playing in Japan.

But amid the political catastrophe unfolding in real time, our democracy crumbling before our eyes, and our civil rights trampled, I have a hard time mustering any interest much less enthusiasm for sports. Or much else.

If you missed it, Major League Baseball has preemptively caved to Donald Trump’s creeping scheme of reinstituting segregation by stripping away much of its Diversity Pipeline Program, as Craig Calcaterra lays out in his always-vital newsletter.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred is as craven as any business leader or college president willfully genuflecting to Trump’s bullying racism. Manfred wasn’t even directly bullied yet. It won’t matter in the end. No amount of kowtowing saves you from MAGA wrath.

This morning’s political current events analysis newsletter from historian Heather Cox Richardson was especially frightening and demoralizing and reinforces why sports – a lifelong interest of mine and the backbone of much of my former professional career – are of little importance to me now.

A sample:

Far from backing down, the administration appears to be considering escalating its fight with the courts. Devlin Barrett of the New York Times reported today that lawyers in the Trump administration believe the 1798 Alien Enemies Act Trump used to deport migrants also permits federal agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant, an assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The men sent to the concentration camp in El Salvador weren’t even charged with crimes.

Unconstitutional, illegal warrantless searches will not stop with those Trump and his fascist cronies deem illegal aliens or terrorist sympathizers. It’s the slipperiest of slopes, and these goons soon will bust down the doors of the regime’s critics and opponents. Trump and his allies spend much of their time insisting Democrats, Leftists, and journalists are enemies of the people doing sinister and illegal things on behalf of Islamic terrorists, communism, or “globalists” (their code for Jews). So why wouldn’t they eventually send agents to arrest politicians and pundits as domestic terrorists?

The demonizing rhetoric comes first, amplified by state propaganda outlets like Fox News, followed by formal sham accusations of crimes. Then it’s bogus investigations, round-ups, and show trials. After that, prisons and camps and deportation even if you’re a U.S.-born citizen.

The final act is always extermination.

History washes, rinses, and repeats itself. Makes it hard to get psyched about the fucking Indy 500 or NBA Finals.

Who’s going to stop Trump and his sleazy fascist underlings from taking us further down this road? The courts and cops certainly can’t or won’t. More from our historian:

The Trump White House and its MAGA supporters appear to be trying to cement their power to control the government by undermining the rule of law and the judges who are defending it. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday called Judge Boasberg a “Democrat activist,” although he was originally appointed by President George W. Bush, and badly misrepresented Boasberg’s order. She also attacked Boasberg’s wife for her political donations.

Trump’s vice president and cabinet were chosen because they will follow any order given, no matter how brazenly illegal and immoral:

Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote that “[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” trying to obscure that it is the role of courts to determine whether or not the power the executive is claiming is, in fact, legitimate. On the Fox News Channel, “border czar” Tom Homan said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Think about that last quote. The administration *doesn’t care* about what judges think. MAGA’s elected and appointed federal leaders are claiming imperial immunity from all laws and consequences. Nothing will inhibit deployment of their agenda. They’re growing bolder and testing all fences.

Richardson writes that Trump’s allies in Congress are promising to investigate any judge that rules against him, and that Trump supporters are directly menacing judges including bomb threats made to Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett – who was appointed by Trump.

(Rolling Stone’s journalists Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng) reported that the White House’s strategy is to “move fast” before courts can stop them. In the end, one source close to the president told them that the president’s ultimate power over judges comes from the fact that they do not command an army, while he does. “Are they going to come and arrest him?” the advisor asked, apparently confident that the answer is no.

And there it is, the threat to use the military to silence or kill any opposition. That is Trump’s endgame to ensconce himself as dictator, if not in formal name then in actual supreme power. Congress and the courts will be hollow, powerless rubber-stamp institutions that exist to give his edicts the appearance of legality.

It’s crushing to have to openly wonder if our generals would follow orders to kill American citizens and enforce a dictatorship. That saps my enthusiasm for debating NFL Draft scenarios or doing Talmudic scholarship study of salary cap nuances.

For now, the courts are mostly ruling against Trump, but we’ve not yet reached the point of the White House blatantly ignoring a warning and being held in contempt or somehow otherwise punished. That will be the red-light, alarming-screaming Constitutional crisis that truly tests our democracy. But again, Trump commands the most powerful military in history, and judges have nothing. The marshals, FBI, police and other federal law enforcement agencies have been reduced to being MAGA stormtroopers that will enforce Trump’s will.

Until we reach the point of national strikes and armed resistance in the streets, a handful of judges are the final line of defense, and it feels like a Maginot Line. Congressional Republicans have zero interest in holding Trump accountable in any way and certainly will not move to check his power or impeach him. They are perhaps the ultimate collaborators, surrendering Congress’ oversight role and spending control as a co-equal brand of government. Congressional Republicans are even casting aside any higher personal political ambitions to instead praise and bolster an autocrat.

They’re his political soldiers, Richardson writes:

That the courts are in the position of trying to stop a president who is ignoring the Constitution reflects that Republicans in Congress appear to have taken off the table impeachment, the political remedy the Constitution’s framers put into our system for such a crisis.

But hey, the college basketball tournaments have begun! The bets are being placed! The best golfers are headed to Georgia soon! Baseball dropped any pretense of trying to diversify its ranks of anything but white men!

It’s hard and unhealthy to be angry and scared all the time. History’s dissidents, rebels, freedom fighters, refugees, and prisoners had their distractions, laughter, and moments of joy, too. The Civil Rights movement’s leaders joked and danced in their spare hours – there’s a famous Steve Schapiro photo of writer James Baldwin swaying away in 1963 that’s always stuck with me. That’s human joy in a time when they literally faced not just discrimination but death.

I tell myself that letting Trump and the news sap my joy is letting them win, and there’s some truth to that. I try to find brief respites, but it’s not easy. Outside of my hometown teams, mostly out of bitter civic pride, I wasn’t even that big of a game-day sports guy to begin with. I’m sure I’ll watch the NFL Draft to see which player the Cleveland Browns wrongly pick at No. 2. I’ll watch a little bit of The Masters and have an essay in the works about my conflicted feelings about golf and its most gilded plantation. I’ll cheer on the Guardians when they play the Tigers. I’ll be giddy if the Cavaliers win another NBA title in June.

But holy shit, it’s hard to take sports seriously these days. The fun is badly tarnished and I feel guilty. Even the sports disappointments (and there many as a Cleveland fan) don’t grind me as much, which I suppose is not the worst thing for a guy still haunted by a fumble that occurred in January 1988.

Sports are political. Deeply so, as much as anything in American life, so that the respite provided by sports is always just outside the menacing shadow of the political. And that shadow dims the light sometimes. There is no sticking to sports, which is a loser mentality.

Colin Kaepernick kneeling was almost a decade ago. Goddamn.

This one of the rare moments I miss being paid to write about the on-field side of sports, the politics and social justice aspects. But I suspect I’d be muzzled in trying to accurately and honestly portray what is actually happening. There’s no place for me in mainstream journalism now. So I rant here.

My hometown Cleveland Browns are owned by a sleazy MAGA billionaire that wants $1.2 billion in public money to move the sub-mediocre team out of downtown and into the suburbs to what looks like a big car dealership or 1990s community college rather than a stadium. This is the same owner that leveraged the team’s on-field future for a washed-up, one-legged unrepentant sexpest quarterback, and once asked a wino for draft advice. And he also somehow skated on a major scandal that sent others to prison.

Again, sports are political at every level.

We’re three years away from the L.A. Summer Olympics. If Trump is still in power, expect it to be a nightmare spectacle of MAGA ugliness that makes Hitler’s 1936 Berlin games look utterly nonpartisan. Sports can be an insidious tool for mindless nationalism, fascism, and totalitarians. There’s talk of next year’s North American World Cup being a MAGA ideological extravaganza. And Americans surely love their gladiatorial bloodsport distractions — comments on any sports social media post today invariably descend into partisan bickering or worse. But sports are also a tool of resistance and are a platform for advocacy and diversity, particularly as women’s sports rise economically and in popularity despite institutional and fan misogyny.

Sports can be a force for good and for progress even as the Trumpists clumsily tried to erase goddamn Jackie Robinson in a bid to purge the “woke cultural Marxism” of honoring anyone who isn’t a white man.

What is probably most remembered about 1936 Berlin is Ohio State’s Jesse Owens atop the medal stand saluting the U.S. flag after winning the long jump, with German silver medalist Luz Long (who became Owens’ friend) giving the Nazi salute. It’s the photo at the start of this essay and it remains a powerful image of the confluence of sports and politics.

Owens supported a Republican Party that no longer exists, the party of abolition and Lincoln, before the Southern Strategy and post-Civil Rights realignment that saw the Dixiecrats become the GOP and the FDR New Deal/Great Society Democratic Party welcome those who valued equality and humanity over prejudice and profit. And long before Trump metastasized the Tea Party GOP into the vulgar, racist obscenity it is today.

Will sports be used in the coming days and years as an instrument of fascism again? Or as a symbol of resistance to tyranny and racism? Will we allow sports to distract us from the darkness descending on the republic? Athletics can be in the vanguard of our liberation and not just a refuge from the news.

Right now, it remains a bummer.

We have bread, we have circuses. We may not have a democracy soon, but not many people seem to give a fuck. Play ball, I guess.

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