ABSTRACT
In stating that “football’s become soft,” Trump cited the meddling influence of experts in emasculating football. Primarily as a means of courting popularity among the voting public, most of Trump’s presidential precursors made a conscious effort to publicly engage sport in some capacity. The swirling complexities of the current conjuncture means that Trump is “caught by forces not entirely understood or controlled, but he has learned to ‘ride’ or perform them as it were”. The Trump assemblage’s preoccupation with nurturing its white base is prefigured on a tacit (re)centring of whiteness as the material-expressive-affective core of the American nation. As with any articulation, there is no necessary correspondence, or indeed non-correspondence between uber-sport and the Trump assemblage. America has a long and disreputable history of pitching “incredible patriots” against resistant “sons of bitches.”. Sport has become an ideological battleground where the struggle over hegemony may well be won or lost.
