The NFL Is Trump’s America—and It’s Invading Ireland

September 22, 2025
By: Dave Zirin

The league is not coming to Dublin to plant a tree. It is coming to plant a flag.

Ahead of the September 28 National Football League game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings in Dublin, social justice campaigners invited me to cross the Atlantic to speak about the politics of the NFL. The plan was to screen a 2022 documentary that I helped produce called Behind the Shield, which is critical of the league and its leadership. Organizers would also arrange a series of media events about the film and the upcoming game. The plan was to warn Ireland that while there may be a big party on Sunday, they should be wary of the league’s corporate and political agenda as well as the heavy footprint they would leave behind.

It’s not dissimilar to what I’ve done previously at other troublesome mega events, like the World Cup and Olympics. But this time, people on both sides of the Atlantic advised me to exercise new caution when traveling overseas given the Trump regime’s practice of targeting journalists and its contempt for the First Amendment.

I was told to take a Sharpie and write an attorney’s phone number on my arm like folks do when preparing for an act of civil disobedience and arrest. It frankly seemed a little over-the-top. Were thought crimes against the NFL now a state matter? Maybe? Certainly the GOP has morphed from self-proclaimed “free speech warriors” to cancel-culture kings, eager to criminalize any criticism of Trump or his allies. MAGA supporters are clearly indifferent to looking like shameless hypocrites. Next, they’ll probably launch a child sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria where people can buy merch.

This advised caution when traveling also seemed less absurd the night I flew out of Dulles Airport. That was Sunday, September 14, when more than two-thirds of NFL home teams compelled their fans to mourn a divisive, far-right YouTube host who made millions denigrating chunks of their fan base. Like the GOP suddenly seeing “free speech” as a danger to the republic, the league yawned at their own hypocrisy and abandoned their “no politics” mantra from the days when another C.K.—the anti-racist one—took a knee against police violence and lost his NFL career.

Save for the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Shahid Khan, all of the NFL’s billionaire owners are white, and the owners’ demand that a stadium of 80,000 people show respect for a political extremist also felt like a message to their players, 70 percent of whom are Black. They were told to stand at attention with flags at half-mast for a person who made his money saying things like “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” (Note to readers: That’s not a fact, and it isn’t happening more and more.) Some in and around the league read this decision as a middle finger to NFL players after a decade of player-led anti-racist resistance. Or as one recently retired Super Bowl champ texted me, “They want that shit erased like it never happened.” (I asked this player if we could use his name. He understandably said, “Not these days.” Yay! Free speech!)

All deaths by violence, whether school shootings in the suburbs, in war zones in the Middle East, or at political events in rural Utah, should be decried. But NFL owners commanding their audiences to mourn this particular person was a show of power, and other than boos at the sight of Kirk’s face on the jumbotron in New Orleans, quite a successful one. The few teams that refused to “play ball” with the compulsory rending of garments immediately became a target for trolls and bots, who demanded a pound of flesh for their insufficient genuflection.

The argument I was taking to Ireland was that in our country’s slide into authoritarian quicksand, the NFL is not a bystander but an aggravator. NFL owners overwhelmingly back the current regime financially and politically. Their meat shield, commissioner Roger Goodell, again and again chooses to shame the memory of his father, the liberal Republican Senator Charles Goodell, who sacrificed his career by defending the right to dissent from the dictates of a lawless president named Richard Nixon. In contrast, four months ago, commissioner Goodell stood with Trump in the Oval Office, his face beaming, as they announced that the NFL Draft will be coming in 2027 to the National Mall. (Hopefully the National Guard will be done with their mulching by then.) Goodell played the supplicant even though in his first term Trump derided, slurred, and slandered both the players and the league. An apology was never offered, but that hasn’t stopped Goodell from capitulating, even removing the words “End Racism” from the end zones at the Super Bowl allegedly because Trump decided to attend and such sentiments get under his paper-thin skin.

In Dublin and then Belfast, I argued that if a slogan of the league is “Football is America,” then Ireland should take a very close look at what “America” has become, because that’s the agenda the NFL is trying to export. I said that the league is not coming to plant a tree. It is coming to plant a flag.

Many Irish people told me that the commercialism of the NFL was already overwhelming them: free branded flag football equipment delivered to hundreds of schools, ads everywhere, and even, yes, flags planted in the Dublin City Center. It cut particularly deeply with people that the NFL was being allowed to stage the game at Croke Park. This is a stadium owned not by some plutocrat but by the Gaelic Athletic Association. It is meant to be a community space, and until recently Croke Park was used exclusively for the promotion and protection of Indigenous Irish sports. There are other, fancier stadiums in Dublin, but the NFL wanted to colonize “Croker” and plant that flag in the most Irish of sporting spaces.

If that sounds conspiratorial or too cunning for the billionaire nepo babies that run NFL teams, it’s actually not. Steelers boss Dan Rooney was the US ambassador to Ireland under President Barack Obama and undoubtedly understands the significance of Croke Park to the Irish people. He therefore must be aware that an NFL game at “Croker” is not a benign act but a statement of economic and cultural aggression.

The other owner ready to storm the beaches of Dublin is the Minnesota Vikings’ Mark Wilf, a choice that also feels intentional. Wilf, who inherited his father’s wealth, is the chairman of the board of the Jewish Agency for Israel. As Rabbi Brant Rosen of Chicago’s Tzedek Congregation explained to me, “One of the most important things people should know about the ideology of groups like JAI is that it is rooted in the maintenance of a Jewish-majority ethno-nation state—that it engages in demographic engineering at the expense of the native Palestinian population.”

The Jewish Agency for Israel, he told me, was founded in 1908 as the Palestine Office for the Land of Israel to encourage immigration to Palestine in order to create a Jewish majority. The JAI continues this work, now collaborating with the Israeli government and other institutions to maintain that majority. That means more settlements to entice emigration. That means driving Palestinians off of their land. That means saying nothing as Gaza is razed. Rosen said, “All of it, of course, is patently antidemocratic—and directly contributes to the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.”

As part of its broad agenda, the JAI has funded therapy for Israelis in border settlements traumatized by Hamas rocket fire. The JAI, however, has not expanded its mental wellness programs to include the Palestinian survivors of Israel’s remorseless and relentless war on the Gazan people in what the United Nations has at long last deemed a genocide.

To bring over Wilf is an especially insulting choice, given that in the game’s host city of Dublin calling for a Free Palestine does not automatically jeopardize your job, your online security, or the safety of your family. During my short trip, I saw Palestinian flags hanging from the windows of homes and shops, a tour guide wearing watermelon earrings, a barback wearing a shirt proclaiming “Free Palestine” in Irish as he carried kegs of Guinness, heart-stopping murals dedicated to the Palestinian fallen that no one would dare to paint over, and a sea of pro-Palestine pins. Anyone who has felt gaslighted by elected officials insisting that the atrocities we were seeing were not actually taking place (a position held by the current subject of our coerced national mourning) can breathe more freely in Ireland. I began to understand why thousands of Americans of Irish ancestry are reversing the journey of their parents and grandparents and sailing back.

Many in Ireland are also very conscious of “sportswashing,” and refuse to allow Wilf and the league’s political agenda to force its way into their country without a challenge. Protest plans are being made, and the NFL, ever so committed to free speech, will have to face the movement for a free Palestine outside the Croke Park gates. Campaigners also told me that the NFL’s martial celebrations of nationalism would feed a nationalist, reactionary right wing that spouts anti-immigrant demagoguery. The nationalism of the NFL also benefits a center-right government that is demanding legal changes that would allow it to fund and deploy a more aggressive military. This brand of militarism is as at home at an NFL game as the tomahawk chop.

My own stress, as the return flight to the United States approached, was ratcheted up dramatically when Vice President JD Vance threatened to “dismantle” my place of employ, because a Nation writer dared to quote what the recently deceased had said. Our colleague also—and perhaps this was her sin in the eyes of Vance—immediately noted that, no matter the shooter’s motivations, this assassination would be exploited to ruthlessly suppress their political opponents.

Just as when he was “creating stories” that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating family pets, Vance was lying, surely aware that it could stoke stochastic terrorism. Watching this from afar, I recalled that I was on immigration forms entering the country as a Nation journalist, and I did not know what that would mean when coming back. Others in Ireland shared those concerns. Upon departing, I had a fresh Sharpie tattoo on my shoulder with the number of an Irish civil liberties lawyer and an opposition party member, again grimacing over the necessity of such precautions.

I got through the line with no more than a couple of bumps, and I’m now back in occupied DC, with no respite from federal troops engaged in “border enforcement,” harassment, and unlawful detention. (I guess it’s no longer just for airports.)

The current situation is intolerable. We must be allowed to speak our beliefs: whether that’s “Free Palestine,” “Trump is America’s Hitler,” or “I do not consent to be searched.” We must not feel coerced to mourn someone who held us in contempt—no matter how many members of this regime’s poisonously stupid cabinet screech for vengeance.

We must have the right to listen to musical groups like Belfast’s Kneecap, currently banned from Canada on ludicrous charges of “antisemitism” and “advocating political violence” because they have consistently supported Palestinian liberation. As a band from the north of Ireland, their starting point is that people have the right to resist colonization—whether they were born in West Belfast or in Gaza. The band members have never made a public statement that could be reasonably read as antisemitic—unless one thinks that criticizing the Israeli state itself is antisemitic. (As a Jew, I think there is nothing more antisemitic than the conflation of Judiasm and Israeli genocide.) There is one Kneecap lyric containing a message that today’s authoritarians don’t want you to hear—that even in the most dire of times, struggle can produce hope: “Underneath all the thundering, there’s magic. And if there’s a better way to live, I’ve gotta have it.”