Donald Trump’s Go-To Dance Move Has Invaded Sports

On November 10th, after the San Francisco 49ers’ defensive end Nick Bosa sacked Baker Mayfield during the 49ers’ game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, another defensive lineman, Leonard Floyd, came over to Bosa and gently butted helmets. Then Floyd bent his elbows at his side and began to sway, in a kind of cross between a shimmy and a shadowbox, and gave Bosa a little encouraging punch. A third teammate, Sam Okuayinonu, ran over to join in. Bosa used his right arm to clear some space, craned his neck forward, and arrhythmically jerked his arms and knees. He looked like a man with a rod in his spine doing the twist, or a robot trying to walk through a wall, or a constipated chicken—or like Donald Trump, when the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” comes on.

Later in the week, the 49ers coach, Kyle Shanahan, was asked about Bosa’s moves in a radio interview. “His dance? That was the Trump dance,” Shanahan said. “I don’t know what the Trump dance is, but it’s supposedly the Trump dance.” It wasn’t Bosa’s idea to use it as a celebration, Shanahan went on. “When Bosa got the sack, Leonard Floyd started doing it, and then Trump did it—I mean, sorry, then Bosa did it.” (Honest mistake.) “And then Sam [Okuayinonu] did it, and then Fred [Warner] came in at the end and did it,” Shanahan said. “Leonard egged them all on, and then they followed, and it was pretty cool to see.”

Trump thought so, at least. “NICK BOSA IS A GREAT PLAYER!” he wrote on his social-media platform. The day before the game against the Buccaneers, Bosa had been fined $11,255 by the N.F.L. for crashing his teammates’ postgame television interview on October 27th, a week and a half before the election, while wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. It was a violation of the league’s uniform and equipment policies. (Chump change for a guy on a five-year contract worth a hundred and seventy million dollars.) When the San Francisco Chronicle asked Bosa what inspired him to break out the dance, he said, “I think you know the answer to that question. All the guys wanted me to do it. I wasn’t even going to do it, but the boys reminded me. And it was fun.”

The boys have been having a lot of fun lately, it seems. A West Virginia University quarterback had done the Trump dance during a game the day before Bosa and his teammates broke it out. So had a player for Drake University. The Las Vegas Raiders’ rookie tight end Brock Bowers pumped his arms in the distinctive Trumpian style; so did the Detroit Lions’ defensive players Za’Darius Smith and Malcolm Rodriguez and the Tennessee Titans’ wide receivers Calvin Ridley and Nick Westbrook-Ikhine. Not to be left out, the English golfer Charley Hull did the dance while competing on the L.P.G.A. Tour. (Hull previously went viral when she signed autographs with a cigarette dangling from her mouth.) As Trump and his courtiers sat ringside, the U.F.C. legend Jon Jones did the Trump shuffle after a violent spinning back-kick had dropped Stipe Miocic in the third round of the U.F.C. heavyweight championship fight. Two days later, the soccer star Christian Pulisic celebrated a goal while playing for the U.S. men’s national team by mechanically pumping his arms and hips like Trump; his teammates Weston McKennie and Ricardo Pepi joined him.

Does the little surge of Trump dances across sports represent a wave, or at least a wavelet, of athletes declaring their allegiances for the President-elect? Has the right suddenly decided that athletes should not just shut up and dribble but instead publicly engage with political issues? Maybe. The climate has changed, as Bosa put it. Bosa’s political leanings are no secret. Nor are Jones ’s, who actually gave Trump his championship belt. But McKennie once called Trump “racist.” Members of Barnsley F.C., a third-division soccer team in England, performed the Trump dance after scoring on Cambridge United. It’s unlikely that they were making a bid for a robust transatlantic partnership between the United States and the United Kingdom. And the Lions’ players Smith and Rodriguez later said they weren’t copying Trump at all—they were spoofing the movie “Caddyshack.”

I can guess about the inclinations of some of the football players who were gyrating like a seventy-eight-year-old with a K.F.C. habit, but not because most of them called themselves Trump supporters. Bowers told the press that he did the Trump dance after seeing Jones do it following the fight. (The Raiders’ public-relations team immediately ended his press availability.) It’s not even clear whether the dance is celebrating Trump or mocking him. It’s not clear, in fact, whether that distinction between celebration and mockery means anything. The move is a meme.

That’s what makes it revealing. “It’s not a political dance,” Pulisic said. “It was just for fun. I saw a bunch of people do it and I thought it was funny.” Afterward, some people, including a former U.S.M.N.T. goalie, Tim Howard, called him out. “If you’re going to make a political statement then be bold and brash enough to stand behind it. Don’t go quiet and don’t plead innocence like Christian Pulisic,” Howard wrote in an op-ed. But, even if Pulisic did vote for Trump, there are reasons to believe him when he says he doesn’t see the dance as political. He is a twenty-six-year-old man from south-central Pennsylvania. He has spent much of his life playing professional soccer. He has a TikTok account. It’s unlikely that he devotes time to thinking about tariffs, or Medicare, or abortion rights, or whether Trump meets the definition of a fascist. He might, but probably not. Pulisic had been eighteen when Trump ran for President in 2016. Back then, Pulisic had not even registered to vote, telling the press he wasn’t going to support either candidate. I have no idea whether he voted this time around. What I do know is that Pulisic—like many professional athletes, and many of the young men who flocked to Trump—has never been of voting age in an election in which Trump was not on the ballot. For them, the question is not whether Trump will become normalized. Trump is the norm.

Trump’s victory made that clear. But, to me, at least, the Trump dance made it clearer. He is a fixture on fight nights. He spent the summer going on popular podcasts. He’s online a lot. Watching the parade of athletes imitating Trump, I thought of Peanut, an influencer squirrel who wore tiny hats on TikTok. Peanut had been seized and euthanized by officials, after receiving multiple reports that Peanut’s owner had been illegally keeping wildlife as pets. #JusticeForPeanut went viral, and, for reasons that are obscure to me, the MAGA movement seized on it. On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Elon Musk and Rogan had a long conversation about how Democrats would enter your house and kill your pets. A TikTok from Trump’s team vowed revenge for Peanut at the ballot box. At the time, the whole thing seemed like a joke. Surely no one believed that Kamala Harris had murdered Peanut. But watching athletes do the Trump dance, I realized that whatever anyone actually believed was beside the point. The joke was on me.

Now Musk is the co-head of an advisory commission, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or D.O.G.E. The acronym alludes to the name of one of Musk’s favorite memes, a picture of a Shiba Inu dog, and the name of a cryptocurrency that the tech billionaire has long boosted. Ha ha! D.O.G.E. is supposedly tasked with razing the federal government. We’re left with memes. Trump has been swaying to the music for years, but his moves came to particular prominence during a town hall in October. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he asked. Then he called for music, and Trump danced the Trump dance. ♦