President Donald Trump could not have picked a more awkward time to rebuke college sports’ name, image and likeness rules than at his White House event on Monday honoring Indiana University’s national championship football team.
There is no team in college football that can claim to have benefited more from the current NIL rules than the Hoosiers. Those rules allow college athletes to make money from advertisements and sponsorships. Indiana University won its first football championship ever this season on the back of players like Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who raked in loads of money thanks to those rules.
Trump, meanwhile, has aligned himself with people pushing to roll back the current rules, and he has openly advocated for returning college sports to a pre-NIL system that many players have decried as exploitative. While courts have affirmed athletes’ right to compensation, the president has peddled baseless claims that the current NIL system risks putting schools “out of business.”
That’s the context for the exchange in the video below, in which Trump disparages the court rulings on NIL rules in response to a joke from coach Curt Cignetti about letting Trump keep the trophy in exchange for a contribution.
“NIL — boy oh boy, did the courts screw us up, huh? That’s all right, it’s — whatever happened, it seems to be working for you, and you’re gonna make it very successful.”
For a sense of how bizarre this entire scenario was, take a gander at this video of Trump calling for Cignetti at one point, apparently without realizing the coach was standing right beside him. If this had been Joe Biden, conservative media would have run the footage on an endless loop.
And of course the president took time to regale his captive audience with a tangent about the ballroom he’s planning to build at the White House, even as his policies fuel economic destruction and death across the globe.
Just another Monday for America’s commander in chief.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.