Donald Trump’s lauding it over the Army vs. Navy football game over the weekend, flanked by the cohorts he's picked for Cabinet positions or that he reviles as staunch allies in Congress, sent shivers down a CNN columnist’s spine Monday.
Writer Stephen Collinson saw the president’s presiding over the military clash as one with echoes of dictatorial rule.
“It was perhaps the most visible showing of power football hosted in the Washington area since late Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke corralled the politically connected, rich and famous in his box at RFK stadium in the 1980s and 1990s,” he wrote.
“When Trump, Vance and the congressional leaders — as well as the ubiquitous Elon Musk — peered over the loudly welcoming crowd and waved, the country’s new establishment looked almost like a politburo of the MAGA movement.”
Trump took in Saturday’s game alongside his troubled pick to head the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, his choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune — as well as billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk.
It was, Collinson wrote, “a sign he doesn’t care about reservations that some Republican senators harbor.”
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He added, “The attendance of Republican congressional leaders was significant. Johnson, who hitched his wagon to Trump early in his tenure, has been rewarded with the president-elect’s patronage but faces a tough job in shepherding the new administration’s hardline agenda through a tiny House majority. And Thune may have one of the hardest jobs in Washington in piloting controversial nominees through the Senate and preserving the chamber’s, albeit rather eroded, prerogative to check likely power grabs by a new president who knows no limits.”
He concluded, “It will be up to Republicans to decide who gets to serve and, more broadly, much of what gets done in Washington – for at least the next two years heading into the midterms.
“ That was the message that Trump and his cohorts spelled out high above the field in Landover, Maryland, as Navy surged to a 31-13 victory over Army to lift the commander in chief’s trophy.”