Resentment—that indignant feeling that someone else’s success has unfairly come at one’s own expense, the emotion that drove Cain to kill Abel—is a powerful political motivator. It is a feeling people get when they stew in their anger, when political grievance is made personal, or when someone believes the entire world is conspiring against them. It leads people to turn the other into their enemy and to convert their longing for change and justice into revenge. We often leave the discovery of resentment in our politics unacknowledged not only because it is an ugly, self-absorbed emotion that is discomfiting to encounter, but because when we do spot it, it suggests someone’s soul has gone to rot. (As small-d democrats, we like to think better of people.) We must be alert to it, though, because when resentment takes hold in the body politic, it brings out the worst in people and the worst in democracy.
Donald Trump has spent his political career weaponizing the resentments of working-class whites and conservative Christians. His basic message to them is that the urban, educated elites who run the country have enacted policies that favor those who have historically not held power in the United States (minorities, feminists, secularists, immigrants) while stripping everyone else of the status and advantages they held in the old system. Its appeal draws its strength from an oversimplified and often inaccurate zero-sum worldview: You are losing because they are winning. Trump drives home his point by asserting the system is “rigged” against the average American, a message that resonates with low- and poor-information voters who don’t pay much attention to politics but who tend to have an impression of government as a malign, even conspiratorial force that is to blame for the problems in their communities and their own lives.
I could spend an entire article poking holes in this framework.1 Instead, I just want to note that one reason Trump’s resentment-infused rhetoric is so powerful is that Trump himself is full of resentment. Trump is a man who believes he has never gotten the recognition he deserves from his fellow rich and famous. Manhattan’s masters of the universe have always treated him as a punchline. He is a D-list celebrity who is furious he has been denied A-list respect. Trump’s sense of personal grievance is what renders the grievance politics he sells to the American people—a politics full of bitterness, contempt, and disgust—so visceral and authentic. It’s made him the People’s Millionaire.
I mention all this because you may have heard this past week that Trump was found guilty in New York of thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments his fixer Michael Cohen made around the time of the 2016 election to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star Trump once had an affair with. Trump is now the only president ever convicted of a felony.
Throughout the trial, Trump has painted himself the victim of an overzealous, politically-motivated prosecutor and a biased legal system. After the verdict, Trump described himself on his campaign website as a “political prisoner” and wrote, “I was just convicted in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG! They’ve raided my home, arrested me, took my mugshot, AND NOW THEY’VE JUST CONVICTED ME!” Just as Trump claimed to be the victim of a rigged election in 2020, he is now claiming to be the victim of a rigged legal system and, like his followers, a rigged political system. His victimhood goes hand in hand with his followers’ victimhood—Mar-a-Lago Jesus keeps insisting his suffering is their suffering—which amplifies their sense of resentment.
Plenty of people have speculated about what this guilty verdict will mean for the 2024 election. Some people think it will help Trump. Others think it will hurt him. A lot of it will probably depend on how the parties and the campaigns play the cards the trial has dealt them over the coming weeks and months. I honestly have no idea what will come of all this. I would think being found guilty of thirty-four felonies would doom a candidate’s presidential campaign the same way it would doom someone’s chances of becoming a nurse, a teacher, or a police officer, but then again, I’ve counted Trump out a lot of times in the past, so I don’t know what to think in that regard.
But allow me to say this: Don Trump is not a victim.
To begin with, Trump got a fair trial. The Right is screaming that the judge in the trial was biased, that the DA who brought the charges was biased, and that a jury drawn from a pool of citizens in Manhattan must have been biased, but what I haven’t heard is a legitimate claim that any of those people did something unusual that disadvantaged Trump. (The most contentious issue seems to be the novel way DA Alvin Bragg structured the accusation of wrongdoing, which is a technical legal issue that will probably be reviewed on appeal.) Instead, Trump has spread lies about the fairness of the case to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the trial. This is part of a decades-long pattern with Trump: When he doesn’t get his way, he blasts what happened to him as unfair.
Beyond that, however, Trump had plenty of opportunities in court to challenge the prosecution. Trump’s lawyers failed miserably at that task, as they discredited themselves while leaving the prosecutor’s case mostly unsullied. As required by law, all twelve jurors—any of whom could have been dismissed by Trump’s lawyers during jury selection—looked at those facts and agreed that Trump was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt on all counts. It would have only taken one juror to find Trump not guilty. Instead, they were all in agreement.
That hasn’t stopped Trump or his defenders from claiming the trial was rigged. Their arguments run into a brick wall, however, when they’re prompted to do what the jury did and consider the facts in the case. To that end, David S. Bernstein has a couple questions Trump’s defenders should be compelled to answer before anyone entertains their accusations of a rigged trial: 1.) “Do you really think that [the actions Trump was found guilty of] should be legal?”; and 2.) “If not…which parts of [the scheme Trump was found guilty of] do you truly believe didn’t happen?” (I would add to question #2 the phrase “based on the evidence presented at the trial.”) Bernstein’s questions help us realize the facts in the case and their application to the law don’t really change even if you assume the people involved in the case hold partisan views. It’s hard to claim a defendant is the victim of a political prosecution when the facts on their own prove the defendant is guilty.
There is, of course, the matter of prosecutorial discretion. Trump’s defenders might argue Bragg could have decided not to bring the case against Trump. Perhaps these people think the case is ultimately too insignificant to litigate. That strikes me as an insincere argument. Ten years ago, if someone had asked the average American if a candidate for public office who falsified business records in order to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment he made to a porn star he had an affair with should be prosecuted, I think the answer would be “hell yeah.” Americans wouldn’t consider that sort of sleazy behavior “insignificant” or beneath prosecution.
Or maybe Trump’s defenders think Bragg should have let the charges slide, since what Trump did is no worse than what other politicians have done. The problem is that requires proving a negative: We don’t know what other politicians have not been charged with doing. And as much as we may want to believe politicians are up to no good behind our backs, we can’t assume they are or that what they are doing is the equivalent of what Trump has done. It is also, again, insincere: If Trump’s defenders assume politicians are crooks, wouldn’t they want to crack down on them when they catch someone like Trump committing a crime rather than letting them slide?
Or perhaps Trump’s defenders think Bragg went hunting for a case he could use to harass and humiliate Trump. That may very well be what happened. But it may also be what was bound to happen to a man who constantly breaks the law. I recall pundits wondering back in 2015 after Trump had ascended to the top of the Republican primary field if Trump would stay in the race once the press began scrutinizing his past. The issue was that everyone knew Trump had closets full of skeletons and that it was all bound to catch up to him one way or another. Up until 2015 nobody cared much about Trump because he was just a sideshow; once he became the main event, though—once it became possible he might be given the nuclear codes—he needed to be taken much more seriously. In other words, people began treating him as they would any other politician running for high office.
What we’ve learned about Trump since then is rather unflattering. It turns out Trump is a serial scofflaw, a shady businessman, and a compulsive liar. For years he regularly engaged in what could legitimately be described as tax fraud, and was found guilty earlier this year in a civil fraud trial of inflating his wealth to deceive lenders. At least twenty-five women have accused him of sexual misconduct; last year, a court held him liable for sexual abuse. As president he was impeached twice. He remains a defendant in three criminal cases, two involving his efforts to subvert the 2020 election and another concerning his possession of classified documents. It should surprise no one that a man who feels no personal obligation to the law would eventually run afoul of it.
A story published by Slate a few days ago captures Trump’s casual contempt for the law quite well. The article is by Bill Pruitt, who worked as a producer on Trump’s reality TV show The Apprentice in the mid-00s. The article made some waves because Pruitt confirms a long-standing rumor that cameras were rolling when Trump used racially derogatory language while discussing the show’s contestants. I was struck by a different episode, though. Pruitt writes about visiting Trump National Golf Club, where Trump implies one of the homes on the property is a love nest he has kept secret from Melania. Later Pruitt meets the architect of the clubhouse and commends him for his work. The architect thanks him but replies
“It’s bittersweet….I’m very proud of this place, but…” He hesitates. “I wasn’t paid what was promised,” he says. I just listen. “Trump pays half upfront,” he says, “but he’ll stiff you for the rest once the project is completed.”
“He stiffed you?”
“If I tried to sue, the legal bills would be more than what I was owed. He knew that. He basically said Take what I’m offering,” and I see how heavy this is for the man, all these years later. “So, we sent the invoice. He didn’t even pay that,” he says. None of this will be in the show. Not Trump’s suggested infidelities, nor his aversion toward paying those who work for him.
That sort of villainy is standard operating procedure for Trump. Don’t mistake him for a victim. He’s a victimizer.
Now that the walls are perhaps finally closing in on him, Trump is desperate to find some way to turn his blatant lawlessness to his political advantage. To that end, Trump lately has been trying to pass himself off as some sort of antihero. It’s designed to turn his defiance of the law into a patriotic act and endear him to right-wingers and marginalized Americans who see themselves as persecuted by and in rebellion against a rigged system. This has led Trump to associate himself with conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, 1/6 defendants, and even individuals accused of conspiring to commit murder. It’s all a way to build a coalition of the resentful. Everyone from Trump to the MAGA mom raising hell with her local schoolboard about the “woke” books in her child’s classroom to the kid in the “Let’s Go Brandon” t-shirt are bound together by their sense of victimhood and the belief that America’s elite are out to get them.
There is tremendous irony in all that, not the least of which is that Trump can turn on a dime from celebrating insurrectionists to calling for the deportation of protesters exercising their First Amendment rights; Trump’s always been a tough as nails law-and-order guy except when it comes to holding him and his buddies accountable for the laws they break. But one thing that has always astonished me about the MAGAverse’s embrace of Trump is that he is precisely the sort of person they should instinctively mistrust: A spoiled, rich, amoral, Ivy League-educated tabloid-celebrity, bully, scofflaw, and landlord from Manhattan who gives off serious snake oil salesman vibes. He’s practically a caricature of what so many of his follower’s despise about America’s elite. It should be impossible for a guy like that to insist he’s somehow a victim, and easy for anyone to see he’s only playing one for the sake of self-preservation.
Signals and Noise
Democracy Watch
“Donald Trump has learned all the wrong lessons in life, because he has never been held accountable by anybody (and we will have to wait until July to see if the sentence he is handed constitutes any real punishment). Regardless, if being convicted of a crime results in his winning the White House again, why should any law or norm stop him from doing whatever he wants to do once he gets there?”—Matt Lewis, for The Daily Beast
Don Trump shared a video to his social media account touting the rise of a “unified Reich” that would follow his victory in November. By Ian Ward of Politico: “The Right’s Fascism Problem” (“Regardless of how or why the video made its way onto Trump’s social media feed, the incident highlights a broader problem for the GOP: Right-leaning corners of the internet are absolutely inundated with fascist or fascist-adjacent content, and that content is increasingly making its way — either intentionally or accidentally — into more mainstream conservative discourse. After all, this isn’t the first time that the porous digital boundary between the online far-right and the MAGA movement has created real-world political problems for Trump.”)
Jonathan Last wonders in The Bulwark if Trump isn’t trying to game his way to presidency but “if [Trump’s] theory about who Americans really are, about what this country really wants, is right.”
Karen Yourish and Charlie Smart of the New York Times charts Don Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about the outcome of the 2024 election. The number of comments he has made far exceed those made about the validity of both the 2016 and 2020 elections combined.
The Washington Post reports Trump told a group of donors he would deport pro-Palestinian protestors.
Overlooked in that same speech: Trump drew an analogy that cast himself as Hitler: “And you know, you go back through history, this is like just before the Holocaust. I swear. If you look, it’s the same thing. You had a weak president or head of the country. [That’s a reference to Biden.] And it just built and built. And then, all of a sudden, you ended up with Hitler. You ended up with a problem like nobody knew.”
Trump falsely claimed Biden authorized federal agents to use deadly force against him during the Mar-a-Lago raid. Trump was referring to a standard law enforcement document designed to limit the use of deadly force, which is precisely the opposite of what Trump claimed. The raid was also scheduled for a day when authorities knew Trump would not be at Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s comments drew a rare rebuke from Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Trump floated the idea of a three-term presidency during a speech to the NRA.
Josh Dawsey of the New York Times writes about how Trump is making audacious requests for campaign donations in the same breath as he promises donors to deliver on their interests.
Noah Kirsch and Roger Sollenberger of The Daily Beast report Trump sold a private jet to a megadonor. The price he received for the sale is unknown, but the jet is estimated to be worth $10 million. (This is one reason why I argue there should be limits on the amount of money candidates can spend on their own campaigns.)
By Matthew Yglesias: “Trump Scams the People Who Trust Him” (“The long-tail risk of [Trump’s] conduct is that something genuinely disastrous happens for the whole country. But the most likely scenario is that he continues to be what he’s been for 30 years: a grifter who rips off the people who trust him, while being relatively ineffective at pursuing his ostensible goals.”)
From the New York Times: “‘We’ll See You at Your House’: How Fear and Menace Are Transforming Politics” (“This was just a typical month in American public life, where a steady undercurrent of violence and physical risk has become a new normal. From City Hall to Congress, public officials increasingly describe threats and harassment as a routine part of their jobs. Often masked by online anonymity and propelled by extreme political views, the barrage of menace has changed how public officials do their work, terrified their families and driven some from public life altogether.”)
The 2024 Election
Politico reports Democrats are in a “full-blown ‘freakout’” over the state of Biden’s campaign. For reference, polling averages have barely budged since Biden’s well-received State of the Union Address, and Trump’s numbers have actually improved slightly since the start of his hush money trial. Catherine Lucey and Ken Thomas of the Wall Street Journal write Democrats are urging Biden to empathize more with the way voters feel about the economy rather than speak positively about it.
A chart, from Axios, that explains this year’s politics
The red line charts inflation (the percentage prices rose over the prior year) over the past 3+ years. The blue line charts the overall change in prices over the past 3+ years. People say they’re mad about the red line. What they mean is that they’re made about the blue line. Voters want that blue line to come down; it probably won’t, and if it did, it would result in falling wages, unemployment, and a recession that could spiral into a depression.
A Harris poll also found a majority of Americans incorrectly believe the United States is in recession and blame Biden for that. (A report released Friday showed economic growth has slowed but that the economy remains fundamentally sound with rising incomes and a sound job market.) By Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post: “Nearly Everything Americans Believe About the Economy is Wrong”
Maeve Reston of the Washington Post examines Democrats’ struggles in Nevada.
Myah Ward and Brakkton Booker of Politico note Biden has invested heavily and campaigned a lot in Pennsylvania with little to show in the polls for his efforts.
In a disappointing but predictable move, Nikki Haley caved and said she would vote for Don Trump in November. Peter Baker of the New York Times adds Haley to the list of Republican politicians who have condemned Trump as unfit for office but now kiss his ring.
David S. Bernstein has a list of questions he hopes get asked of Trump during the first debate. (“Having been forced earlier than expected to contemplate a Biden-Trump ’24 debate, I find myself intensely uncomfortable with the [dare I use the term] ‘normalizing’ image of the former President spending most of 90 minutes on live national prime-time television taking questions on policy positions. So I’d like to offer a suggestion to Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who have been announced as moderators for the planned June 27 affair: don’t do that. It’s not that those forward-looking policy topics are unimportant—see for example Eric Cortellessa’s valuable Trump interview for Time, which I wrote about recently. It’s just that asking Trump about his second-term policies feels a little like asking Charles Manson how he plans to decorate the Tate house when he moves in.”)
Maggie Haberman and Jonah E. Bromwich of the New York Times note that, in a move that would have been hard to fathom over a decade ago (and that would have doomed a Democratic candidate for office) Trump is now regularly associating himself during rallies with people accused and convicted of serious crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder.
Trump began his Memorial Day post on TruthSocial by writing, “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country…” It just goes downhill from there.
Trump addressed the Libertarian Party’s national convention and was met with jeers and boos. And that was before he began to mock them.
Katie Glueck and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times examine the low-information voters who are currently fueling Trump’s lead in the polls but tend to hail from traditionally Democratic communities. (Ron Brownstein writes for CNN that what that means is that Democrats may, unlike past years, hope for lower turnout, as low information voters have lower turnout rates.) Nate Cohn of the New York Times digs into the numbers and concludes Trump’s support among this cohort of voters makes his lead quite shaky. In another column, Cohn reminds readers this race remains close and that Biden’s position is much stronger than many assume.
A Blueprint poll found most voters under the age of 30 were unaware of Trump’s most controversial political comments. However, a majority found those comments offensive.
Leigh Ann Caldwell of the Washington Post writes about how high rents and home prices—driven by housing shortages, inflation, and high interest rates—could become a significant issue in the 2024 election.
Glenn Thrush of the New York Times digs into how public concerns with crime—violent crime is down, put property crime is up—are shaping the 2024 election.
Republican Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan declared in an ad that he would vote to codify the protections in Roe v. Wade. Left unsaid: If Hogan would vote to confirm Republican-appointed judges whose judicial philosophies are likely hostile to abortion rights.
Congress
Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern received a rebuke on the House floor for making “offensive” comments after accurately describing Trump’s recent and pending court cases.
The Republican-led House passed a bill cracking down on non-citizen voting, which rarely happens and is already illegal.
Jasper Goodman and Eleanor Mueller of Politico observe that the cryptocurrency lobby is gaining bipartisan support and power on Capitol Hill.
By David Leonhardt of the New York Times: “A New Centrism is Rising in Washington” (“The new centrism is…a recognition that neoliberalism failed to deliver. The notion that the old approach would bring prosperity, as Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, has said, ‘was a promise made but not kept.’ In its place has risen a new worldview. Call it neopopulism.”)
Annie Karni of the New York Times reports Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman is turning off progressives who supported him in 2022 with his political positions and caustic personality.
Casey Murray and Byron Tau write in NOTUS about the unusual amount of power Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar and his family wield in Webb County, Texas. Cuellar is currently facing multiple counts of bribery in federal court.
Patrick Svitek of the Washington Post finds Republican members of Congress who endorsed someone other than Donald Trump in the 2024 primaries have not faced backlash from Republican voters.
The Supreme Court
By Dahlia Lithwick of Slate: “What These Stories About Samuel Alito’s “Provocative” Flags Are Really About” (“[W]e need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle, to a discussion of the courts. Not just Alito or Thomas, who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happen to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight, and why that is deeply dangerous. More so, why justices who were placed on the court to behave as well-compensated partisan politicians would do so in public as well as on paper. Until we do that, Alito will continue to fly around the world, giving speeches about his triumph in Dobbs and Thomas will keep taking gifts and failing to disclose them. That won’t be the end of the Supreme Court story; it will be just the start of it.”)
State and Local Government
Judd Legum of Popular Information obtained training materials produced by the Florida Department of Education that shows how Florida’s teachers are being instructed to teach Christian nationalism to their students.
The Florida Board of Education chose to keep lessons describing how slavery allowed Black people to develop skills they could use to their benefit in the state curriculum.
More than a dozen incumbent Texas statehouse Republicans have been ousted in primaries by hard right challengers.
Robert Downen and Renzo Downey of the Texas Tribune report the Texas Republican Party voted on a platform that calls for new laws requiring the teaching of the Bible in public schools and a requirement that statewide elected leaders win the popular vote in a majority of Texas’s 254 counties, a law that, if enacted, would almost certainly lock Democrats out of office even if they won the statewide popular vote. For reference, here are the results of the 2018 Senate race between Republican Ted “Cancun” Cruz and Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a close contest that Cruz won by 2.5%.
O’Rourke made it close by winning the five most-populous counties and eight of the ten most-populous counties but still only won 32 counties total. Cruz won Loving County—the least populous county in the United States, with a population of 64 in 2020—by a tally of 47-6. Republicans want to enact this law because they fear Texas is trending Democratic and may soon slip out of their control.
Immigration
By Derek Thompson of The Atlantic: “Americans Are Thinking About Immigration All Wrong” (“If American politicians are ever going to think about immigration policy through the lens of long-term opportunity planning rather than immediate crisis response, they first need to convince the American people that those long-term opportunities exist. This case is actually easy to make. Cheaper and more plentiful houses, higher average wages, more jobs, more innovation, more scientific breakthroughs in medicine, and more state government revenue without higher taxes—all while sticking it to our geopolitical adversary, China—require more immigration. Across economics, national security, fiscal sustainability, and geopolitical power, immigration is the opposite of America’s worst problem. It holds clear solutions to America’s most pressing issues.”)
Injustice
The Washington Post has an in-depth story about how, for decades, Catholic priests, brothers, and sisters sexually assaulted Native American children who were taken from their homes by the U.S. government and forced to live at remote boarding schools.
The New York Times reports on the abuses carried out by Mississippi sheriff deputies who terrorized the citizens of the county they were supposed to protect.
International News
Hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash.
Israel pressed into the center of Rafah and gained control over Gaza’s border with Egypt. The Biden administration said an Israeli missile strike that killed and injured dozens of people in a tent encampment in southern Gaza did not cross their “red line.”
The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Yahya Sinwar (the leader of Hamas) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as other Palestinian and Israeli leaders.
Norway, Ireland, and Spain recognized the Palestinian state.
CNN reports the pier the US Navy constructed to deliver aid to Gaza has broken apart in high seas and will need to be repaired. Still, it may not be worth it: Stephen Kalin and Nancy A. Youssef of the Wall Street Journal write that the pier faced serious logistical challenges during its limited operational run that severely limited relief agencies’ ability to get aid to Gazans.
The Washington Post looks at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s break with Democrats, a strategy that has been developing for years and that represents a deviation from Israel’s typical efforts to court bipartisan support in the United States.
The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman writes about Netanyahu’s increasingly reckless management of the war in Gaza.
Mari Saito of Reuters (with photos by Thomas Peter) visits the front lines of the war in Ukraine to find out what life is like for the Ukrainian soldiers stationed there.
Multiple Russian sources told Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn of Reuters that Vladimir Putin is open to a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine that recognizes the current frontlines.
Paul Sonne and Anatoly Kurmanaev of the New York Times report Vladimir Putin is purging the ranks of his defense ministry, a move mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin demanded last year before his death in a plane crash likely orchestrated by Putin.
David E. Sanger of the New York Times reports debates are intensifying within the Biden administration about allowing Ukraine to use American weapons to attack targets within Russia.
Isabelle Khurshudyan and Alex Horton of the Washington Post report Ukraine has quit using some high-tech American weapons because Russian efforts to jam their guidance systems has rendered them useless.
Doug Cameron and Micah Maidenberg of the Wall Street Journal write about the United States’ preparations for war in outer space, which would include satellites capable of attacking other satellites.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a snap election for July 4. His Conservative Party—which has gone through five Prime Ministers since the Brexit vote—is getting trounced in the polls.
Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss, a German aristocrat accused of conspiring to overthrow the German government, appeared in a German court as part of a massive trial resulting from an investigation into a far-right plot to storm Parliament and assume control of the nation.
India recorded what may be a record temperature of 126 degrees Fahrenheit outside New Delhi. That’s eight degrees shy of the highest temperature ever recorded in the United States in Death Valley, California.
Matthew Kaminski of Politico takes a deep dive into the perilous state of politics in Mexico, a country experiencing stunning economic growth but beset by stunning levels of gang violence that threatens to undermine its democracy.
Garbage Time: The End of College Sports as We Know It
(Garbage Time theme song here)
A few years before “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) money upended college sports, I was in a restaurant in my Iowa hometown and spotted a framed football jersey signed by homegrown all-American University of Iowa linebacker Josey Jewell (2014-2017) hanging from one of the walls. I asked a waitress how they got ahold of that. She said they knew someone connected with the Iowa football team, so they bought the jersey and passed it on to their connection, who got Jewell to sign it. All it cost them was the price of the jersey, since Jewell as a college student at the time couldn’t charge for autographs. The waitress added they couldn’t do that with Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz, however, as he charged for autographs. At the time, Ferentz was earning over $5 million, making him the state of Iowa’s highest paid public employee.
That story seemed to sum up the state of college football for me at the time. Here was the University of Iowa turning a profit by selling a jersey worn by a player who would never see a dime of those proceeds even though he was the one who made that jersey valuable. And then he probably, what, doubled? tripled? quadrupled? the value of that jersey for its owner by obliging their request to put his signature on it free of charge. Sure, Jewell received compensation for playing at Iowa in the form of a college education and the opportunity to showcase his skills for interested NFL teams on a national stage, but that form of payment didn’t come close to representing Jewell’s real market value, which became clear after the Denver Broncos picked him in the fourth round of the 2018 NFL draft and then signed him to a four-year $3.8 million contract. In March of this year, Jewell signed a three-year $22.75 million contract with the Carolina Panthers. Not sure what he charges for autographs now.
When I saw Jewell’s jersey in that restaurant in the late ‘10s, the debate over whether college athletes ought to be paid for their labor was just beginning to simmer. A couple weeks ago, it finally boiled over: As part of a settlement to three federal antitrust lawsuits, the NCAA and the five power conferences (the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and the now defunct Pac-12) agreed to pay out $2.7 billion in damages to student-athletes dating back to 2016 and set up a revenue-sharing plan that will allow each school to distribute up to $20 million per year to its athletes. That means universities can now directly pay the athletes who compete for their schools. “Amateurism”—the idea that college athletes are to receive no compensation for playing for a university beyond a full-ride scholarship to cover the cost of tuition—is dead.
This has been a long time coming. Major college athletics is a big business. In the pre-pandemic year of 2019, Division I schools generated nearly $16 billion in revenue. Most of that money comes from football and men’s basketball, which have lucrative TV contracts. Yet the players who put that product on the field see very little of the money they make for their schools—only about 18% of it, all in the form of scholarships. Meanwhile, roughly a third of that $16 billion is used to compensate coaches (in many states, the highest-paid public employee is a public university’s football or men’s basketball coach) while schools spend roughly the same amount on facilities as they spend on athletes. With that much money flowing around, it is hard to argue that the labor of a college athlete playing for a major football program like Alabama or Michigan is only worth the value of their $20-30,000 scholarship.
More recent developments have only made it more difficult to maintain the model of amateurism. In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled the NCAA could no longer prohibit student-athletes from making money off their name, image, and likeness, which had the effect of shedding light on college athletes’ value in the marketplace. (For example, University of Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark had NIL deals worth an estimated $3.1 million in college.) At around the same time, the NCAA changed its transfer rules so that student-athletes would not be required to sit out a year after switching schools. Not only did this allow schools and their boosters to use the promise of better NIL deals to lure recruits and athletes at other universities to their programs, but it also functioned as a sort of admission that similar deals were already taking place all the time under the table.
Consequently, the deal the NCAA cut to get out from under those antitrust lawsuits seemed inevitable. As a principle, people ought to be paid what they’re worth. The NCAA could no longer maintain the fiction that the 18-22-year-olds playing for college teams raking in millions upon millions of dollars were only entitled to compensation worth the value of their education. Read the deal as a confession: For decades, colleges and universities throughout the United States have been running the equivalent of professional sports programs using sweatshop labor.
A remarkable feature of this story is that no one has a clue what any of this means for the future of college sports. If anything, this is just the beginning of a massive transformation of the college sports landscape. There are those who are certainly celebrating the fact that undercompensated athletes will finally be paid their due, but it’s unclear how schools will spend that extra $20 million. If they split it evenly between all their athletes, including those who play on teams that don’t turn a profit (i.e., gymnasts, swimmers, wrestlers, etc.) the average athlete will likely see a cash boost of no more than $30,000. That’s still not close to what the market owes the best athletes on the highest-profile and most-profitable teams. But using that money to compensate star players might mean it will only flow to a handful of athletes, as universities attempt to outbid one another for their services.
Universities could decide to use that $20 million to hire elite football and men’s basketball players with the hope of turning those programs into massive moneymakers. If every school did that, however, that $20 million would become a salary cap that would fall far short of the players’ collective worth. One could imagine an all-conference quarterback with an NIL deal backing him up threatening to leave a program if the coach doesn’t slip him the extra half-million another program with a skimmed-down roster is offering.
Meanwhile, throwing $20 million at only football and men’s basketball could very well run afoul of Title IX, which requires certain levels of equity in college sports between male and female athletes. And what would colleges do when star athletes emerge in programs that don’t generate a lot of revenue and begin demanding a cut of that $20 million? Caitlin Clark, for instance, was certainly owed more than any University of Iowa football or men’s basketball player over the past two years. Would LSU, a school with national title aspirations in football, pay-up to ensure gymnast Livvy Dunne, whose social media following made her the third-highest-earning NIL athlete behind Shedeur Sanders (Deion Sanders’ son) and Bronny James (LeBron James’ son), stays in Baton Rouge?
I suspect LSU would not prioritize a gymnast over even a backup quarterback, which makes me wonder, as college sports become more overtly professional, if universities will continue to fund their many unprofitable, lower profile teams. Football and men’s basketball already subsidize most Division I athletic departments (most of which actually run deficits and rely on tuition and student fees to make up the difference.) On the one hand, fully professional football and men’s basketball programs could generate the cash that could sustain other college sports teams. My hunch, however, is that those football and men’s basketball programs will demand those profits stay with their teams so that they can remain as competitive as possible with other schools. I wouldn’t be surprised therefore to see universities start slashing programs like wrestling or volleyball so football and men’s basketball can retain more of their own revenue. Schools might keep lower profile programs they specialize in (i.e., wrestling at Iowa, lacrosse at Maryland) but they won’t commit to much more beyond that, particularly if schools are required by law to have the same number of slots for female athletes as male athletes.
The professionalization of college sports could even prove so tumultuous that universities decide to get out of the sports business entirely (or maybe at least the football business.) Sports have long been a feature of college life, but it seems strange for state-run institutions of higher education to be operating professional sports teams. Colleges have five things an independently operated pro team would desire: A strong brand ID, athletic facilities, a student fan base that can fill those facilities, a regional fan base that identifies strongly with the team, and tradition. It might make sense for schools to package those features and lease them to a group that can operate its teams as professional sports organizations. If it ever came to that, though, we may find ourselves dealing with teams and leagues that bear little resemblance to what is found in the current college model.
All of which is to say that the potential for disruption here is very high. I suspect most Americans still view college athletics through the frame of high school sports. From this point of view, the players, who progress from freshman to senior, are students still learning how to play the game. The coaches are teachers tasked with building character. Fight songs are played by pep bands whose members are drawn from the student body. The school’s traditions bind players and fans to their homeland. Rooting for your team is like rooting for your neighbor’s kid, and even if they don’t win, what really matters is the old college try. For many, unlike the major professional sports leagues, which they believe are tainted by ego, commercialism, obscene amounts of money, and the heartlessness of big business, college sports are pure.
I don’t know if that image of college sports ever actually existed. Maybe it did, and maybe even recently enough that it still forms the baseline for the way many people think about college athletics. But major college sports today are a far cry from that ideal and have been for quite a while. The idea that pro sports are more debased than college sports falls apart as soon as one accounts for how much money the NCAA, university athletic departments, and high-profile coaches rake in while players earn squat.
It would be foolish to assume the NCAA’s court settlement will bring stability to college sports. I think it’s more likely this marks the end of college sports as we know it and the beginning of an overhaul of the college sports model. In that way, what’s going on in college sports is a microcosm of what’s happening to American society today. Many people are currently dissatisfied with the political-economic model that has structured American society for the past 45-or-so years. They sense its basic tenets are rotten and inadequate when it comes to addressing the many factors currently roiling society. Change is needed. Yet people also sense that what needs to be done will be so disruptive that the new model won’t retain the features of the old model they had accustomed themselves to and enjoyed. They can already imagine themselves twenty years from now looking back forty years into the past and lamenting what’s been lost. So they cling to what they can of the good old days even as the forces of change sweep them into the future. For an institution as rooted in tradition and nostalgia as college sports, that can be a hard pill to swallow.
Exit Music: “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While)” by Kim Weston (1965)
For example, minorities face far more social disadvantages today than whites, conservative Christians continue to enjoy the rights granted to them by the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment, Trump’s conservative economic policies would “rig” the economy for the wealthy rather than the working class, policymaking is not a zero-sum undertaking, etc.