In the wake of President Donald Trump’s demands that his team change its name back to the Cleveland Indians and away from the Cleveland Guardians, the team’s president said that while he hasn’t been following the demands closely, he doesn’t think that the team will change its name back, at least for now.
As background, the name change happened in July of 2021, when the Cleveland Indians announced that they would change their name to the Cleveland Guardians, with the change effective after the 2021 season. Their decision followed years of wokeness-inflicted, astroturfed controversy regarding the team name’s supposed insensitivity toward American Indians, and appeared sparked by the George Floyd-related national unrest and leftist pressures.
So, intimidated and pressured into changing the name by the far-left, team owner Paul Dolan was apparently inspired by the “Guardians of Traffic” statues on Cleveland’s Hope Memorial Bridge to change the team name from the Indians to the Guardians. Involved in the rebranding was nixing the famous Chief Wahoo logo, which quite infuriated non-woke fans.
While their name change was less infamous than the Washington Redskins becoming the Washington Commanders, as fewer people noticed, President Trump lumped the two together in a fury-filled social media post in which he insisted that the Commanders and Guardians should change their names back to the Redskins and Indians.
Beginning his post on Truth Social about the matter, the president said, “The Washington “Whatever’s” should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past.”
Continuing, he framed the decisions made by the two teams to change their names as erasing American Indian heritage, history, and prestige, saying, “Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”
Concluding the angry post, he noted that this is no longer the era of George Floyd and related outrage, and so it is time for the teams to return to “common sense” and change the names back. He said, “Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”
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Commenting on the matter to the press, the Guardians’ president of baseball operations, Chris Antonetti, explained that rolling back the past few years and doing a rebrand that changes the Guardians’ name back to the ‘Indians’ is “not something [he has been] tracking or [has] been paying a lot of attention to.”
Further, he added that the team has already done four years of rebranding and will continue building that brand out rather than reversing course and then moving from there, comments that will likely quite annoy the president. He said, “We’ve gotten the opportunity to build the brand as the Guardians over the last four years and are excited about the future.”
Predictably, the president’s comments infuriated woke commenters online. For example, far-left X personality Aaron Rupar insisted that it was “racist” to honor American Indian heritage and history, saying, “The mad king demands the return of racist sports team names.”
Watch Sen. Daines’ commentary on how the Redskins could change their name back below: