Last month, in a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the San Francisco 49ers’ star defensive end, Nick Bosa, celebrated a routine sack with a cheerful and ungainly series of hip-swivels and fist-pumps, not unlike the movements of an automaton gaining sentience.
This is what has become known as the Trump dance.
For Bosa — who had just been fined $11,255, or .033 percent of his $34 million-a-year salary, for sporting a “Make America Great Again” çizgi on the field weeks earlier — it was, evidently, an emphatic if tongue-in-cheek salute to the president-elect. The lumbering gestures of politicians rarely trickle down to the football field, but this instance made for a strange kind of harmony: Trump, after all, has perfected in politics exactly the kinds of gloating theatrics we expect from athletes after just about every net-positive play.
The Trump dance has become a phenomenon in the world of sports, where the president-elect has long vied for purchase. Sometimes it suggests a resounding endorsement of Trump himself; sometimes it’s just about the pleasures of stiff gyration. Following Bosa’s lead, the Las Vegas Raiders tight end Brock Bowers celebrated a recent touchdown with the dance, pumping his fists in the gleefully stodgy manner Trump has at so many rallies. So did Christian Pulisic, a star of the U.S. men’s national soccer team, who clarified that he was not declaring his support for Trump but merely “thought it was funny.” When the heavyweight fighter Jon Jones introduced his own variation of the shimmy, Trump himself was looking on from just beyond the ring like a proud father, flanked by his associates Kid Rock and Elon Musk.
It’s hard to say exactly how the move originated; over the past decade, no small number of Trump campaign events have harnessed the galvanizing power of impromptu dance. What we can say is that Trump frequently greets the playing of “YMCA,” a staple of his campaign playlist, by darting his arms back and forth in the fitful style of an inflatable tube man outside a highway car dealership, often swinging an imaginary golf club as a kind of grace note. One notorious example came in October, at a Pennsylvania town-hall event that was twice interrupted by medical emergencies, prompting Trump to request the song — “nice and loud,” he called to the on-site D.J. — before initiating his signature twist. After roughly 39 minutes of idle movement alongside Kristi Noem, the immigration hard-liner who would become Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, the candidate finally left the stage to the sound of “Memory,” the maudlin 11 o’clock number from the musical “Cats.”
News coverage of this town-hall-turned-listening-party seemed to misunderstand its appeal. It was cited as evidence of Trump’s generally odd and excitable nature, or perhaps as a sign of his declining mental faculties. But here he was as his supporters see him: not as a vengeful and unserious authoritarian or threat to American democracy, but as an affable geezer so secure in his masculinity that he is consistently roused to movement by a campy old disco trifle. (Putting aside, for the moment, that this particular classic has endured among gay men as a paean to cruising for sex.) If the dance were not so obviously a reflection of Trump’s genuine enthusiasm for “YMCA,” you might even see it as a clever bit of branding, an appeal to the everyman’s struggle to find the beat. Like his pretend shift at a McDonald’s or the mug shot taken after his Georgia indictment, the Trump dance was reproduced online until it became an inside joke and then a göğüs, a signifier of cocky defiance of the haters and the losers.
