There has been a long history of athletes using their power to create more inclusive, just and sustainable civic futures in our nation. Perhaps the most influential was Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player in Major League Baseball, who used his stature to advance civil rights throughout his career.
And now it’s not just players but leagues that continue the tradition. On Aug. 16, the NBA announced that it would not host games on Election Day to allow time for players, staff and fans to vote. This builds on a long history of athletes using their power to influence more inclusive, just and sustainable civic futures.
And now designer, educator and civic futurist Lisa Kay Solomon is working with a committed group of student athletes, coaches, administrators and civic partners to extend the NBA’s work to colleges across the country. In 2020 Solomon met with long-time basketball coach Eric Reveno, who had embarked on a personal mission to help his players register to vote.
But his efforts didn't end with his own team, Georgia Tech. Coach Rev became the driving force behind All Vote No Play, an initiative that urged athletics to take Election Day off from practice or games so players could vote and volunteer. With support from the National Association of Basketball Coaches and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, the campaign ultimately convinced more than 1,100 coaches to sign the All Vote No Play pledge. The call to action was so meaningful to players that the student-run NCAA Student Athletic Committee leadership team unanimously passed legislation to make All Vote No Play an annual tradition.
Solomon met Coach Rev that year while she was working on her personal mission to change the way we engage young people in the voting process. They instantly bonded in their shared belief that young people need, and deserve, to be not just informed but empowered to participate more fully in shaping the future they're going to inherit.
Two years later, in 2022, All Vote No Play is more than just a day, and it's more than just voting. The campaign makes citizenship for coaches, players, and teams easy, meaningful, and impactful. Their playbook has a wide range of free, nonpartisan "civic drills" to help their team learn, engage, gather and vote. The All Vote No Play initiative is designed to help all athletes build and flex their civic power to shape their futures.
On Sept. 13 there will be an AVNP Engaged Athlete All-Star meeting, featuring the “GREATs and GOATS” who are using their athletic platform, power and purpose to make the world a better place.
Athletes from every sport and college are enthusiastically invited to participate.
Speakers at the event will include NBA champ Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors. Curry not only has four championship rings, but has used his platform to publicly advocate for voting rights, voter mobilization and other causes he cares about.
Curry will be joined by Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer, the winningest NCAA women's basketball coach of all time, former Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice (who recently added a new title as part-owner of the Denver Broncos) and the New Orleans Saints’ Demario Davis. He is not only one of the NFL’s most successful linebackers, but his own story and advocacy for prison reform and efforts to reduce inequality in his hometown of Mississippi and globally have moved his teammates and fans.
Each of these headliners will be interviewed by passionate student athletes, representing just a few of the many extraordinary, engaged athletes across the country who are flexing their own civic muscles within their campuses and communities:
- UCLA quarterback Chase Griffin, the NIL Male Athlete of the Year, helped run the 2020 Bruins Voter drive and donates a percentage of his endorsements to a Los Angeles food bank.
- The Yale Bulldogs’ tight end Ryan Belk, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in 2018, is helping organize a voting registration drive with the athletic department, alongside classmate Sari Kauffman, co-founder of MyVote Project.
- Felicia Renelus, former co-captain of Brown University’s women's track and field team and now competing for the University of California at Berkeley, will be hosting an Engaged Athlete All-Star Event watch party with her fellow athletes, furnished with local pizza delivered by Pizza to the Polls
These are just a few extraordinary leaders of the All Vote No Play Engaged Athlete series who are turning this civic moment into a cultural movement.
With the 2022 midterms less than 70 days away the immediate goal is registering and mobilizing voters. But the broader goals go well beyond voting as All Vote No Play is working hard to illuminate and amplify how athletes can all use their agency, power and courage to shape the kind of futures and communities all Americans dream of.
Sign up here.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.