David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
From Kareem Abdul Jabbar to Billie Jean King to the “NFL Votes” program in 2020, there is a long history in the United States of athletes supporting civic engagement and voting.
In 2020, the NFL created “NFL Votes” to encourage civic engagement of active and retired players, club and league personnel, and fans, and worked with Rock the Vote to produce voter education and registration sessions for players and club personnel. In the same year, the National Basketball Players Association urged their players to register to vote. More than 96% of its eligible players registered in the 2020 elections, after fewer than 25% voted in 2016.
At the college level, historic NCAA legislation was passed in the fall of 2020. In June of 2020, Coach Eric Reveno, then Associate Head Coach for Georgia Tech Men’s Basketball, tweeted that Election Day should be a day OFF from playing, and a day ON for voting. The tweet and the hashtag, #allvotenoplay, quickly went viral and inspired over 1,100 coaches to sign a pledge to do the same. Coach Reveno teamed up with Coach Joe Kennedy, then Assistant Coach for Holy Cross Men's Basketball, and together they worked with the NCAA and student athlete leaders across the country to unanimously pass legislation to make Election Day a dedicated day for civic engagement annually.
Minnesota football coach P.J. Fleck said it was a mark of leadership for coaches to make Election Day something big and sacred, not just another opportunity to put on pads.
Exactly three years later, on June 2, 2023, All Vote No Play became a program under a new nonprofit organization, The Team. The Team is a nonpartisan organization that creates award-winning programming focused on integrating civic engagement into college athletics.
The momentum continues today through a new program called the Engaged Athlete Fellowship. The Team and The Bridge Alliance have teamed up to create the inaugural class of 28 NCAA athletes working in many areas of civic engagement. Continuing the tradition of caring about the importance of voting, three of the class of 28 athletes have chosen to emphasize voting in their Engaged Athlete Fellowship program.
Brooke Hudson, Florida A&M University women’s volleyball player, has designed a program consisting of monthly educational pop-up meetings to inform FAMU and FSU students about the importance of voting, who the upcoming presidential candidates are, and what each candidate’s campaigns aims to achieve. The initiative will culminate with a civic celebration at the Capitol building in Tallahassee.
Another Engaged Athlete Fellow Evan Nelson, a men’s basketball player from Harvard University, is working on a project that will include Primary Debate watch parties, ”Food with a Fellow”- a chance to hear from a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics about a career in public service and how to utilize their platforms to influence, and culminates in a Voter Engagement Outing- a civic celebration featuring resources, food, drinks, and activities!
The creativity of how these student athletes are focusing on voting is exciting. Creighton basketball player Sami Osmani offers monthly table talks designed to underscore the importance of voting, civic engagement, and civil discourse to Creighton University students.
The Engaged Athlete Fellowship provides stipends and training to college athletes to harness the power of athletics to build great teammates, engaged citizens and committed community members. The program hopes to grow into a national movement of engaged athletes but needs financial support to fulfill the dream. With your help, we can build a community across schools, sports, and conferences of student athletes who are excited about the connection between civic engagement and athletic involvement, and understand how important it is for the future of our democracy.
Please contact The Team’s Co-Founder and Executive Director, Joe Kennedy, to learn how you can help. Joe is a 2007 graduate of Northwestern and former basketball team captain with a deep history of building a coalition of sports organizations. During the 2020 election cycle, Kennedy connected with Coach Eric Reveno, where they became a major force leading a new college athletics movement to expand student-athlete voter registration and create civic resources for coaches and teams. Coach Kennedy is working towards a future where all student athletes and athletic departments establish civic engagement as a priority. You can contact Joe Kennedy at info@theteam.org.
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.