"Once a Chief, Always a Chief"

Watch Trump Mobiize the Identity Sideshow

“It is not every day,” Troy Clossen notes in the New York Times, “that small-town mascot drama in a school district of roughly 6,500 students is a topic of conversation in the Oval Office.”

True. But Closen found himself writing about a characteristic specimen of the Trump method at work.

In 2022, New York state education authorities ordered public school systems to eliminate mascots drawn from Native American culture or lose state funding. This order was resisted in the many areas where indigenous mascots had been used for years.

For decades, Massapequa, “a middle-class swath on the South Shore” of Long Island, had displayed its Native American “Chief”—a portrait in profile of a stern native leader in a feathered headdress—on signs, logos, and sweatshirts. The Massapequa school district (it also serves the village of Massapequa Park) sued the state. The suit alleged that banning the mascot violated the First Amendment rights of the hamlet’s residents. The board argued that there is nothing disrespectful about The Chief’s portrait, and that “The phrase ‘once a Chief, always a Chief’ is commonly used among students and alumni.” Three other Long Island towns joined the legal action to keep their team names: the Wantagh Warriors, the Wyandanch Warriors and the Connetquot Thunderbirds.

A federal judge ruled against the school districts, and it looked as if New York state authorities would have their way: that the Chief, the Warriors, and the Thunderbirds will be disappeared.

Enter President Trump, who criticized New York’s policy and called on the federal education secretary, Linda McMahon, “To fight for the people of Massapequa on this very important issue.”

He took to social media to fan some flames:

“Forcing them to change the name, after all of these years, is ridiculous and, in actuality, an affront to our great Indian population . . .What could be wrong with using the name, ‘Chief’? I don’t see the Kansas City Chiefs changing their name anytime soon!” “LONG LIVE THE MASSAPEQUA CHIEFS!”

Fortunately for Substack subscribers, I am in a position to speak authoritatively on this episode. I grew up in Massapequa. I played as a Chief for many varsity seasons. Therefore, I am still a Chief.

A Chief Speaks

What we see here is President Trump stoking a battle between “woke” and working white people over the respect owed to a distant group of indigenous people—a conflict the outcome of which does not interest Trump even slightly, but which is perfectly designed to distract everyone else involved from battles they should be waging against Trump himself. Provoke war on the horizontal axis and you can obscure your own insatiable vertical extraction of goods and services that is decimating every one of the battling groups.

The Massapequa fight is not one that any Native American instigated. The interest of Native Americans in the Massapequa controversy is in a real but largely abstract matter of principle. The question for them is a general one—who gets to decide how their history is used—not whether to stamp out a specific racist misuse such as the NFL’s Washington “Redskins” brand or the Cleveland “Indians” demented trademark, Chief Wahoo.

Unless things have changed since my boyhood, depictions of Native Americans in Massapequa may be clumsy, but they aren’t disrespectful. The Chief himself is a dignified (if slightly grumpy) character. He appears only as an image; there is no capering, costumed mascot. As kids we were fed a history of the indigenous people that was an admiring story of endurance, inventiveness, and adaptation in a challenging coastal environment. We were dragged periodically to the Tackapausha museum on the Massapequa/Seaford border to marvel at arrowheads, flints, moccasins, and wampum. It all amounted to an acknowledgement of the fact that there had been someone living there before we whites arrived: a reminder of Nick Carraway’s “old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.”

Obviously, there is always room for improvement, and the local school board should be having horizontal discussions with representatives of Native American communities. This won’t be easy. For one thing, there are hardly any Native Americans living in Massapequa with whom to engage. Still, part of the central challenge lies in explaining that absence, and there is a Native American diaspora to draw on—it comes down to reaching out, horizontally, from one group to another. It might even turn out that these controversies over The Chief have provided a fulcrum for leveraging into being an educational culture that bears continuous respectful witness to the Native American experience.

But let’s remember that abetting the preservation of The Chief constitutes the least of the Trump administration’s transgressions against Native Americans. While preoccupying The New York Times with high school mascots, Trump and Elon Musk (in his DOGE incarnation) are systematically stripping out life-saving, treaty-guaranteed, federal support for native communities, leaving tribes with deep uncertainty about their health clinics, schools, police agencies and wildfire crews.

The Native Americans are incidental to this struggle—exploited as they so often are, set up to suffer collateral damage from White Mischief. They are in this mix to provide Trump with the moment to pretend that by attacking the “woke” allies of the Native Americans he is protecting the middle-class world of working white people that he, his sponsors, and his allies are working remorselessly to destroy.

Massapequa constitutes a nearly perfect microcosm of a world created by the gigantic egalitarian experiences of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War. Massapequa (and Massapequa Park) have about 50,000 residents today, in 1945, there were about 3,000. These places and the lives lived in them were, quite simply, creations of Veterans Administration mortgages, G.I. Bill educations, labor union power, services and infrastructure projects supported by high marginal tax rates, and Social Security protections for dignity in old age.

There is no point in pretending that what resulted from this is a Peaceable Kingdom of racial and ethnic harmony, but people got along. Everyone in Massapequa invokes with wry affection the nickname, “Matzho-Pizza,” that reflects one of its characteristic demographic divides. The local chapter of the Sons of Italy has offered refuge for all Columbus statues exiled from elsewhere, but the financial secretary of the Sons making the offer was named William Murphy, and everyone has a working vocabulary of at least 30 words of Yiddish and can snap out two or three Sicilian curses when the occasion so requires. The generations that emerged from this world includes an incredibly diverse roster of celebrities, wierdos, and criminals including (to name a few) Peggy Noonan, Jerry Seinfeld, Alec Baldwin (his father was my baseball coach), Christine Jorgenson, Ron Kovic, Brian Kilmeade, Joey Buttafuco, Jessica Hahn, William Gaddis, Carlo Gambino, Indiana U.S. Senator Joe Donnelly, Steve Guttenberg, Marvin Hamlisch, Brian Seltzer (The Stray Cats), Dee Snider (Twisted Sister), and Candy Darling. This—not a uniform Nordic fantasyland—is the fertile “normal” that local supporters of The Chief imagine that Trump is rushing to help them protect.

In fact, Trump is moving with frantic haste to destroy the economic pillars that made it possible in the first place and have to sustain it. With tax cuts on the wealthy and indirect tariff taxes on consumers he is extracting wealth from the middle and re-directing it towards an insatiable top. With a war on federal jobs and benefits he and Elon Musk are undermining the security of the older generation that found a place there and hopes to remain. His determined assault on scholarships, student loans, and academic institutions constitutes a war on futures.

There are Massapequas all over (OK, OK, in different forms). We have to hope that their residents don’t take the bait Trump offers here—fight with each other horizontally, and leave the vertical pillagers free to hunt. The enemy of Massapequa’s preservation and Massapequans’ futures is a vicious extractive looting of the financial props that made the place possible in the first place. Trump plays for the other team in that contest, no matter how he feels about logos. The fight the Massapequans need to have is one for them to fight together, and against that threat.

If, in the end, after a conversation, Native Americans conclude that The Massapequa Chief is disrespectful, then The Chief has to go—as much as a matter of civility as one of civil rights. There are other team names available. Speaking for myself, I would have proudly taken the court as a member of the basketball Matzho-Pizzas, although I can see that might give offense and have to be avoided too. Maybe we could adopt the name of our local billionaire and scrimmage as “The Seinfelds.” A good, if edgy, possibility might be “The Serial Killers” but I suppose we have to wait until Gilgo Beach defendant Rex Heuermann’s case is adjudicated before we can adopt that one.

But if it comes to it, I think we would all agree to invoke the Vultaggio family’s iconic hamburger place, call the teams “The All Americans,” and remember the New Deal heritage that made our world.