Trump Announces Executive Order Protecting Army-Navy Game — and He’s Already Predicting a Lawsuit

 

President Donald Trump declared on Friday that he has “much more power” in his second term and he’ll be using that power to provide an exclusive time for the annual Army-Navy game.

Trump announced the new executive order while at the White House on Friday presenting the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy to the Navy football team. The president said his executive order will ban other football games from being broadcast while the Army-Navy game is going on.

He said:

I have much more power in my second term… I’m going to sign an executive order to ensure that the second Saturday in December, is preserved exclusively — nobody is playing football, not Ohio State against Notre Dame, not LSU against Alabama — nobody is going to play football for four hours during that very special time of the year in December. It’s preserved forever for the Army-Navy game. If you don’t want to watch football, you don’t have to. But if you want to watch football, you are only watching one game. You are not watching 19 different games.

Trump said the “college playoff expansion” has “encroached” on the Army-Navy game timeslot.

“First term, I don’t know if I could have gotten away with this,” the president joked.

The Navy football team has won the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy the past two seasons.

According to the order, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and FCC Chair Brendan Carr will be in charge of the implementation of this exclusive window.

They will “coordinate with the CFP Committee, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, related organizations, other appropriate Government agencies, and the playoffs’ broadcast and media rights partners with the goal of establishing an exclusive window for the Army-Navy Game, during which no other college football game is broadcast,” the order reads.

“We’ll probably get sued at some point because we always get sued,” Trump said of the order. “But we win those suits and we’ll win this one.”

Watch above via CSPAN.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!

Tags:

Zachary Leeman covered pop culture and politics at outlets such as Breitbart, LifeZette, BizPac Review, HollywoodinToto, and others. He is the author of the novel Nigh. He joined Mediaite in 2022.