It’s the craze that spread from NFL fields to the UFC octagon and, in football, from the US national team to Barnsley.

An endearing imitation of Donald Trump‘s interpretation of a YMCA dance adopted from the rally stages.

Christian Pulisic – American soccer’s poster boy – called it “fun” rather than political, after adopting the alternate fist-pumping move to celebrate scoring following the presidential election in November.

But its popularity signals that associating with the returning president is now far from taboo in the sports world, after the snubs of the first term.

That will be welcome news for President Trump as sport is far from a sideshow this time around and instead, central to his agenda and projection on the world stage.

There was a constant campaign pledge to ban transgender athletes from single-gender sport – reasserted in the splendour of an inauguration ball on Monday night.

The run-up to the election also saw Trump use mixed martial arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship as a route to attracting male voters. And World Wrestling Entertainment’s former boss even has the education brief in his cabinet.

Beyond the political, sport has a personal appeal to Trump too.

Golf has never just been a respite from politics or business, but a lucrative venture if he keeps Saudi Arabia sweet – with the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund bringing its breakaway series to his courses.

Then there’s the prestige of being in office to host the men’s World Cup and Summer Olympics.

For once, Trump could see the benefit of losing in 2020 – enabling him to be a rare leader of a nation during the two biggest sporting shows on the planet – while still making false claims at the Capitol this week about that “rigged” election.

When the US hosted the 1994 World Cup, Alexi Lalas was the icon of the national team with his distinctive unruly red hair and beard.

Early to join the MAGA movement, he has seen a shift from those who once approached him in “hushed tones” while travelling the country.

“I think that many people got to a point where they were sick and tired of hiding what they felt was common sense,” Lalas told Sky News.

“It made me sad that they felt the pressure and that they were ultimately scared to express that.”

There can be a backlash from those not expecting such a strident right-leaning approach from the player they might remember as a “90s grunge hippie type”.

“I have lost friends because of it,” said the Fox Sports commentator who was in Washington for the presidential parties. “There are people that view me differently than they did before because now they know my political affiliation.

“I’m not going to apologise for it. I believe that I’m a good person, that I want good things.”

The World Cup will be unprecedented. Not just being the largest with 48 teams, but bringing an influx of millions of sports fans, unlike anything seen in the country before.

“[Trump] recognises the power and the draw of sports and being associated with that,” Lalas said.

How will pledges to FIFA to allow ticket-holding fans entry collide with a clampdown on immigration? An early test will be when the new men’s Club World Cup is used as a test event this summer.

Inside Trump’s alliance with FIFA boss Infantino

It’s a platform not just for the players, but for the Trump-Gianni Infantino alliance to dominate.

Few have ingratiated themselves with Trump like the FIFA leader. Public displays of loyalty through the scandals of the first term were rewarded with a prime spot at the inauguration, just behind the president and his predecessors on Monday.

The boss of a global football governing body that promotes non-discrimination listened to – but not always obviously applauding – an address that vowed to eliminate diversity and inclusion programmes, and only recognise male and female genders.

Read more:
List of executive orders signed by Trump
President rebuked by bishop

This is a country with plans to bid again for the Women’s World Cup, which for the first time in 2023 featured a transgender and non-binary player – Canada’s Quinn.

Shutting trans women out of women’s sport was on Trump’s mind before, and after, taking the oath of office. His go-to topic for rally speeches is now high on the Oval Office agenda.

The vow to protect the fairness of women’s sport is perhaps persuading female athletes with rival loyalties to at least consider backing the Republican.

“This was a very decisive issue for many women like me, who consider themselves largely Democrat and have been their entire lives,” cyclist Evie Edwards, part of the ICONS advocacy group, told Sky News.

“It’s been very, very difficult over the last five years to get voices heard.

“The fact that they’re just now being heard, the fact that President Trump announced this on day one in office, is extremely encouraging for the majority of us.

“Regardless, if your party affiliation is Republican or Democrat, it’s an extremely important, necessary step.”

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How do trans athletes feel about Trump?

To the marginalised trans athlete community, facing discrimination in wider society, there is a feeling of being targeted for political gain and excluded from the sports they love.

Trans male wrestler Mack Beggs is troubled by the constant misgendering of Paris 2024 women’s boxing champion Imane Khelif by Trump, in campaign speeches based on disputed gender eligibility tests on the Algerian.

“Overall [Trump is] going to use anything that he can to exploit any little thing when it comes to those major events,” Beggs told Sky News. “I think that using Imane as a pawn and a tool in order to elevate that conversation and fan irrational fear of trans athletes being in sports is kind of a little pathetic.”

And it is about more than just having the chance to compete.

“The majority of my community is scared because it’s not just about the sports,” said Beggs, who still dreams of fighting one day in the Trump-loving UFC. “It’s about overall our rights being taken away as a whole.

“We start with sports and that’s going to go on to the medical bills as well.”

And Trump has rapidly shut down government accessibility initiatives – contradicting the societal change promoted by the Paralympics which come to LA in 2028.

But will anyone in sport stand up to Trump if inflammatory rhetoric and meddling risks overshadowing sports? Trump called Paris 2024 a “disgrace” over the opening ceremony depiction of the Last Supper, fuelling an Olympic culture war.

Sebastian Coe could be running the Olympics by the time of Los Angeles 2028 if he wins the IOC presidential election in March.

“I’m not entirely unused to dealing with politicians,” Lord Coe, a former Conservative MP, told Sky News. “I understand the language. I understand the pressures. It’s a landscape I’m comfortable in. But sport has to maintain its independence and its autonomy.”

In a Trump world that is not always possible – as the campaign trail and his first two days in office have made clear. And not every sports leader wants to maintain their independence, seduced by the entry into the orbit of real global power.

There’s a chart that’s been doing the rounds in recent weeks – American businessman Marc Andreessen tweeted it, and then it was reposted by Donald Trump himself.

The chart is pretty simple: it shows the proportion of American federal government revenues coming from tariffs, going all the way back to the early days of American independence.

And to glance at, it tells a compelling story. For nearly all of the 19th century, tariffs imposed on goods imported into America provided more than half the government’s revenues.

The president’s interpretation was as follows: “The tariffs, and tariffs alone, created this vast wealth for our country. Then we switched over to income tax. We were never so wealthy as during this period. Tariffs will pay off our debt and, MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN!”

Money blog: New tax rises now ‘a good bet’ for 2025

The first half of his post is quite true. America’s federal economy was largely built on revenues from tariffs. When Alexander Hamilton was designing much of the federal infrastructure, not to mention paying the debts from the War of Independence, he chose to fund it with tariffs and duties on goods imported to the country.

Revenue wasn’t the only reason for the tariffs. They were there, too, to protect the country’s nascent industries. But those tariffs were the main source of income for a long time. What changed? Well, from the late 19th century onwards, the size of the American state expanded. Paying for the Civil War was expensive; funding a growing welfare state and national infrastructure in the following decades likewise.

But tariffs can only go so far. There is only so high one can lift these fees before they begin to stifle activity, making goods so expensive to import that domestic consumers face economic damage. That brings us back to the data in the chart approvingly cited by the president.

Take the same numbers and divide them by GDP – the total size of the US economy – another way of skinning it (indeed, the way you’d normally look at long-run historical figures like this). Now everything looks somewhat different. You can see that at no point in American history – even in those early days when tariffs were far higher than today and a far more important source of revenues – did the total amount they raised exceed 6% of gross domestic product. This is not accidental.

It was because tariffs couldn’t raise enough to finance the Federal administration that successive administrations began to collect other taxes on American citizens rather than imports, starting with excise taxes and income taxes in the Civil War. Those taxes, collected by the Internal Revenue Service, ballooned in the following decades – as did the size of the state.

Today the American federal budget is orders of magnitude bigger than two centuries ago (albeit still much smaller than those you find in Europe). The new administration has made it an explicit policy to cut back on waste, led in part by Elon Musk and his DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency, whose name was seemingly chosen in order to fulfil Mr Musk’s ambition to turn everything into a meme). But there are limits to how far one can cut: a superpower with a large military, vast infrastructure networks such as road and rail, not to mention public health and education systems, does not come for free.

Even so, raising revenue is just one purpose of tariffs. They can also be used as a negotiating tool with other countries (indeed, this might well be their main function in the hands of Mr Trump). They can be used to protect domestic industries against competition.

Whatever the purpose, after decades of relatively free trade around much of the world – most notably America itself – we are living now in an era where tariffs are back. And this story has only just begun.

The creator of a dark web market that sold illegal drugs, stolen passports and hacking equipment using Bitcoin has been pardoned by President Donald Trump.

Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole, in 2015 in connection with his ownership and operation of the hidden website. The then-26-year-old was also ordered to forfeit $183.9m (£120.2m).

“Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people,” said Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York said at the time of his incarceration.

What was Silk Road?

According to documents presented at his trial, Ulbricht created Silk Road in January 2011 and owned and operated the underground website until it was shut down by the police in October 2013.

Silk Road took its name from a network of historic trading routes that were active in the second century.

It emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet, where a variety of illegal drugs were bought and sold.

Silk Road was used by thousands of drug dealers, distributing hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs to more than 100,000 buyers, totaling more than $200m (£131m). Ulbricht was accused of making more than $13m (£10.53m) in commission.

Ulbricht was accused of using a Bitcoin-based payment system to facilitate illegal activity on the site, and he used a special network to conceal the identities and locations of its users.

Read more: How users accessed Silk Road

The FBI said the site had just under a million registered users, but it’s not clear how many of those were active, or which country they were in.

Murder for hire and six deaths

Prosecutors also claimed Ulbricht was willing to use violence to protect his criminal enterprise.

They said he solicited six murders-for-hire – including one against a former employee – although there was no evidence any of these actually took place and Ulbricht was never tried for them.

The former employee has also voiced support for the campaign to free Ulbricht, and said he did not believe he was dangerous.

Six deaths were connected to drugs sold on the site. Among them, was a 27-year-old Microsoft employee who was found unresponsive in front of his computer, which was logged into Silk Road. He had died of a heroin and prescription drug overdose.

Two sixteen-year-old boys, one from Australia and one from California, both died from taking 25i-NBOMe, a powerful synthetic drug designed to mimic LSD (and commonly referred to as “N-Bomb”) that they had bought on the site.

Read more: Seized Silk Road Bitcoins auctioned by US

Caught by a Gmail account

It was a painstaking process to identify the man behind Silk Road, known online as Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), a reference to a character in the 1987 film The Princess Bride.

It began with a post made on a web forum where users discussed magic mushrooms. A user nicknamed Altoid started publicising the site, linking off to its dark web location.

Altoid then appeared on another site, discussing virtual currency. In a post asking for an IT expert with a knowledge of Bitcoin, he asked people to contact him via rossulbricht@gmail.com.

This email address was the breakthrough that ultimately linked Ulbricht to Silk Road.

An undercover agent linked this address to a series of social networks, including a YouTube account, which had favourited several clips from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an Austrian school of economics. DPR would later make several references to the institute on Silk Road discussion forums.

A further lead came in the form of a routine border check of a package from Canada that contained several forged documents, all with Ulbricht’s photo, being delivered to his flat share in San Francisco.

Another slip-up came when Ulbright posted on a question-and-answer site for programmers, asking questions about an intricate code that later become part of the source code for Silk Road. He accidentally identified himself as Ross Ulbricht, before quickly correcting it.

Life in prison

Ulbricht spoke after sentencing expressing remorse for what he had done.

“I’ve essentially ruined my life and broken the hearts of every member of my family and my closest friends,” he said. He walked out of the courtroom carrying with him photographs of those who died as a result of drugs purchased on his website.

Now aged 39, he most recently wrote to President Joe Biden in October 2022, pleading for release.

“Over countless hours, I have searched my soul and examined the misguided decisions I made when I was younger,” he wrote.

“I have dug deep and made a sincere effort to not just change what I do, but who I am. I am no longer the type of man who could break the law and let down so many.”

He said he had worked with prisoners to overcome addictions and come to understand “the damage I caused by helping promote drugs”.

He said he longed to have a future once more and hoped to start a family with his fiance, who “stood by me for all these years”.

Freedom

On the second day of his presidency, Mr Trump said he had called Ulbricht’s mother to let her know “it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son”.

He called those who had convicted Ulbricht “scum”, citing his own convictions: “[They] were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”

The ‘Free Ross’ X account posted an image of Ulbricht leaving prison a short while later.