Trump Tennis: How One Man’s Forehand Became a Global Rorschach Test
PARIS—On the red-clay courts of Roland-Garros this week, a curious sideshow has been unfolding next to the strawberries-and-cream set: Donald Trump Tennis, an unofficial, unsanctioned, yet oddly magnetic phenomenon that began when the former U.S. president’s name was spotted on the reservation sheet of an indoor court in Palm Beach and then ricocheted across continents faster than a Novak Djokovic return. Within 48 hours, #TrumpTennis was trending from Manila to Marrakesh, bookmakers in London were posting odds on whether he would double-fault on match point, and Chinese state television aired a three-minute segment titled “The Imperialist Lob: Decoding American Decadence.” Somewhere in Serbia, a meme account Photoshopped Trump’s hair onto Iga Świątek’s forehand follow-through. It looked disturbingly aerodynamic.
The spectacle is, of course, less about tennis than about the gravitational pull of an ex-president who treats every open surface—be it a debate stage, a social media feed, or a tennis court—as a potential campaign rally. But because the planet’s attention economy has already been stretched thinner than the gut of a pre-war Dunlop, “Donald Trump Tennis” has become a Rorschach test for everyone’s geopolitical anxieties. Europeans see it as proof that the United States, having exported both McDonald’s and McFreedom, is now exporting McMonarchy. Africans watch highlight clips between power outages and wonder if the next IMF restructuring package will include a clause about maintaining proper net height. Australians treat it like their own bushfire season: horrific, mesmerizing, and safely on the other side of the ocean—until the smoke reaches Sydney.
What the cameras don’t show is the small army of courtiers orbiting the court. There’s a former Slovenian model turned serve-speed analyst, a Saudi golf envoy calculating how many LIV tournaments equal one Grand Slam, and a rotating cast of Japanese camera crews who have mistaken the whole affair for an avant-garde gameshow. The locker room smells faintly of bronzer and litigation. A Russian oligarch’s nephew lingers outside with two ball kids he appears to have rented by the hour. Everyone agrees the new balls are “American-made,” a phrase that now strikes even the Americans as vaguely threatening.
Bookies at Paddy Power have framed the existential prop bet of our age: “Will the match end before NATO does?” Meanwhile, the International Tennis Federation has issued a sternly worded statement reminding member nations that “tennis remains a gentleperson’s game founded on principles of sportsmanship and not, repeat not, a venue for announcing tariff schedules.” The warning arrived too late; Trump has already requested that each serve be preceded by a brief tariff negotiation with the opposing baseline.
The broader significance—assuming we still believe in such quaint concepts—lies in how effortlessly sport and politics now swap costumes. When the world grows weary of actual diplomacy, we hold a mirror up to the UN General Assembly and find it playing mixed doubles. The court becomes a green rectangle of soft power where lobs are metaphors and line judges double as fact-checkers. Every fault is an international incident; every let cord, a referendum. Climate change melts the Arctic, but the crowd only gasps when the ball boy slips on a bead of presidential sweat.
And yet, beneath the cynicism lurks a morbid curiosity: maybe the only arena still capable of hosting civilizational collapse is one with a net in the middle. The scoreboard reads Love-Love, a cruel joke about the state of the world. We watch because, for once, the stakes are refreshingly trivial: just a game, just a man, just planet Earth tuning in for the next serve. If the ball goes out, we shout. If it clips the tape, we hold our breath. And if it lands fair, we pretend—only until the next rally—that the rules still apply.
