‘DC’s Not Making Money Here, DC Is Paying Billions’: CounterSpin interview with Pete Tucker on DC stadium deal 

 

Janine Jackson interviewed reporter Pete Tucker about the DC stadium deal for the August 8, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

 

Janine Jackson: As we record on August 4, longtime friend of FAIR and editor at FieldOfSchemes.com Neil deMause reports that the Washington, DC, City Council has voted, as expected, to approve the agreement for a new stadium for NFL team the Washington Commanders.

Yes, this is the deal that Donald Trump weirdly, though not relatively that weird for him, declared he would somehow forbid if the team didn’t change its name back to the Redskins. Well, that doesn’t seem to be happening, but that doesn’t mean typical power dynamics are not at work in securing vast and under-explored public outlays, based on vast and under-explored promises of public gain.

Does a Washington Post editorial opposing the deal mean that the tide is shifting against these sort of subsidies? Or, better said, what would actual public-serving news media, in the face of these “we are a for-profit company, give us your public dollars” deals, look like?

Pete Tucker is a DC area journalist who writes frequently for FAIR, as well as at his own Substack. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Pete Tucker.

Pete Tucker: Thanks so much, Janine.

JJ: Can you tell us, first, about the deal that appears to have been struck? It looks like the Commanders’ owner, Josh Harris, is going to get more than a billion dollars in cash, plus more than $5 billion in free rent and tax breaks. Maybe I am too ignorant to see why this is a special “get” that should make DC taxpayers proud. What happened here with this deal?

PT: First, Janine, I would say that the way the deal is described is that more than a billion tax dollars have been used, I’m glad you mentioned Neil deMause’s Field of Schemes; it’s his website for folks who are dealing with stadium fights, and will be in the near future. It’s a highly readable, excellent breakdown.

And he is one of the few who has relied on economists to look at the deal more in detail. And he’s come up with $6.6 billion, which is an awful lot larger than the mere “more than $1 billion,” which is how the Washington Post is describing this deal.

So, for starters, this is a media story, in the sense that it’s the local publication, and there’s no—even in the sorry state that the Washington Post is, where people are fleeing in droves; there’s real turmoil there—even amid that, the Washington Post is still the big game in town. And at the 11th hour, it did write an editorial in which it said this was corporate welfare, but that was after it backed the deal with its reporting, crucially putting out a poll saying that the majority of residents support this deal, 55%.

But if you look at the poll, it was for an $850 million deal, and you had the mayor saying, “Oh, and we’re gonna make all this money back.” When you look at what Field of Schemes and others have put forward, DC’s not making money here, DC is paying billions to forfeit billions in the future. And we’re doing it for a billionaire, Josh Harris, co-founder of Apollo Management.

And what is so frustrating is that this is being done by an all-Democratic city council and mayor. You know, the Democratic Party is in crisis right now. It is at the lowest point that it’s been in 35 years. And there’s no evidence that the party actually wants to stop and assess where it is. But, my gosh, this certainly presents a good case study.

Democrats are in control here locally, and they have the ability to not be an opposition party, but to set the terms. And, you know, a block and a half away, at Pennsylvania Avenue, President Trump has funded this Big Beautiful Bill, which puts tax breaks that disproportionately go to the wealthy. And he’s funded that in no small part by taking healthcare, in the form of Medicaid, from millions. And Democrats are rightly outraged at that.

And then a block and a half away, at the John A. Wilson building, what is Mayor Muriel Bowser doing, and the DC Council, led by chairman Phil Mendelson, all Democrats? They are taking healthcare, Medicaid, away from thousands, tens of thousands, in order to free up money in a budget that devotes huge amounts to building a stadium for a billionaire.

And the media coverage has been woeful. The opposition party has been, it seems like, more copying what Trump is doing. And, lastly, I would say the media coverage also could say, OK, you want to say “more than a billion”? Or you want to get more into the weeds, and say more like $6.6 billion? But whatever it is, all of these dollars are going to a stadium, as opposed to after-school programs, as opposed to shoring up an already hurt safety net. And that also has been left out of the coverage. And I think if you had an honest poll that did a full accounting for the costs, and these dollars are precious and could be used in other ways, I think you’d have a very different response from District residents.

JJ: Absolutely. And it involves—I mean, maybe I always look at media, because I’m a media critic—but the failure of journalists to connect those dots, as you say, that are just a couple of blocks apart from one another, I do think impedes public understanding.

And another thing is, if you oppose the stadium, and you also don’t like slurs against Native Americans, well then, here’s this Politico piece that wants you to know that you are part of the “culture-war intrusion that could upend the deal by prompting a distracting debate.”

So it’s as if there’s two shiny objects: Trump is a racist who wants people to think about something other than whatever horrific thing he’s just done. And then there are leftists or progressives who care about racist icons and trademarks, and, apparently confusingly, also care about the draining of public coffers for profiteering corporations. And it’s as though it’s too confusing a story for a reporter to do. And I guess I have a particular resentment for the idea of journalists who pretend they can’t parse out the way that you can not like the Redskins as a name, and not like Trump, and be opposed to a stadium deal.

PT: Yeah. And if you would’ve divided it into good guys and bad guys, where would Josh Harris fit in this?  You know, I have read countless stories about this deal, but you had to go back to a much earlier article that Harris is a major donor, disproportionately  Republican, and he’s tight with Trump. In fact, Trump wanted to name him his OMB director in his first term. And Harris’s firm, Apollo, gave a way-outsized loan, as opposed to their normal loan, to Jared Kushner. So he was in and out of the White House before, and indeed, he had a press conference with Trump and Muriel Bowser and Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, about, I think, draft day being in DC, but also talking about the stadium deal.

So if you’re going to bring Trump into the equation, fine. You got to have Josh Harris next to him. They’re friends. That’s what Trump said. Trump wanted him as his OMB director.

It’s amazing how, to get this deal through, suddenly something so basic as their longstanding relationship just goes completely unmentioned. The progressive side, somehow, is to call this the Commanders, not the Redskins, and get this deal done. And where is the opposition party? You know, giving billions to billionaires is, I thought, kind of the Republican thing. And that’s just what the Democrats are doing here in DC.

JJ: To bring it back finally, to journalists, because I have such a gripe on this coverage, with the coverage of the promises, which is copious. We hear what they say they’re going to do, what they say, and then years later, whether that happens, coverage of outcomes, hmm. Not a thing. Like whether it happens or whether it doesn’t, this promise of like, it’s going to bring all these benefits to the community, it’s going to bring all these jobs—it just seems like that follow-up coverage doesn’t happen.

And then the next deal comes up, and we get back to the promises again. And there’s this follow-up piece that doesn’t happen. So, finally, I would just ask you, and I know it would be a long story, but what would you be looking for from local and even national journalists, when they’re talking about this kind of deal?

PT: I would ask for more skepticism. And maybe it’s that there’s a lack of expertise, although there really shouldn’t be. But that’s where Neil deMause and Field of Schemes comes in for me, which is just scathing, highly readable.

And there has been some local coverage, at sites like Greater Greater Washington, that have called this into question. Not so much City Paper, whose owner is also a minority owner of the Commanders.

So you have seen some of that, but more of that, just like, look at the numbers; even the DC council’s own budget analysis shows they would make more money, they would get more tax revenue, if they just built housing on the site. This is 180 acres along the river, the Anacostia River, it’s riverfront. It’s the last big parcel of land in the nation’s capital. It is an extraordinary development opportunity. The Commanders have said that this is their spiritual home. It’s where they used to play. It’s where the old RFK stadium is and will be taken down. I mean, just imagine someone with unlimited funds, he’s got over $10 billion, Josh Harris, that’s his net worth.

And the team said this is their spiritual home. You are in a strong bargaining position. You know, if someone came to buy your house, and they’re extremely rich and they say this is their spiritual home, you don’t then hand them bags and bags of money. And yet this is what DC is doing.

And there’s just too few journalists saying, this is not appropriate. This is not the way the government should be operating.

And I think it’s not just journalism, it’s the lack of a spine for the Democratic Party, to be like, this is not the role the government should play in our society. And then you look at why people are like, well, between Trump and these Democrats, we know what Trump thinks. He’s the unvarnished salesman of such an approach to governance.

So it’s really a failure of the media and the lack of an opposition party, and how many kids won’t get the after-school programs, and it’s on the banks of the Anacostia River, and how much could that be cleaned up? And the public good just seems to be such a thing that always gets constricted. And the public purse is just opened up for a billionaire to build a toy, a fancy stadium, in the nation’s capital. And we all should celebrate that.

JJ: I’m going to end on that appropriate note.

We’ve been speaking with reporter Pete Tucker. You can find his work on his Substack, and also some of his work on FAIR.org. Pete Tucker, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PT: My pleasure, Janine. Thanks for having me.

 

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.