There are two things that OutKick founder Clay Travis knows better than most: Sports and President Donald Trump.
Those two merged when Trump, running for reelection in 2020, sought new audiences to reach, and as a sports fan and former owner of the New Jersey Generals in the short-lived United States Football League, he asked to be interviewed on OutKick the Coverage sports talk radio show.
“Trump wanted to reach nontraditional audiences with his message, especially persuadable men. He knew my audience was filled with diehard sports fans who would also, likely, be open to hearing from him,” Travis wrote in his newly released book Balls: How Trump, Young Men, and Sports Saved America.
Since then, he’s interviewed Trump 10 more times, attended events with the president, and now, in his book about woke sports and who he calls the “sports fan-in-chief,” he revealed what he believes is the president’s secret to political success and legacy building.
Reflecting on Trump’s 2024 comeback against Vice President Kamala Harris, Travis wrote about Trump’s worry-free style and aggressiveness, seen most publicly when, after being shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, he rose with a fist to yell “fight, fight, fight.”
Said Travis in his book published by Hachette Book Group, “Trump didn’t just win the election; he moved all 50 states redder, from New York to California, Florida to Washington, and all points in between. How did he do it? When it got right down to it, Trump had balls. And the Democrats didn’t.”
Travis, who anchors OutKick, now owned by Fox, and co-hosts the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, said the assassination attempt and Trump’s genuine ties to sports were all that many men needed to see, and why he did so well among men in the election.
“If it had happened in a movie, none of us would have believed it was real,” he told Washington Secrets of the shooting.
“The election was effectively over then, and I think that reaction will become more legendary as the passions of the present political world fade. And I just think it’s going to live on in a way that is iconic on a level that I’m not sure most people even recognize yet,” he added.
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Balls is also a comprehensive look at woke sports and how Travis and OutKick helped to lead the pushback on the transgender movement and other liberal influences that have hurt many brands, including the NBA and Bud Light.
But for Washington Secrets, his insight into Trump is the most interesting, especially his views on the president’s legacy.
For example, working in the media where legacy outlets continue to attack the president, Travis said that those platforms will eagerly report that Tuesday’s elections have hurt Trump and his chances of a successful midterm election result.
And after those congressional elections in 2026, he predicted that the same media critics would pivot to casting doubt on Trump’s legacy and influence.
“The minute that the midterms are over, you are going to see a pivot that’s going to make your head spin from ‘Trump is Hitler’ to Trump is the greatest Republican presidential force of any of our lives, and Republicans are never going to be able to replicate his ability to turn out voters,” Travis said.
But, he added, Trump “is discussing” a “unity ticket” of Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in hopes of beating a potential leftist ticket of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“Everybody will be lining up, and we’ll see just how many people are going to contest the Republican nomination, and to what extent the Trump popularity is going to carry JD, who obviously will be running, and Marco,” said Travis.
Beyond 2028, though, he believes Trump’s legacy will have legs far into the future, as has former President Ronald Reagan, whose two terms influenced a generation of high school and college students to become conservatives.
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Trump may have even more going for him, said Travis, citing the president’s overwhelming influence in politics since 2015 and additionally his ties to sports and players.
“There was an article out recently that I was reading that said most kids become huge sports fans between the age of eight and 12, and that era of their life imprints on them far more significantly than later in life. In other words, if you haven’t become a big sports fan between eight and 12, you might in the future, become a big sports fan, but that’s the age when really it happens for most people, and that’s when the allegiances are cast. And, you know, think about the number of kids out there in the same way I was thinking about it in the context of the Trump presidency, and certainly my boys overlap that in some way as well. But that’s what I’ve seen with their own fandom, is that that’s a function of kind of how all that is going,” he told Secrets.
