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Pat Leonard: Jaxson Dart's Donald Trump misstep makes John Harbaugh's job harder

Pat Leonard, New York Daily News on

Published in Football

NEW YORK — John Harbaugh said his Giants would be all about football.

Four months into his tenure as head coach, Harbaugh is finding out just how difficult it will be to make that a reality.

The team he inherited is rife with immaturity and entitlement. It is lacking in accountability, perspective and any semblance of a winning mentality.

The Giants under Joe Schoen crown themselves annually as the winners of every offseason, only to win an average of 5.5 games the past four years.

Why wouldn’t quarterback Jaxson Dart strut around in a custom suit at the Kentucky Derby for the gossip pages after winning four games his rookie season, when his GM prances around to national reporters talking about “wins” in March and April after finishing dead last in the NFC East?

Why would Dart think there was anything wrong with introducing Donald Trump on stage at a rally when the Giants have protected Jeffrey Epstein friend Steve Tisch at every turn of the chairman’s scandal?

The Giants also have leaned heavily into Dart’s rising star and fame, feeding the desperate and rabid fan base with the hope Dart’s rookie flashes represents. Not to mention that the “culture” created by Schoen and former coach Brian Daboll is one that gave a ton of leeway to their preferred players, most notably Dart, Malik Nabers and Abdul Carter.

Dart’s choice to align himself with Trump so strongly and publicly, regardless, was a huge mistake.

At some point in our nation’s discourse, the cruelty, racism, prejudice, violence, inhumanity, corruption and criminal behavior performed and encouraged by this president became discussed as one legitimate perspective in a two-sided debate.

But history books one day will frame Trump’s evil properly in the context of civilization. And Dart just put his face on one of the pages of those chapters.

Carter seemed to be calling out his quarterback’s decision to take a stand in such a polarizing and controversial landscape.

The Giants need to get better at football. Dart’s actions will impede that. He has invited a circus, a toxicity and radical sections of society into the Giants’ orbit.

The team’s biggest issues will grow into outsized proportions and appear on television shows where the Mara family would prefer never to see their logo gracing the screen. Just imagine which outlets will be requesting credentials now to Harbaugh’s and Dart’s press conferences? Think of the crowd, the questions, the additional messaging that could threaten to fracture this locker room.

Ideally, Carter wouldn’t have aired his disagreement with his teammate publicly. But standing for people who know the difference between right and wrong is a reflection of maturity, not immaturity. Carter spoke up in the face of Dart flaunting what Trump represents. Good for him.

That appeared to be the gist of what Carter was saying: What are we doing? Actions have consequences. This is going to invite a lot that we don’t want around us.

 

Harbaugh is a Trump supporter, as well, so it will be interesting to monitor how his relationships evolve with players in the locker room as he works to put out this fire and keep the team together.

But the Giants sent a clear message that they are not thrilled with Dart’s actions, either. They leaked to team-friendly media that Dart had not approached the team about Trump’s invitation and that they were not thrilled about the quarterback’s decision to do a “Go Big Blue” chant at the rally.

So the team effectively threw Dart out onto an island for making the ill-advised decision.

This was reminiscent of last season’s leak from the Giants building that Dart — a draft pick driven by Daboll — was being too reckless with his body. So this is twice in a year now that the Giants’ brass has publicly questioned Dart’s decision making and begun distancing themselves from him just in case.

Still, the Giants’ culture of “accountability” is enough to give Dart more whiplash.

When Dart makes a bad decision as a player, he gets called out for it. When Schoen drafts numerous players who make bad decisions that put the team in a bad light — and when his best player, Dexter Lawrence, forces a trade out of town — he gets a contract extension.

That’s why the Giants grew desperate enough to hire Harbaugh in the first place, though, remember? This franchise’s leadership is lost. Their priorities are out of order. They point fingers outward, not inward.

Their GM is better at going on camera and talking about how good a job the Giants are doing than at his actual job of making the Giants good.

So it’s no surprise that his quarterback craves the spotlight, feels untouchable and made an ill-advised personal decision without fully evaluating the cost on his team.

Harbaugh now is charged with turning around this oil tanker of dysfunction, but thanks to Dart’s decision, the media microscope will be trained even more acutely on the Giants’ every move on political, football and personal levels.

This is also not Baltimore. This is New York. Everything Harbaugh is used to hearing and reading will be magnified. It will be louder. And it will not be something that the head coach can control.

The only thing that should matter for the Giants and Harbaugh, ultimately, is how they play and whether they win on the football field this fall.

There are two major problems with that, though: The Giants aren’t very good at football and haven’t been for a very long time.

And as Dart reminded everyone, the Giants don’t have enough practice making football their priority in the first place.


©2026 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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