Donald Trump has never been shy about his love of football.
So when four Baltimore Ravens showed up in suits to hear him speak, he pulled them right into the spotlight.
What one Raven filmed from inside the motorcade spread like wildfire. The reaction from critics was as predictable as sunrise.
Four Ravens traded a day off for a front-row seat
President Donald Trump traveled to Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point, Maryland, on October 6, 2026, to unveil one of the largest defense manufacturing projects the Baltimore area has seen in generations.
Four members of the hometown team decided they wanted to be there for it. Four-time Pro Bowl cornerback Marlon Humphrey came with kicker Tyler Loop, long snapper Nick Moore, and punter Ryan Eckley, according to OutKick. All four gave up a day off to put on suits and sit in the audience.
Trump met the players before he took the stage. Then he made sure everybody else in the room knew they were there.
“Could you stand up?” Trump asked. “You guys are where are you? Big stars. Where are you guys? There they are. Good looking guys.”
He kept going. “What a team you have this year,” Trump said. “What a great team.”
The Ravens sat at 3-1 at the time and led the AFC North.
And for reasons nobody quite explained, the President zeroed in on Moore. He’s the oldest of the four and plays the kind of position most fans never think about unless a snap sails over the punter’s head.
“I said, tell me, are you a coach? They said, ‘No, he’s a snapper,'” Trump recalled. “You know, nowadays, those long snappers are very valuable. It’s an amazing job you do with that. And he’s got an unblemished record.”
Trump also teased Moore about the gray creeping into his hair, joking that teams don’t mind because they only need him for one play. Any long snapper who has toiled in obscurity for years had to enjoy that.
One seat behind the President and a million views
Then came the part nobody saw coming. At least a couple of the players climbed into the presidential motorcade and rode along as Trump toured the site, OutKick reported.
Humphrey grabbed the seat directly behind the President. He pulled out his phone and recorded Trump and Moore swapping stories about a Super Bowl from years back.
Humphrey posted the clip on X. Within hours it blew past one million views.
But the internet never lets a nice moment stay nice for long. OutKick’s Armando Salguero noted that a big chunk of the conversation in the replies turned to, of all things, racism. Salguero decided the comments weren’t worth the energy of typing out. Hard to argue with him.
And anybody surprised by Humphrey’s enthusiasm hasn’t been paying attention. After the July 2024 attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, Humphrey wrote that “Trump took a bullet for America,” according to The Mirror. He later challenged the President to a round of golf in Palm Beach with a simple “Let’s golf!”
So a player who has backed Trump in public for years took a ride with him and shared the video. That’s not exactly a plot twist.
The quarterback still got a message
Lamar Jackson, the team’s biggest star, missed the event. Jackson is nursing an ankle injury, and his status for the Ravens’ upcoming matchup with the Atlanta Falcons remained uncertain, according to OutKick.
But Trump made sure Jackson heard from him anyway.
“Say hello to your quarterback,” Trump told the players. “He’s a little bit injured. And tell him I know his mother. I met his mother a few times in Palm Beach. And she’s a fantastic, beautiful woman. Give him my regards. He is some player.”
The other Moore stayed home
Funny thing about the guest list. One Moore got a personal shoutout from the President. Another Moore didn’t show up at all.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, said at his gubernatorial debate that he would skip the announcement because the White House barred him from speaking, the Maryland Daily Record reported.
The White House fired right back. “It’s unfortunate that the Governor is now making a multi-billion-dollar announcement about himself by throwing a tantrum over an announcement that will bring sorely needed jobs back to his state thanks to President Trump,” the White House said, according to The Hill.
Moore’s office insisted the governor was proud to welcome Anduril and the jobs coming with it. Still, the long snapper landed a better seat than the governor of the state.
What Anduril plans to build at Sparrows Point
The reason everybody showed up was the money. Anduril Industries plans to spend $3.7 billion of its own capital on a shipyard called Arsenal-2, and the Navy awarded the company a separate $2.9 billion contract, putting the total north of $6 billion, The Washington Times reported.
Anduril says the project will create 3,100 direct jobs, support more than 14,000 indirect jobs, and pump $2 billion a year into the Maryland economy, according to WMAR 2 News. Maryland and Baltimore County will match up to 13% of the company’s investment through incentive programs, the Daily Record reported.
Arsenal-2 will produce components for Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines, starting with torpedo tubes, which an administration official identified as one of the parts holding up production, per WMAR.
That bottleneck is real. Shipyards currently deliver roughly 1.3 Virginia-class boats a year, well short of the Navy’s goal of two, and the Navy doesn’t expect to hit that pace until around 2032, Fox News reported.
Trump didn’t undersell it. Since World War II, he said, “there’s been nothing like what we are doing today.”
There are hurdles ahead. Anduril expects the Baltimore facility to start operations around 2030, and the company acknowledged it still has to prove it can meet the strict certification and safety standards that govern nuclear submarine work before it graduates to larger sections of the boats, according to Fox News.
A steel town gets a second shot
Sparrows Point isn’t just any patch of waterfront. Steelmaking started there in 1898. By 1953 the site ranked as the largest iron producer on the planet, and by 1958 it was the biggest steelmaking facility in the country, according to the Maryland Department of Transportation.
Then the long slide came. Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and the mill finally went dark in June 2012.
Plenty of working families in Baltimore County watched that happen in real time. Decades of trade deals told them the jobs were never coming back and that cheaper overseas labor was simply the price of progress.
But the math has changed. Communist China now runs a shipbuilding machine that dwarfs anything in the West, and Fox News noted the submarine push comes as the US struggles to keep pace with Beijing’s capacity. An America First manufacturing policy treats that gap as a national security problem, not a line item.
And that’s the part of the day the critics in Humphrey’s replies skipped right over. Four football players showed up to watch a President promise thousands of jobs to the same city they play for every week. Somehow the conversation online drifted to race instead of rivets.
Maybe that says less about the players than about the people who can’t stand seeing an athlete smile next to Trump. Athletes who bash the President tend to get magazine covers. The ones who ride along with him get lectures.
Whether Arsenal-2 delivers everything Anduril promises is a question the next few years will answer. Construction timelines slip. Defense contracts get messy.
But one thing already looks settled. Trump wants the industrial heartland building things again, and he’s happy to bring a few Baltimore Ravens along for the ride. The Ravens locker room will certainly have plenty to talk about when the players get back to work.
“Ravens players ride with President Trump in motorcade, get shoutout during speech at Baltimore shipyard event,” OutKick
“‘A tremendous victory’: Trump visits Baltimore County to announce new $3.7B shipyard plans,” WMAR 2 News
“Trump announces $6.6B initiative to build submarine parts at Baltimore shipyard,” The Washington Times
“Trump to announce creation of Sparrows Point submarine facility,” Maryland Daily Record
“Maryland governor, White House spar over $3.7B submarine investment event,” The Hill
“Trump turns to emerging tech giant in multi-billion bid to ramp up US submarine production,” Fox News
“NFL star challenges Donald Trump to round of golf in his own backyard,” The Mirror (as cited by AOL)
“SFAC Slides October 2023,” Maryland Department of Transportation