One-two shows Trump’s true colours
Feeding NFL anthem bonfire after pardoning boxing pioneer reminder of real agenda in play
On May 24, U.S. President Donald Trump summoned a star-studded group — including Canadian boxing legend Lennox Lewis — to join him and relatives of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, while Trump signed an order granting Johnson a posthumous pardon.
Never mind that hours earlier Trump, who won just eight per cent of the African-American vote in 2016, lashed out at Black NFLers, suggesting players who protest during the pre-game anthems should leave the U.S. Trump’s pardon of Johnson, whose 1913 conviction is widely accepted as racially motivated, marked a bold move on race that his predecessor Barack Obama, who declined to pardon Johnson, never made.
In erasing a racist conviction from Johnson’s record, Trump figured to shield himself from accusations he’s a white supremacist, and strengthen his strained relationship with Black citizens.
“This is a big step forward, especially for the Black community, for the simple fact that he didn’t have to do it,” WBC heavyweight champ Deontay Wilder, who attended the ceremony, told the New York Times. “Hopefully this ain’t one thing — you do one great deed, then that’s it.”
Then on Monday, Trump abruptly rescinded his White House invitation to the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles, and his explanation — that the team refused to stand with their hands over their hearts for the national anthem — dripped with insinuation that Black players protesting systemic racism lacked patriotism.
If you’re struggling to reconcile a president who pardoned Johnson with the man who labelled NFLers decrying racism “sons of bitches,” those identities coexist comfortably within Trump, who routinely uses Black athletes as props to advance various agendas.
The pattern becomes clearer when viewing the Johnson pardon alongside Trump’s friendship with rap star Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian, whose meeting with Trump led to a pardon for Alice Johnson.
The 62-year-old AfricanAmerican grandmother was imprisoned since 1996 on a non-violent conviction related to cocaine. Those moves serve the same objective for which Trump originally hired former Apprentice star Omarosa Manigault: to boost his anemic support among African-American voters while deflecting criticism from his record on race.
The Johnson pardon also confirms the widely-held conclusion that the boxer’s conviction was less about crime than about anti-Blackness, the fighter’s fame and his flouting of the racial hierarchy.
Johnson won the title in 1908, battering Canadian Tommy Burns until police intervened. The win enflamed racial tensions among white sports fans, but instead of demurring Johnson pushed boundaries further, taunting overmatched opponents and flaunting his relationships with white women. When no Great White Hope could topple Johnson, the law did. In 1913, his partnership with a white woman named Belle Schreiber triggered his prosecution and eventual conviction under the Mann Act, which outlawed transporting women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Johnson left the U.S. rather than accept the ruling, eventually negotiating a return and serving 10 months in federal prison.
This week, Trump and his legal team have contended that the president is empowered to pardon himself if special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election leads to a conviction. And Trump’s Twitter posts labelling Mueller’s investigation a “hoax” and “witch hunt” aim to craft a narrative that makes Trump and Johnson kindred spirits, undeserving victims of baseless criminal cases motivated by critics’ spite rather than a genuine desire for justice.
In the seven decades between his death and his pardon, Johnson underwent the same transformation figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali experienced. Alive, he was boundary-breaker who made white Americans furious by challenging entrenched racism. Dead, he’s an icon celebrated only after simplifying his legacy, and worthy of pardon by a president who once defended rioting neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va. as “very fine people.”
Trump’s treatment of modern-day Black athletes who protest racism likely provides a clearer view of his attitude toward race, and how he would have reacted to Johnson in real time.
“Staying in the Locker Room for the playing of our National Anthem is as disrespectful to our country as kneeling,” he tweeted. “Sorry!”
Trump’s pre-emptive cancellation of his meeting with the Eagles helped camouflage the reality that only a handful of players from the squad even planned to make the trip. He revoked his invitation rather than confront his profound unpopularity among AfricanAmericans in general and Black NFL players specifically. But the move also scores points with Trump’s base: white, conservative, racially regressive voters who enjoy seeing the president muscle Black athletes they perceive as unpatriotic, ungrateful and uppity. Trump leapt into the ongoing NFL anthem demonstration debate last September, when campaigning for a candidate in an Alabama Republican primary. This week’s outburst coincided with primary elections held in eight states on Tuesday.
The drama has worn on talk show host Meghan McCain, daughter of John McCain, the Arizona senator who spent years lobbying for a Jack Johnson pardon.
“I think the White House and the presidency is bigger than one man,” she said during The View, which she cohosts. “I don’t like how political sports has gotten.” Too late. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Trump was a mainstay at high-profile boxing events in Atlantic City, where he owned several casinos. Before that, he was majority owner of the New Jersey Generals of the USFL, and led that league’s unsuccessful drive to unseat the NFL as the premier pro football circuit in the U.S. Four years ago, he launched a failed attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills.
Trump didn’t ditch his affinity for sports when he entered politics. On the contrary, his actions this spring hint that sports may never be political enough to please him.