Trump makes America break again
Civil discourse in America is down in the dirt and Donald Trump is swinging the club that put it there.
In a series of outbursts bizarre even for the United States provocateur-in-chief, Trump has in recent days urged National Football League franchise owners to fire players who kneel during the national anthem and called on fans to boycott teams that permit such protests.
To top it off, the president disparaged any athlete who acts this way as a “son of a bitch.”
History tells us many U.S. presidents freely indulged in profanities.
No one has done it with such relish and as publicly as Trump.
If he thought such tough, undignified vulgarities would stop professional athletes from taking a stand against racial inequality and specifically denouncing police violence against African Americans, he was wrong. His crude insults have provoked more protests than ever. Hundreds of NFL players responded to Trump by sitting, kneeling or raising their fists as the Star Spangled Banner was sung before Sunday’s games.
Of course, it’s doubtful Trump minded because his intention was never to end a controversy. His métier is to create them. He pours gasoline, not water, on political brush fires. And so he’s raised the heat in the discussion of race to the boiling point.
National Basketball Association superstar LeBron James called the president “a bum.”
Other athletes chose an unprintable obscenity to criticize Trump.
On the other side of this increasingly polarized debate, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza told fans to boo protesting players — and that’s exactly what spectators in Indianapolis did.
It would be a mistake to dismiss all this bad behaviour as just a tempest in a teapot.
Trump has diminished his office while attacking civil discourse in a nation whose constitution guarantees free speech.
There is no place for respectful dialogue in the America Trump is creating.
There is “us” — the Americans who see things Trump’s way and for whom the national anthem is a sacred hymn — and there is “them” — the Americans who believe the anthem ceremony can legitimately be used to support civil rights.
Trump does not seek to stake out a common ground where people with differing views can meet, respectfully exchange opinions and either come to a compromise or accept they can disagree agreeably. He divides, for the sake of dividing as much as to conquer. It’s how he acts internationally when, for instance, he responds to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program by threatening to “totally destroy” the country and calling its bellicose leader, Kim Jong Un, “rocket man.”
It’s how Trump’s handling his country’s greatest unhealed wound — racism.
And now he’s taken the fight to professional football, an icon of American culture where until now Americans of every race, creed and background have been able to come together.
Welcome to Trump’s America, an ugly place where you must choose the side you’re on. But it’s not a game. And with so many people screaming, it’s becoming impossible for them to understand each other.