Trump unites his rivals by hijacking a courageous protest

The US president could be made to regret his abuse of gridiron players who take a stand against police brutality

American football is sport’s best copy of American life: a struggle for territory and power. So we might have guessed it would become a battleground for the Trump presidency, which has hijacked a protest about police brutality and sold it back to the nation as an attack on the US military and the flag.

The demonic strategist in Trump’s head spotted an opportunity when Colin Kaepernick’s decision to drop to one knee for the Star-spangled Banner began to catch on as a means of drawing attention to the shooting by police of unarmed black Americans.

The nature of the protest, which stirred the country’s deepest sensitivities about the stars and stripes, allowed the White House to bury the original grievance under a tide of nationalistic and racially framed indignation.

As Americans discuss the weekend’s mass NFL protest with a fervour striking even by the standards of Trump’s volcanic reign, the most pressing need was to dig out those founding objections from the sludge of the president’s tirades, and perhaps to find new ways to protest beyond going down on one knee, to outflank the hostile forces of Trump’s America.

And boy, are those forces hostile. A colleague in America reports that within one hour of listening to a Boston radio station he heard the protesting NFL players called “thugs, morons, idiots and dummies”. Trump, of course, called every one of them a “son of a bitch” who should be hauled off the field and fired. He said it in Huntsville, Alabama, in the same Deep South where he claimed there were some “fine people” at a Neo-nazi demonstration in Charlottesville.

One of the president’s religious advisers, the Texas pastor Robert Jeffress, brought the ghosts of the Old South flooding back. Jeffress said: “They [the NFL players] live in a country where they’re not only free to earn millions of dollars every year, but they’re also free from the worry of being shot in the head for taking a knee like they would be if they were in North Korea.”

When Stevie Wonder went down on one knee before a concert in Central Park, former congressman Joe Walsh tweeted that he was “another ungrateful black multimillionaire”. Not getting “shot