GELZINIS: Trump goes for the jugular with NFL
It’s not simply about red meat anymore with Donald Trump. Friday night in Alabama, our president jumped the shark and went straight to live flesh.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, you’d say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired!’” Trump screamed.
I wonder if there was spittle at the corners of The Donald’s lips when he drove his ’Bama rally crowd into unmentionable heights of pleasure.
Now we know that any pro athlete with the audacity to express an opinion that transcends yard lines, or base lines, or foul lines is a “son of a bitch” in the eyes of a president who backed into the White House on the strength of a low-rent reality show that had him “firing” low-rent celebrities.
Trump won’t remember any of the Golden State Warriors who he uninvited from visiting the White House.
But he will never, ever forget that Steph Curry, the Warriors’ charismatic superstar, snubbed his White House invite. That’s a tough blow for a guy like The Donald, who craves the celebrity slipstream.
Trump in Alabama? You had to know our president was going to let it all hang out. After all, he was in the embrace of a redmeat throng who cheered for a president who wasn’t talking like some politician, but rather like the loudmouthed redneck on the next barstool.
In Alabama Friday night, The Donald was unchained. He singled out Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, as one of those “sons of bitches” for opting to display his feelings about what Trump himself described as “police treatment of blacks and social injustice.”
There you have the disconnect of this huckster in the White House. Trump can articulate what Kaepernick was calling attention to, while in the same breath berating this athlete’s attempt to express his feelings as “a total disrespect of everything we stand for.”
Who is the “we” Donald Trump was talking about Friday night in Alabama? Was it the Alabama of Bear Bryant on that fabled night decades ago when his all-white Crimson Tide was rolled over by a multiracial USC team ... in Alabama?
Or is it the country where multiracial athletes like Steph Curry, Colin Kaepernick and so many others have dared to express the opinions they’ve formulated in college. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to express themselves and push against the dumb jock mentality that Trump is clearly more comfortable with.
Of course, there are those dumb jocks who’ve been burned chomping too deep into the red meat. Hello Curt Schilling.