Trump’s personal foul
W
hile 3.4 million U.S. citizens reeled in the rubble of a cataclysmic storm, President Trump did what comes most naturally to him: He gleefully reignited a race-laced culture war. To govern is to choose, and Trump has proven, yet again, that he would rather throw salt on wounds than fix real problems or heal lingering divides.
Along the way, he managed, ironically, to unite an often fractious National Football League. About 200 players protested Sunday, far more than ever before, their hands forced by a man who disgustingly uses the most powerful pulpit in the country to demand salute-and-shut-up-or-befired complicity.
Trump’s stance — demanding all players stand for the national anthem, or lose their jobs — displays a breathtaking ignorance of core American values.
In this country, we can encourage but cannot force public-school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
And while private workplaces have latitude to restrict employees’ political statements, it is out of a healthy respect for freedom of conscience that very few force routine recitations of pledges, salutes or songs.
Justice Robert Jackson, in a 1943 Supreme Court ruling issued at the height of World War II, expressed the principle this way: “To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.”
The weekend of agonizing consternation began when, Friday night, the President ginned up an overwhelmingly white Alabama audience by wishing NFL owners would fire anyone who kneels during the national anthem.
“Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired, he’s fired,” went the crass rant.
Colin Kaepernick’s decision last year to take a knee to protest police killings of African Americans was, we said at the time and repeat again now, unwise. We feared it would set back an important movement by conflating it with a referendum on basic symbols of national identity.
Notwithstanding the miscalculation, it is Kaepernick’s right, and the right of those who side with him, to make their point — in a manner that does not interfere in the slightest with performance on the football field.
Some in Trump’s camp claim players’ singular sin is choosing to protest on the clock, rather than “on their own time.”
That is knowingly dishonest. Trump sent quarterback Tom Brady, at his workplace, a Make America Great Again hat. It soon found its way into the Patriots’ locker room, expressing a political opinion on company time.
And in the case of the anthem, it was the NFL that went out of its way, beginning in 2009, to make the ceremony public and essentially mandatory for all, as it pocketed millions of dollars from the Department of Defense and National Guard in what Sen. John McCain called “a marketing ploy.”
Team Trump would have NFL players sign away basic rights because they happen to make a lot of money.
In fact, Kaepernick and others understandably believe the wealthy and famous have a special responsibility to use their privileged platform to give voice to the less powerful.
That’s a version of the very dynamic that brought us a President named Donald Trump.