Herzlich to Trump: Meet us!

A VETERAN GIANTS leader has invited President Donald Trump to visit the team and engage in a productive dialogue about NFL players’ intentions, actions and origins in the national anthem debate.

Linebacker Mark Herzlich, who is part of the NFL Players’ Association leadership council that has met frequently with league leaders on the subject, said Tuesday afternoon following the club’s fourth OTA practice in East Rutherford that he “would love Trump to come down” and see what an NFL locker room really is all about.

While there have been reports of NFL players potentially boycotting the 2018 season in response to both a new league policy requiring players to stand and the continued unemployment of Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid, Herzlich said the issue is about so much more than one man, politics or patriotism.

And he has invited the president — who said last week that players who kneel during the anthem “shouldn’t be in the country” — to come see so for himself.

“I think the best way to handle remarks like that is it’s not necessarily a push back against his remarks. It’s to maintain the focus on the real issue,” Herzlich said. “The real issue isn’t players being against a president or against a country. It’s about players being for unity, and they want to create an atmosphere with law enforcement, with others in their community that we share in the locker room.

“You go in the locker room and guys from every single race, every single demographic, every single religious background, and we all are just a team,” Herzlich continued. “And so I think we see that, what’s possible. And I would love Trump to come down here and hang out in our locker room and see what locker room talk’s really about, and talking about our night nurses and our babies — this is what we talk about, it’s a family.”

Head coach Pat Shurmur did not issue an official team policy on how the Giants will enforce the NFL’s new policy. And coowner John Mara did not speak to the media Tuesday morning.

But after passing the new rule last week, Mara called standing for the anthem “the right thing to do,” and Shurmur used that same phrase twice on Tuesday about his expectations for his players.

Giants players Olivier Vernon and Michael Thomas both knelt last season as members of the Giants and Dolphins, respectively. The NFL’s policy says protesting players can stay in the locker room but that if they kneel or show disrespect for the flag that the team will be fined. Individual clubs also have the discretion to handle further discipline or the fines how they see fit.

Jets acting owner Chris Johnson issued a statement last week that he won’t pass along any fines to his players (his brother, owner Woody Johnson, also is Trump’s ambassador to the United Kingdom). But Mara and the Giants have made no such promise.

“We haven’t had a team meeting,” Herzlich said. “I’m sure at some point we’ll go over the rules and gameday policy. Guys have different opinions on it in the locker room, but at the end of the day this is the rule that’s been enacted and make players aware that this is the current rule and despite there being a rule this is how you can help out in whatever role you want to.”

“(What we want to do is) get from the protests to being active in the community,” Herzlich added. “Let’s get in the community with the police and ride along so maybe the first time a kid meets a policeman is in their school in a positive environment. So what we’re trying to do is, OK, we have everybody talking about it, how can we now take the next step to act upon it? So I think that’s our main focus with the PA (Players Association) and the players, now that it’s being talked about again, it’s an opportunity for us to get out in the community and do something about it.” GIANTS SAFETY Michael Thomas, one of the vocal leaders of NFL players’ peaceful national anthem protests of social injustice, didn’t want to speak emotionally Tuesday on a sensitive subject that requires more careful deliberations at both the team and players’ association levels.

So Thomas would not say if players intend to boycott the league — there was a report they would happen if brethren Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid are not employed on rosters in 2018 — or if Thomas thinks players’ response to President Donald Trump’s latest salvo at their