Trump’s NFL bashing a new brand of identity politics

It’s football season in an election year. Can President Trump and flag-waving politics be far behind?

Not by much. I used to watch sports for fun. But since the rise of Donald Trump as president and former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as political activist, pro football has been pulled into the culture wars and midterm elections politics.

After two years of sweat and tears, including off-season months, between National Football League players and management over protests during the national anthem, the season opened last week still with no new rules in place.

But fortunately there were almost no new protests, either. No players knelt during the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the season opener Thursday night between the Atlanta Falcons and the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. Only 10 NFL football players mounted some form of protest during the league’s Week One games, according to news reports.

Yet President Trump still found something to tweet about. “Wow, NFL first game ratings are way down over an already really bad last year comparison,” he tweeted Sunday. “Viewership declined 13 percent, the lowest in over a decade. If the players stood proudly for our Flag and Anthem, and it is all shown on broadcast, maybe ratings could come back? Otherwise worse!”

Indeed, NFL ratings have been on a slide for the past couple of seasons, the same period as the protests Kaepernick began in 2016 by taking a knee to call attention to police brutality, racial inequality and other social injustices.

Unfortunately, like Black Lives Matter, Kaepernick’s movement lacks structure or formal agenda, which makes it vulnerable to any adversary who wants to redefine it as rude, unpatriotic and even anti-American. That’s bad for the protesters but great for Donald Trump.

Trump said as much in a conversation with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, according to Jones’ sworn deposition that The Wall Street Journal reported in May. The case filed by Kaepernick, who has not played an NFL game since January 2017, alleges collusion by the league to sideline him because of his protests. Trump told Jones, according to the deposition, that “This is a very winning, strong issue for me. Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”

That outlook would help to explain why, just as the kneeling protests were losing steam early in the 2017 season, the nation’s new president inserted himself into the issue in his own special barnstorming fashion. If a player kneels during the anthem, he said, whipping up a September rally in Alabama, his team’s owner should “get that son of a b---h off the field now.” That’s our president.

Later on Twitter, he called for owners to fire such players and for fans to boycott NFL games. Boycotts are an odd call for a businessman to advocate, but, let us not forget, Trump is in politics now.

Yet, as well as the issue resonated well with Trump’s base, among other folks, it seemed like a risky time for Nike to unveil a new 30th anniversary “Just Do It” ad campaign featuring, yes, the unemployed Colin Kaepernick, with a new motto of defiance: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Trump, finding something new to be enraged about, tweeted that the sports merchandising giant was “getting absolutely killed with anger and boycott” because of its Kaepernick caper.

But, shock of shocks, that wasn’t quite true. Despite boycotts and ritual burnings of Nike shoes in YouTube videos, the company’s online sales actually jumped by 31 percent between the Sunday before and the Tuesday after Labor

Day, according to Edison Trends — almost twice last year’s 17 percent increase over the same time period.

The moral of this saga may be that we are a country of many tribes. One group’s taboo is another’s totem. If Trump misread Nike’s support, it may be because the company’s customer base is about as young, urban and multiracial, as his is older, white and small town.

“Identity precedes ideology,” philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of the new book “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity,” recently wrote in the Washington Post. “American politics,” he concludes,” is driven less by ideological commitments than by partisan identities.” In other words, we vote not so much for what we want, our issues, as for who we think we are, our identity.

It is fashionable these days for politicians to decry “identity politics,” at least until they can use it to their advantage. That’s a game Trump plays like a champ.

The moral of this saga may be that we are a country of many tribes. One group’s taboo is another’s totem.