Trump’s NFL bashing cements his role as divider in chief
The outpouring of defiance toward President Trump that spread across the National Football League this weekend harkens back to a single phrase directed at fear-mongering Sen. Joe McCarthy during a congressional hearing in 1954.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” said an Army lawyer, crystallizing in a moment the politics of division behind McCarthyism and its persecution of innocents.
Similarly, Trump’s ad hominem attacks against “son of a bitch” players who sit or kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality had nothing to do with patriotism or love of our country. When he demanded NFL owners fire protesting players (and mocked concerns about head injuries), it was vintage Trump stoking flames of anger and resentment.
Why did the president do it now, when the #TakeTheKnee movement seemed to be waning? Who knows? Maybe he was just trying to whip up his core supporters at a rally in Alabama. Or maybe it’s his latest effort to employ a weapon of mass distraction. Why focus on a likely defeat on Obamacare repeal, or a possible loss for your favored candidate in today’s Alabama Republican Senate runoff, when you can try to stir public resentment of a pampered athletic elite?
The president, after all, has such a keen eye for ways to divide people, as he has demonstrated with the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., his dissing of undocumented immigrants, his travel ban focused on Muslim-majority nations and his effort to excise transgender troops from the military.
The anthem protest was such a ripe wedge issue. Nearly three in four Americans said they thought it was unpatriotic last year, and the protest led reasons why some viewers have stopped watching NFL games.
The only problem is that professional athletes and team own- ers alike recognized Trump’s crude move for the ruse that it is: “With everything that’s going on in our country, why are YOU focused on who’s kneeling?” NBA star Chris Paul tweeted.
By the end of game play on Sunday, the divider in chief had managed to provoke a unified response: Players for each of the NFL’s 28 teams had chosen to stay seated, lock arms, take a knee or remain in the locker room during the anthem. Thirty of 32 team owners or CEOs issued statements supporting them.
An epidemic of impertinence? Not at all. Rather, it was an audacious rejection of Trump’s ploy.
By Monday morning, an unrepentent Trump responded on — where else? — Twitter by trying to sow more discord, suggesting that players kneeling were the true transgressors, even though it was clear that whatever the gesture, player solidarity had carried the day.
“We are at a time when the most powerful position in the world can bring us together as a people,” NBA All- Star Lebron James told reporters, referring to Trump. “And he doesn’t even care.”
Allowing someone to dissent peacefully is part of the nation’s patriotic tradition. Using the bully pulpit of the presidency to rain aspersions down on those who dare to do so is simply indecent.