NFL winning in battle vs. Trump
Rants on anthem unites league, players
When Donald Trump veered off on one of his venomous tangents in a speech in Alabama Friday night, calling an AfricanAmerican athlete exercising his First Amendment rights a “son of a bitch,” he almost certainly never would have envisioned the picture that would lead the national news 72 hours later:
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, a staunch Trump supporter, taking a knee on the field with his players before the national anthem.
Congratulations, Mr. President. You’ve created hundreds of Colin Kaepernicks.
With your divisive rhetoric, you’ve united NFL owners and players. That has always been difficult to do on almost any subject. You made it look easy.
As they kneeled or stood and locked arms before and/or during the national anthem Sunday and Monday at games around the country and in London — or didn’t appear for the anthem at all — they weren’t necessarily thinking about Kaepernick and his fight against social injustice. They were thinking about you. They were protesting you. They were protesting what you said and how you said it. They were repudiating you. Trump can spin this any which way he wants as he whiles away the hours on Twitter, but this time he has met his match. He has picked on people who have a megaphone as large as he does. He has gone after athletes with massive Twitter followings, with microphones in their faces and with devoted fans from red states as well as blue. It’s NFL players, it’s NBA players, it’s NBA coaches: talk about fire and fury. They’re letting Trump have it.
Then there are the owners. They, too, have criticized Trump. They’ve locked arms with their players and Jones, of course, took a knee.
These are Trump’s people. Quite a few voted for him and donated to his campaign and inaugural committee. Not long ago, he desperately wanted to be one of them, to own an NFL team. Now, even they are against him.
He’s not taking this well. If we’ve learned anything about his Twitter habits, it’s that he never knows when to stop. Half of his eight tweets before noon Tuesday were about the NFL.
He kicked things off with this: “Ratings for NFL football are way down except before the game starts, when people tune in to see whether or not our country will be disrespected!”
Turns out, NFL ratings were up for the weekend and way up for Monday Night Football.
Next: “The booing at the NFL football game last night, when the entire Dallas team dropped to its knees, was loudest I have ever heard. Great anger.”
Arizona fans booing the Dallas Cowboys? Who knew?
“But while Dallas dropped to its knees as a team, they all stood up for our National Anthem. Big progress being made-we all love our country!”
Sounds like our man is moving the goal posts now, trying to do anything to declare victory after a lost weekend.
And, finally: “The NFL has all sorts of rules and regulations. The only way out for them is to set a rule that you can’t kneel during our National Anthem!”
Let’s all hold our breath while the NFL Competition Committee writes up that one.
Clearly, Trump is obsessed with this. The worse it goes for him, the more he probably will tweet.
Who should Trump blame for all of this? The Kaepernick story had all but burned itself out until he himself brought it back to life, deciding to declare war on American sports and ruin his weekend.