Instead of tending to escalating tensions with North Korea, working with Congress on passing sensible gun control legislation in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, or dealing with his failing Cabinet, Donald Trump is doing something much more important in his eyes: tweeting about NFL protests and the sportscasters who support them. On Tuesday morning (at 3 AM, no less), he rattled off a series of tweets stating that the NFL shouldn’t receive tax breaks while players “disrespect” the country.
The hypocrisy here is astounding. By now, anybody with an ounce of sense should know that the protests are not at all about the anthem but instead about police and state violence directed at blacks and people of color. But lying about facts is what Trump does best. What’s really laughable in this tweet is the gall of Donald Trump talking about tax breaks for a corporation. It is really almost too much to bear. Seriously, the loser president who refuses to release any tax information from the last decade, the very same man who has declared bankruptcy numerous times and has made a fortune by exploiting tax loopholes, the one who is proposing a massive tax cut which will save his family billions of dollars, is now suggesting that the NFL shouldn’t get tax breaks because of player protests? Now, that’s rich.
But, of course, a Trump tweetstorm would be incomplete without attacking a person of color. So predictably, he lashed out at ESPN’s Jemele Hill, who was suspended for two weeks for tweeting about the protests.
Hill said that while she doesn’t advocate any kind of boycott of the NFL, she recognizes that owners who explicitly prevent their players from participating in protest put the players at risk of looking like sell-outs to fans. This was in reference to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who said this week that any player who is “disrespectful to the flag” won’t play. Here was Trump’s response:
What’s telling is that even though she was suspended (because that’s what happens when a black woman has the nerve to publicly speak her mind), Hill is right. Jerry Jones is allowed to prevent players from protesting because the NFL has changed its policy and can now force players to participate in standing on the field and paying homage to the flag and national anthem. Apparently, there is a specific policy in the NFL’s “Policy Manual for Member Clubs” which outlines the requirement. Though the policy is not new, what was outlined just three years ago vastly differs from what the NFL is making public this year.
The 2014 policy reads that failure to be on the field by the start of the national anthem may “result in disciplinary action from the League office.” The version currently being promulgated by the NFL revises this to read “result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violation of the above, including first offenses.”
That’s a pretty big change for two reasons: They’ve added a lot of punishment, and they’ve removed the language that punishment would come from the league office. We don’t know when the change was made; its language did not appear on the web at all until two weeks ago, and questions sent to an NFL spokesperson have yet to be answered.
How interesting that back in 2014, when these protests weren’t yet a thing, the League merely required players to be on the field and quietly acknowledge the flag and anthem. But just a few weeks ago, around the same time that Trump went after these players, a new policy mysteriously emerged which now punishes players in a big way for peaceful protest. It is also not coincidental that NFL owners are Trump supporters, having given millions of dollars to Trump while he was campaigning.
Jemele Hill is right: it does put players in a precarious position. If they show any integrity and protest, they risk huge fines and the possibility of losing their careers. If they don’t protest, it could be seen as cowardly by many of their fans. At the end of the day, the owners (having no integrity at all) will do all they can to make sure they don’t lose dollars. So if they think fans are offended by peaceful protest, they will do everything they can to curb it. Meanwhile, players could easily nip this in the bud by using their only leverage—refusing to adhere to this requirement. If a majority of players agreed to take a knee at the same time, or better yet refused to play for one game, this whole thing would be over. They won’t do it because no one wants to risk their paycheck. But it would be a powerful message if they did.
And once again, it is black women like Jemele Hill who take the risk to speak out and end up paying the price. Let’s hope that ESPN doesn’t follow behind the NFL and come up with some mysterious new oppressive policy and fire her over it.