The trouble with so many of the terms being used to describe the man squatting in the Oval Office these days is that they wear out so quickly. After his latest performance in Huntsville, Alabama, “unhinged” can now be included in the pile of words that have to be retired because they just aren’t strong enough to do the job anymore.
If you haven’t yet heard, Pr*sident Trump epitomized himself Friday night when he blasted NFL players who protest institutional racism by refusing to stand for the national anthem before games.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out, you’re fired!”
That was specifically directed at Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback whose silent peaceful protests cost him his job. Trump employed stronger language against someone exercising his First Amendment rights against injustice than he used against the Charlottesville Nazis and other white supremacists, one of whom murdered another person exercising her First Amendment rights.
For this latest spew, Trump has caught a boatload of flak from many quarters. For instance, Bill Maher and Bob Kostas trashed him Friday night. But Kaepernick’s mother took top honors on Trump’s favorite venue:
Back in August at Slate, Josh Levin delivered a primo smackdown of his own.
One year after he began his protest, Kaepernick has won with the media and lost with the man. We should not be shocked that a league that polices players’ touchdown celebrations would not abide a quarterback who took a knee for social justice. The NFL has always been and will always be a redoubt for reactionaries. It is also a closed system, one controlled by billionaires whose views are much further outside the mainstream than Kaepernick’s.
In November, the Guardian reported that NFL owners donated 42 times more cash—$8,052,410 vs. $189,610.72—to Republican causes as compared with Democratic ones in 2015 and 2016. The Daily Beast subsequently wrote that of the $107 million raised to finance Donald Trump’s inauguration, the NFL’s money men chipped in roughly 7 percent, with Washington’s Dan Snyder, the Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, the Rams’ Stan Kroenke, the Patriots’ Robert Kraft, the Texans’ Bob McNair, the Jaguars’ Shahid Khan, and the Jets’ Woody Johnson giving $1 million each. Johnson, for his part, was recently confirmed as the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom.
A sliver of aggrieved fans is telling the league’s ruling cabal what it wants to hear. Seven months into Trump’s tenure, with the
president’s approval rating plunging to depths that
Kaepernick’s never did, NFL owners remain the commander in chief’s most steadfast constituents. With the exception of the South Korea–born Kim Pegula and the Pakistani-American Khan, who gave to the Trump inaugural but
opposed the administration’s immigration ban, every one of the league’s majority owners
is white, and they’ve been conspicuously silent as other corporate honchos have spoken up about Trump’s heinous personal behavior and racist policy proposals.
Donald Trump disrespects the flag, the Constitution, and that highest form of patriotism, dissent in the cause of justice, something that throughout American history has sparked the greatest of our national reforms. Such dissent, often exceedingly unpopular when it began, has been what has helped us live up to the ideals expressed in America’s founding.
Back then, those ideals—such as all people being equal under the law—were just words on parchment or paper, very often ignored by the very men who signed the documents where those words appeared. It took plentiful risky patriotic dissent to make progress in attaining those ideals. What Kaepernick and a courageous handful of other NFL players have done is point out that there is still need for further progress.
Today, every day, Donald Trump ignores those ideals, gives them the finger. How long must we wait before someone in authority tells him “Off the field! Out, you’re fired”?