I couldn’t care less about the NFL and Trump’s recent tempest-in-a-tweet-storm struck me as just throwing red meat to his crowd of easily-played supporters. Mostly, I’m wondering if we’ll ever get past this Cult of the Presidency thing that’s been going on.
But I did come across a couple of good responses to Trump’s tweet storm this week. My emphasis below.
Matt Welch at Reason gives a good analysis from a libertarian view. It’s pretty long, so I’ve only listed the ‘lessons’ without their explications. But it’s worth a read.
9 Lessons from the Trump/NFL Anthem Wars
1) The most offensive aspect about mixing politics and sports is the conscripted tax money and police power. […]
2) Donald Trump made the conscious choice to revive a near-moribund social controversy for political advantage. […]
3) Almost every sentence containing the phrase “we must” in reference to strangers is a bad sentence, particularly coming from a president. […]
4) Freedom of political expression for athletes is directly proportional to their freedom of contract. […]
5) Trump is on the opposite side of the criminal justice reform cause that sparked all this stuff in the first place. […]
6) Fantasizing about ordering ungrateful “privileged” athletes around is one of the lower tendencies in American sports fandom. […]
7) Public patriotic rituals are already political, and should not be a one-way ratchet. […]
8) Telling the president to get bent is a healthy democratic response. […]
9) Culture-war dissidents deserve a shout-out, too. […]
And Jay Nordlinger gives his conservative take at National Review.
[…] I never had any use for Colin Kaepernick’s stunt. I don’t like this exploitation of national-anthem time. I also believe in safe zones — zones free of politics, such as concerts and games. I’m semi-famous for it (though only semi-)! An essay on safe zones is included in my recent collection, Digging In.
Kaepernick really disgusted me when he wore a shirt touting Fidel Castro — and socks depicting cops as pigs.
At the same time, I counseled benign neglect, borrowing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (radioactive) phrase from the late ’60s. […]
The issue was dying out. There were just a few embers. Then Donald J. Trump got into it, of course. He is an arsonist in American politics. We used to call Sharpton & Co. “racial arsonists.” The president is his own brand of arsonist. (Actually, Trump and Sharpton are a lot alike, as I’ve argued before: two New York media creatures.) Also, Trump insists on being at the center of attention, always.
There’s an expression for such men: “the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.”
You heard Trump, revvin’ up that crowd: “Get that son-of-a-bitch off the field right now! Out! He’s fired!” Blah blah blah. Roar roar roar. And that changed everything.
We Americans are a patriotic lot. We’re also a cranky, independent-minded, nonconformist lot. We don’t like to be told what to do, especially by Authority. We don’t like to be bossed around. So, pre-Trump, kneeling meant one thing — and then it meant a big middle finger to the Man, a.k.a. Trump, a.k.a. POTUS.
Context is everything. Everything. It took Donald J. Trump to make anti-kneelers sympathetic to kneelers. Indeed, he turned some anti-kneelers into kneelers themselves.
He crudifies everything he touches — including conservatism, including patriotism. There is a difference between patriotism and jingoism. Between patriotism and crude nationalism, crude flag-waving. […]
No Truce With Kings 