Thursday, October 12, 2017

NFL Lost to Trump



Never Trumper Rich Lowry believes that the NFL lost to President Trump in the controversy about the players' national anthem protests.

Lowry thinks he knows how that happened.

He writes:

Donald Trump isn't exactly on a winning streak, but he is beating the NFL in a rout.

...Donald Trump doesn't play three-dimensional chess, as his supporters insist. Sometimes, even the rules of checkers seem to elude him. But he has an instinctive cunning and a grasp of a nationalistic cultural politics that shouldn't be underestimated by his opponents, even though it almost always is.

Putting aside whether a president should be waging war on a sports league at all, Trump’s intervention in the kneeling issue was needlessly inflammatory. He shouldn't have called protesting players “sons of bitches” and mused about firing them—there’s no reason for the president of the United States to sound like the loudest guy down at the end of the bar.

The very outrageousness of Trump’s riff, though, served his purposes. This use of controversy-generating exaggeration is one of his distinctive contributions to our politics.

Since no NFL players were going to be fired, the fundamental issue was never going to be Trump’s lurid overstatement. Instead, the overstatement acted as a neon advertisement for his commonsensical underlying point, namely that players should stand during the national anthem. And it baited the NFL into fighting him on indefensible ground.

There were all sorts of unobjectionable means available for players to take a stand of defiance toward Trump, but they allowed themselves to, in effect, get double-dared into disrespecting the flag.

...It is stunning to step back and consider that Trump took on the most popular sport in the country—and what not too long ago would have been considered an unassailable institution—and beat it into submission, with one pungent line at a rally and a bunch of tweets. By last weekend, getting Vice President Mike Pence to walk out of a 49ers-Colts game was only making the rubble bounce.
First, let's be clear about what Trump actually said.
Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, "Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!" You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, "That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired." And that owner, they don’t know it. They don't know it. They'll be the most popular person, for a week. They'll be the most popular person in this country.
He didn't call the anti-police protesting players "sons of bitches."

Lowry puts that in quotes, but Trump didn't say that. He, like others, incorrectly cites it as a direct quote.

All these Leftists and Never Trumpers don't get it.

Trump's remarks didn't start the controversy. People were ticked off last year. Ratings for games were down BEFORE Trump made his comments.

After Trump made his statement at the rally in Alabama, the Leftists and Never Trumpers went crazy. They covered the national anthem protest issue relentlessly. They treated it as if it was the most important issue facing the country. Nothing else seemed to matter. They put it and kept it in the spotlight.

I honestly don't think the NFL lost to Trump. His "one pungent line at a rally and a bunch of tweets" didn't convince Americans to reject the NFL. They had already done that.

The Leftists and Never Trumpers in the media don't understand. Americans aren't following Trump. He's echoing the voices of Americans.

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