Eugene Robinson: Trumps race-baiting rhetoric shows who he truly is
President Trump’s race-baiting attack on African-American athletes is nothing new. During the civil rights movement, blacks in the South who dared to stand up for justice were often punished by being fired from their jobs. Trump is demanding that National Football League team owners act like the white segregationists of old.
It was gratifying to see the overwhelming rejection of Trump’s hideous rabble-rousing by NFL players, owners and fans. But let’s be clear: There is no reason, at this point, to give Trump the benefit of any doubt. We should assume Trump’s words and actions reflect what he truly believes.
His opening salvo, delivered Friday at a campaign rally in Alabama, could not have been clearer, or cruder: “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!’”
Trump was referring, of course, to players who take a knee during the singing of the national anthem. The practice was started by quarterback Colin Kaepernick — and adopted by a smattering of players around the league, almost all of them black — as a way of protesting police shootings of unarmed African-Americans.
Trump claimed in a Monday tweet that “the issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race,” but that is a lie. Kaepernick’s method of protest had everything to do with race, as its intent was to focus attention on racial injustice.
Trump was speaking to a virtually all-white audience in the Deep South. About 70 percent of players in the NFL are African-American. Some political analysts put two and two together and concluded that Trump was playing to the racial anxieties and animosities of his base. If this is true, however, he seems to have miscalculated.
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