It’s no secret that blustery, overcompensating macho types like Donald Trump love football. Trump himself, you’ll recall, tried to buy an NFL team in the 1980s and failed. He then bought a team in the startup USFL, which began in 1983 as a spring supplement to the NFL but went tits up in 1985 when, at Trump’s insistence, the league switched to a fall schedule and went head-to-head against Goliath. Some wags take that as evidence that he has a track record at destroying pro football leagues.
With Trump, we can never rule out revenge as a primary motive, but it seems to me he understands perfectly well what he told Cowboys owner Jerry Jones: “This one lifts me,” meaning he can’t lose by attacking the NFL.
His disinvitation* of the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles is the latest sign that Trump understands how to frame the racially fraught demographics of the NFL — an 85% white audience watching a 75% black sport — to appeal to the racial fears of a big chunk of his base. With help from right-wing media, he’s framed a plea for social justice as an anti-American slave revolt, proving the NFL still has a Trump problem, and it’s likely to persist. How ironic that the people who love football the most are being asked to give it up by their Rasputin, and enough are doing so to have NFL owners wearing Depends.
Like it or not, the Eagles are all over the news today, because this is one of those stories the media can cover by running up to all sorts of sports stars and other celebs and breathlessly tweeting their reaction. But if you read just one thing about this, make it this column by Marcus Hayes of the Philly Daily News, who calls out to the many Trump fans who populate the parking lots at The Linc, “How ya like your boy now?”
As with so many things in Trumpworld, the courts may prove the undoing . Legal experts think Colin Kaepernick’s lawsuit against the league is on solid legal ground:
in certain cases, private businesses can be considered state actors, and Kaepernick and other NFL players ― like his former San Francisco teammate Eric Reid ― who appear to have been ostracized over their protests, could have a credible argument that the NFL, in this instance, was a public entity that was improperly influenced by the president.
The NFL, Edelman argued, could be considered a state actor for two reasons: First, because it receives tax breaks from the federal government, and second, because most of its teams play in stadiums that are partly financed by local governments. NFL stadiums have also received billions of dollars in federal tax subsidies.
Federal courts have previously ruled that sports franchises have acted as state actors. In 1978, a judge found that the New York Yankees’ policy banning female reporters from their locker room violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause because New York City owned Yankee Stadium, qualifying the team as a state actor, as Edelman notes in a brief he wrote examining the possibility of NFL players filing a free speech lawsuit.
Trump, naturally, made it worse for himself legally by tweeting his threat to rescind tax breaks if the owners didn’t restrict the protests.
Unlike Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Trump never played the game, and you can see why — he’s prone to fumbling. Maybe it’s the tiny hands.
*”Disinvitation” is a recently coined word seen mostly in controversies over speakers at colleges; socially it just isn’t done. I bring this up because it’s evidence that Trump violates all norms, not just political ones, and I suspect it’s out of equal parts ignorance, dickishness and childish self-regard.