Gelfand on Trump vs. NFL: "It's Surreal All Over, and Getting Weirder with Every Tweet"

We are already fast forgetting Donald Trump’s manic, obscene and perhaps cunning fortnight of bellicose rants and tweets about the NFL. For now, at least, we are reminded that there are more disgusting things to worry about. The media avalanche rolls on in the era of the mad man.  

But it would be wise to remember these tantrums, because, whether you like them or not, Trump came close to winning the popular vote and his outbursts reveal clues as to who we are and what we will either endorse or — perhaps worse — tolerate.

Looking back, it was probably inevitable that Trump would, sooner than later, get around to vilifying professional football players. They are, after all, mostly black, which means they committed the sin of not voting for him.

Clinton outpolled Trump 88 to 8 percent among black voters.

And Trump and his father — a man once arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally — had a long history of discriminating against black people who tried to rent apartments from them.

The only prominent black person in Trump’s administration is Dr. Ben Carson, who, for some reason, is secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Carson’s specialty, separating conjoined twins, doesn’t seem to qualify him for the job, but since when does that matter?

While we’re on the subject, the separated twins didn’t do very well, but they did propel the market-savvy doctor to fame and fortune. You know the old saying: the operation was a success, but…

Then, of course, there was that business of Trump saying that some of those Nazis in Charlottesville — the ones yelling “Jews will not replace us” — were “very fine people.” By any standard, the Nazis didn’t piss him off half as much as the football players did. Serves the athletes right for being on the wrong side.

It was almost as if Trump was upset because he was being deprived of the pleasure of watching black guys injure each other

Not to put a surgically fine point on this entire mess, but am I the only one who found it rather odd that, in the middle of calling black players “sons of bitches” for taking a knee during the anthem, Trump went off into a rant about rules designed to keep a few players from suffering brain damage? I mean, it was almost as if Trump was upset because he was being deprived of the pleasure of watching black guys injure each other. Luckily, he can find comfort in the league’s injury report, because the casualties to body and brain just keep coming.

Not surprisingly, Trump, like so many culture warriors before him, now proclaims his affection for NASCAR. Any time a Yankee wants to slobber all over Southerners, you can bet the NASCAR card is about to be played. Real patriots, driving real cars.

And, in the beginning, real bootleggers, and there ain’t nothing more American than that.

Football? Buncha ungrateful black guys who hate America. Real men salute the flag and burn those Colin Kaepernick jerseys. And, more importantly, take videos of the blaze and post them on YouTube.

Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that even some of my Yankee Republican buddies started chewing tobacco, washing down moon pies with Dr. Pepper, and planning trips to Talladega. This was during the George Bush The Lesser years, when stock-car chic was all the rage. Although it has been largely forgotten even by historians, our own former Governor, Tim Pawlenty, was one of about 80 men — plus Michelle Bachmann — who vied for the lead in the Iowa GOP straw poll back  in 2011. Pawlenty, desperately trying to cut through the clutter, came up with a creative gambit: he affected a Southern drawl as he ate his way through the corn harvest, one country fair at a time.  Unfortunately, he sounded like a kid from St. Cloud trying out for the high school production of Streetcar Named Desire and was out of the race before he gained more than a pound or two.

Ah, yes, the Southern Strategy. It’s as American as calling black dudes SOBs. Why else would a President show up in Alabama to talk about football and NASCAR  when the North Koreans were threatening to drop the Big One and a large chunk of the country — plus Puerto Rico — was drowning in toxic water?

Trump’s hearty endorsement might have seemed like a badly needed boost for NASCAR, but Luther Strange probably thought he was going to kick butt with Trump’s backing. And then Strange got crushed by an even bigger nutjob in that GOP Senate primary. The winner, Ray Moore, clearly had a better take on the Bama mentality than did Trump. Moore, a disgraced former judge, believes that the United States Constitution is unconstitutional because the real laws are to be found in the Bible. Meaning the New Testament. Don’t laugh. He’s about to become a Senator and you’re not.

Yeah, it’s surreal all over, and getting weirder with every tweet. Although Trump has, for now, topped out at about 25 NFL tweets, he’ll almost certainly be back to it now that he’s done tossing paper towels at Puerto Ricans (and wondering if it’s even worth trying to save the territory).

Given what’s at stake as we approach Nuclear Winter, perhaps we should be encouraging the President to keep venting all over our gridiron gladiators. Because even if you accept the idea that his unbalanced tirades are supposed to distract us, we can always hope that they distract him.

I, for one, am watching a lot more football and a lot less news. Not saying it’s exactly inspirational, because I used to be a sportswriter, and you know what they about seeing how they make sausage. Kinda spoils the appetite. So while I still watch, I’m not naive about the role of sports. Not when there’s a bribery scandal in college basketball, and cynical football owners are enriching themselves at the expense of human brains, and baseball owners can’t be bothered to put up a little netting even though little kids keep getting hospitalized by line drives.

No one does revenge better than Trump, which explains what his crusade against the NFL is all about

But a guy doesn’t have to be a fatuous simpleton to at least try to believe that in sports, as in politics, there have always been heroes who battled the odds to make us better than we were. I realize that many football fans now think it’s their patriotic duty to believe the players are basically traitors, but the men who took a knee to protest deaths from police bullets had nothing to gain. They stood to lose endorsements (as several have) and even their jobs — as Kaepernick did. Almost weekly, the President conscripts new victims to play the role of them, which quite naturally leaves the role of us as a tempting option.

But reverence for authority is a dangerous thing — especially when, at the very top, inspiration has been supplanted by a lust for revenge. And no one does revenge better than Trump, which explains what his crusade against the NFL is all about.

Almost 35 years ago, Trump bought into the upstart USFL by purchasing the New Jersey Generals for $5 million. The new football league had a TV contract and was doing all right, but Trump had big plans. He convinced the owners to switch from playing in the spring to playing in the fall. Even Trump knew the USFL could never compete head-on, but he had a plan: he would launch an antitrust suit, thus forcing the NFL to fold Trump’s team into its league. Almost overnight, Trump’s dime store team would be worth a billion dollars. Like most of the thousands of lawsuits Trump has filed, this one didn’t go all that well. Which is to say that while  the jury found in Trump’s favor, the future President was awarded three bucks.

So there will be more scores to settle, more epithets from the bully’s pulpit. For now, however, you might want to take the sanguine view that something positive, something almost heart-warming, has taken place. Yes, the players and their coaches and owners, seen so often linking arms in a show of solidarity, have defied Trump by reinforcing the right of Kaepernick and all other players to speak out against injustice. That sounds pretty swell. And I’d love to buy in. But I can’t.

Consider this: Kaepernick, who is still unemployed, has a career quarterback rating of 88.9. As of this writing, there are currently 13 quarterbacks in the NFL with lower ratings after the fourth week of this season. So next time you see those somber and pious NFL coaches and owners getting touchy-feely to the tune of the national anthem, you might want to stop to consider that Trump has absolutely nothing to worry about. Because those coaches and owners are a bunch of damned hypocrites.

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