TRUMP V. NFL PLAYERS, DELIBERATELY TURNING UP THE HEAT,NOT THE LIGHT

One of a real president's jobs is to try to pull the country together.  Trump does just the opposite.  He plays to his hard-core alt-right, white supremacist and nationalist, bromancers etc,.by deliberately antagonizing his opponents.  They will strike back and Trump will use it to fire up the crowds at his rallies.  The adoration of his fans seems to be his primary goal.  Trump is building a cult or personality with some of the worst elements of American society, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc.  This is from reason.com.  A Libertarian publication.  They are not a bunch of left-wing politically correct college kids or profs.


2) Donald Trump made the conscious choice to revive a near-moribund social controversy for political advantage. Do you know how many players made any kind of protest gesture during the national anthem the weekend before Trump called them SOBs? Less than 10.

The conclusion here is inescapable. The president of the United States, while claiming to be appalled by scattered incidents of alleged anti-patriotism, voiced his displeasure (at a political rally) in such a way that guaranteed those incidents would multiply. He doesn't want this controversy to die down; he wants it to intensify, in a way that pits American vs. American.

Just look at the follow-up reporting. "He knows it'll get people stirred up and talking about it," a senior administration official reportedly told Politico. Another Trump adviser reportedly told CNN's Jim Acosta that the president is "winning the cultural war...just made millionaire sport athletes his new HRC." At a dinner with conservatives last night, according to multiple outlets, Trump (in a paraphrase by Politico's Josh Dawsey) said "that his NFL feud was going well and he wants to keep it going."

There is something fundamentally unseemly about a governmental chief executive deliberately whipping up us-vs.-them antipathy toward an entire bloc of his own constituents. Republicans (and others) were rightly outraged when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo asserted three years ago that "extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay" have "no place in the state of New York." Hillary Clinton was rightly excoriated for calling a whole chunk of Trump supporters an irredeemable "basket of deplorables." Even Barack Obama's bitter-clinger comments from 2008, which were made in a semi-private setting and with the patina of trying to understand a certain population, reeked of a kind of collectivist condescension that critics had cause to reject.

Trump's politics of Othering is, has been, and will always be central to his political project, from his birther freelancing to his Mexico-is-sending-us-rapists campaign kickoff to his assertion that District Judge Gonzalo Curiel's Mexican heritage was "an inherent conflict of interest" to his travel ban to his pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and so on. His campaign themes were patterned after the culture-war wedge-issuing of Richard Nixon. "The silent majority is back, and we're going to take our country back," the candidate declared in July 2015. His dark acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was a virtual Nixonpalooza: "I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police," he thundered. "When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. Believe me. Believe me....I am the law and order candidate."

The president's populist advisors welcome racially tinged culture war as advantageous political strategy. "I want them to talk about racism every day," Steve Bannon told The American Prospect just before leaving the White House. "If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

The language Trump used in Alabama was telling. In a speech where he mused "Isn't it a little weird when a guy who lives on 5th Avenue in the most beautiful apartment you've ever seen comes to Alabama and Alabama loves that guy?" and said that if he'd lost the election he might have moved "to Alabama or Kentucky," the president railed against the anthem protesters' "total disrespect of our heritage, a total disrespect of everything that we stand for" and diagnosed the NFL's problems in this way: "But do you know what's hurting the game more than that? When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they're playing our great national anthem."

http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/26/9-lessons-from-the-trumpnfl-anthem-wars?utm_medium=email