Never mind the spectacular season that just wrapped up. Forget about the youngest-ever coach to ever make it to the Super Bowl. Set aside the fact that one of the quarterbacks from today’s game is set to either cement himself as the winningest play caller in history or the one with the most Super Bowl losses ever.
No, the reason that NFL ratings are up, according to President Donald Trump, is… Donald Trump.
In CBS’s Face The Nation interview that will air prior to the big game, the President told host Margaret Brennan that ratings for the league have improved only since his intervention in the player kneeling “controversy.”
I was just one that felt, very important, you can’t be kneeling for the national anthem… they haven’t been kneeling and they have been respecting the flag and their ratings have been terrific ever since.”
Of course, plenty of players do still kneel, despite being told by many of their teams that they would be fined for doing so. But the #TakeAKnee movement was never about respect for the flag, something that Trump still doesn’t seem to understand — or perhaps he does, but has used the anthem and the flag as a racist dogwhistle against the players that he called “sons of bitches” during the first NFL season of his presidency.
Brennan pressed the President on whether or not he thought the players had a point, and, impossibly, he managed to sound even more racist — saying there were “a lot of reasons” that players kneeled, but that he had fixed all of that:
.@margbrennan talked to @realDonaldTrump about kneeling during the national anthem and asked if he’s sensitive at all to players like @Kaepernick7, who point out the majority of victims of police violence are black. pic.twitter.com/uWIu9GRpa0
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) February 3, 2019
Uh, no. And if anyone in the NFL has been calling the President and thanking him for anything he’s done in office, it’s guaranteed that they were owners, not players.
Featured image via screen capture
