Trump Says Athlete Protests Are ‘Going to Destroy Basketball’
Trump Says Athlete Protests Are ‘Going to Destroy Basketball’
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump rebuked professional sports athletes and teams for canceling games to protest racial injustice and said that the National Basketball Association “is going to destroy basketball.”
“You know when you watch sports, you want to relax, but this is a whole different world,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday night after a campaign rally in New Hampshire. ”It’s terrible. I think what they’re doing to the NBA in particular is going to destroy basketball.”
Earlier this week, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to show up for an NBA playoff game with the Orlando Magic to protest the police shooting of a Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Brewers, a Major League Baseball club, had a walkout on Wednesday.
Athletes in the WNBA and Major League Soccer joined NBA players in solidarity, prompting a series of cancellations across American professional sports, which had just begun to re-emerge from the shutdown brought about by the coronavirus.
“It’s going to be very bad for football and I think it’s very bad for the NBA.” Trump said on Air Force One. “And it’s going to be very bad for baseball if they don’t get smarter.”
Trump, since the early days of his presidency, has been highly critical of such acts of protest, lashing out at the National Football League players, many of whom were Black, who got down on one knee during the National Anthem in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
He has taken a harsh view of the demonstrations that began after the death of George Floyd in the custody of the Minneapolis police and resurged this week after a police officer in Kenosha shot Jacob Blake, seven times.
That hostile stance has become a crucial part of his argument for re-election.
During his acceptance speech that concluded the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, he denounced the protesters. And at the New Hampshire rally in Manchester earlier Friday, he told the crowd that people demonstrating against police brutality were “looking for trouble.”
“They’re not protesters,” Trump said Friday at a rally at the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. “Those are anarchists, they’re agitators, they’re rioters, they’re looters.”
Hours before he spoke, thousands of people gathered near the Lincoln Memorial to mark the 57th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.
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