The idea that Americans should be forced to honor the national anthem in precisely the way that the president defines and for the reasons that he defines is the laughable opposite of actual patriotism. The national anthem and the flag are symbols of the full range of American values and ideals; among the most important of these are the rights to political expression and the idea that we need to continually work to perfect our union. When a citizen believes that our country is not living up to these ideals, then the single most important thing they can do is to share their discontent with others and persuade others to join them, in a way that conveys the power of their feelings and the reasons for their dissent. This clearly includes the use of symbolic actions; one powerful such action is refusing to stand for the national anthem.
Peaceful protest is always welcome in our country; when a politician calls for retribution against peaceful protest, this is a powerful warning sign that this politician holds beliefs hostile to democracy. Enforced political conformity and unreflective worship of patriotic symbols are practices of totalitarian societies, not a healthy democracy. Donald Trump would have you believe that he’s attacking NFL football players for their lack of patriotism; but what he’s actually attacking them for is their actual patriotism.
As is so often the case with Donald Trump, the tendencies towards authoritarianism are tied up with presidential-level racism. He brought up the issue of black athletes kneeling for the national anthem at a nearly all-white rally for a Republican candidate for the Senate, and his calls for these athletes to be fired is in the context of an NFL in which 75% of the players are African-American and all but one of the team owners are white. His tweets suggesting that the football players need to just shut up and play the game because they’re paid a lot of money easily evoke old chestnuts that African-Americans are lazy, and also that they should avoid getting uppity. And as if determined to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that his anger at the players has everything to do with their race, within a day the president was picking fights with still more African-American athletes, not on the national anthem issue, but by disinviting the Golden State Warriors from visiting the White House.
If there are any doubts left as to his alignment with white supremacists, you need only compare Donald Trump’s enthusiastic denunciation of these African-American athletes with his grudging and hedged criticism of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and other avowed enemies of American democracy after the violence in Charlottesville. As many a countervailing tweet has pointed out in the past 48 hours, the white nationalist marchers were “fine people” in the eyes of the president, while any NFL player who kneels at the wrong time is a “son of a bitch.” Now that we know that “son of a bitch” is within the president’s wheelhouse of publicly appropriate phrases, the fact that he kept it in reserve when denouncing neo-Nazis pretty much tells you everything you need to know about his moral unfitness for office.
In attacking some of the country’s most popular African-American athletes, Donald Trump is showing us that his racism and war on equal rights are total and all-consuming. Under cover of defending American values, the president is trying to marshall racist resentment against patriotic Americans who seek to raise awareness and effective change around abusive policing and other expressions of systemic racism in American society. This is what it looks like when the president is a white supremacist. His racist provocations will only continue to escalate, and will only be stopped by a countering movement in American politics and society.
