It’s funny. It’s almost as if the president wants people talking about a handful of NFL players taking a knee at the start of a preseason football game rather than, say, anything else currently going on in the United States. On Thursday night, a couple of Miami Dolphins players took a knee during the national anthem as part of an ongoing symbolic protest against social injustice and police brutality. Once again, president Donald Trump went on Twitter to denounce the players and demand that the NFL put a stop to it.



Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) The NFL players are at it again - taking a knee when they should be standing proudly for the National Anthem. Numerous players, from different teams, wanted to show their “outrage” at something that most of them are unable to define. They make a fortune doing what they love......

At this point, it feels like an endless cycle. Whenever the subject hits the news, the president feels the need to invoke the issue for easy political points, particularly when a news cycle is tilting against him (which is to say, frequently). This time around, it feels like the NFL brought Trump’s wrath upon itself: there’s a fair chance we wouldn’t be dealing with this mess in August if the league had just arrived at a sensible resolution during the summer.



The issue of players protesting during the anthem had been receding from public memory entering the offseason. Then the league decided they had to stir the pot by unveiling a ‘compromise’, without consulting the NFL players’ union, which would allow individual teams to punish players for not standing for the anthem. Then, of course, word leaked out that the Miami Dolphins would suspend players up to four games for not standing. The news of such a draconian punishment inspired enough outrage that the NFL had to immediately issue a joint statement with the union that “no new rules relating to the anthem will be issued or enforced for the next several weeks” as they negotiated with the NFLPA.

When the NFL attempted to give free rein to teams to set their own punishments, they were making it inevitable that a team like Miami would go to the absurd length of handing out suspensions for protesting longer than some players receive for committing acts of domestic violence. It’s not a coincidence that while multiple players protested ways other than kneeling on Thursday night, by either remaining in the locker room or raising their firsts during the Star-Spangled Banner, the two players who made a show of kneeling were Dolphins: Kenny Stills and Albert Wilson.

Of course, even the absurd potential penalty that Dolphins ownership would have handed Stills and Wilson wouldn’t likely be enough for the president. Immediately after the NFL announced it was reviewing their policy in July, Trump name-checked out commissioner Roger Goodell, demanding that kneeling players be taken out of the game and that repeat offenders be suspended for the rest of the season without pay.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) The NFL National Anthem Debate is alive and well again - can’t believe it! Isn’t it in contract that players must stand at attention, hand on heart? The $40,000,000 Commissioner must now make a stand. First time kneeling, out for game. Second time kneeling, out for season/no pay!

The NFL refuses to realize that only the most extreme measures will ever be enough for Trump to lay off the criticism, because the continued existence of these protests are in his best interests. The league is trying to fix a “problem” for the benefit of a president who benefits from division and thus doesn’t really want to see the problem fixed.

In his definitive exploration of Trump’s obsession with the NFL player protests, Deadspin’s David Roth makes a convincing case that Trump has no desire for the NFL to resolve the issue to his satisfaction. It turns out that the controversy provides a never-ending supply of red meat to his base, which gets riled up beyond reason at the sight of African-American athletes peacefully protesting. It also doesn’t hurt that this manufactured outrage has successfully convinced its intended audience that the target of these protests is not racially motivated violence within the criminal justice system but rather the anthem, the military or even the flag itself.

When serious debates devolve into referendums on performative patriotism, Trump tends to benefit. Roth cites a Wall Street Journal report where Trump tells Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones “this is a very winning, strong issue for me. Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.” Roth rightfully points out that, for this reason, it’s impossible for the league to fully appease him: “He is pushing and pushing and pushing at this issue because that is what he does, and because he is nothing without something to push against. There is no compromise to make.”

Play Video 2:52 Taking a knee: two years on, where does the NFL stand? – video explainer

Short of banishing every offending player from the league – and free agents Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid will be the first to tell you that this is very much on the table – it’s hard to see what the NFL could possibly do to win here. When Trump finds the right target to attack, the one that will get his audience to cheer him on the most, he sticks with it. This is, after all, the man who is still dropping “Crooked Hillary” references on a nearly daily basis, nearly two years after the 2016 election. Perhaps he will go back to attacking the league for becoming too soft because it’s making rule changes to make the game slightly less crippling to those who play it: “They’re ruining the game. That’s what they want to do. They want to hit. They want to hit! It is hurting the game.” Promoting needless violence seems to be “a very winning, strong issue” for Trump, too.

In any case, the NFL will surely provide the president with some sort of controversy he can use to motivate his base and otherwise occupy the rest of us. Nothing the NFL has done during Goodell’s reign has shown that it has any capability of handling any crisis, large or small, without alienating every party involved. Maybe that’s what makes it such an appealing target for Trump: he’s found a foe that not even his fiercest critics have any interest in defending.