In a strained voice that was never raised, more stern than livid, Gregg Popovich lit into the country that elected Donald Trump president.

On Friday, before the Spurs’ game against the Pistons, the San Antonio head coach was asked about the election Tuesday, in which the United States chose the controversial Republican candidate as its president-elect.

“We are Rome,” Popovich ended, in a nearly six-minute diatribe that depicted Donald Trump as a grade-school bully, and his voters as a mass of humanity that Popovich didn’t know lurked in this country.

“I’m sick to my stomach,” Popovich said, in audio posted by mysanantonio.com. “The disgusting tenor and tone and all the comments [during Trump’s campaign] that have been xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, and I live in a country where half the people ignored all that to elect someone. That’s the scariest part of the whole thing to me. Got nothing to do with the environment, Obamacare and all the other stuff. We live in a country that ignored all those values that we would hold our kids accountable for. They’d be grounded for years if they acted and said the things that’s been said in that campaign by Donald Trump.”

Popovich, 67, attended the Air Force and previously came out in support of Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest. He seemed at a loss over Trump’s stunning victory, and not because of his political party. He cited Lindsey Graham, John McCain and John Kasich as Republicans he respects, if doesn’t align with politically. But Trump’s actions, in which Popovich said preyed on the base fear of Americans, had him shaken.

“[Trump] used that fearmongering and all the comments, from Day 1, the race-baiting, with trying to make Barack Obama, our first black president, illegitimate,” Popovich said, referring to the birther movement, in which Trump alleged Obama was not born in the U.S. “It leaves me wondering where I’ve been living, and with whom I’m living and the fact that people can just gloss that over. … Now we see that he’s already backing off immigration, Obamacare and other things, so was it a big fake? Which makes you feel that’s even more disgusting and cynical. That somebody would use that, to get the base that fired up to get elected.”

What seemed to irk Popovich, perhaps more than anything else, was an incident a year ago this month, in which Trump ridiculed a handicapped reporter.

“What gets lost in the process are African-Americans and Hispanics and women and the gay population,” Popovich said. “Not to mention the eighth-grade developmental stage exhibited by him, when he made fun of a handicapped person. I mean, come on. That’s what a seventh-grade, eighth-grade bully does. And he was elected president of the United States. We would’ve scolded our kids, we would’ve had discussions till we were blue in the face trying to understand these things. And he is in charge of our country. That’s disgusting.”

A reporter tried to cut off Popovich, who said he was not finished.

“He’s angry at the media because they reported what he said and how he acted,” Popovich said. “It’s ironic to me — it makes no sense. … That’s my real fear. That’s what gives me so much pause and makes me feel so badly that the country is willing to be that intolerant and not understand the empathy that’s necessary to understand other groups’ situations.

“I’m a rich white guy. And I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it. I can’t imagine being a Muslim right now. Or a woman. Or an African-American, a Hispanic, a handicapped person, how disenfranchised they must feel. … My final conclusion is, my big fear is: We are Rome.”