Strauss: As you write in the book, football has come to represent something really important to a lot of Trump’s supporters. Is the sport itself part of the “Make America Great Again” platform?

Leibovich: There’s no question. There’s a pretty big Venn diagram from the football heartlands of Ohio and Alabama with the Trump Belt. You listen to NFL coaches being defensive about football and concerned about concussions and football going soft with safety rule changes. Trump said it perfectly—football has gone soft and America has gone soft. That, to me, is the whole game. That was after the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh playoff game and he weighed in. [In early 2016 the two teams played a particularly violent game with a number of penalties and a suspension for violent play.] You had this perfect moment—you had the announcer, Phil Simms, saying, this is a disgrace, and you had all these guys saying, these guys have to be punished. And Trump, a couple days later, says, this was great … The crowd in Nevada, they went nuts. He was hitting the same chord that people in Ohio might feel defensive about football being ruined by these oversensitive liberal-bubble people on the coast or these alarmist scientists and academia. It’s the same flavor of culture war.

Strauss: The NFL has desperately tried to move on from the anthem controversy, while the Trump administration has done everything possible to keep it in the news, right?

Leibovich: The handful of people kneeling and protesting were a lower-grade distraction [when Kaepernick first started kneeling] … They had not reached a critical mass. A lot of people didn’t like it, but then Trump took the wedge and jumped in and just widened it like he did it … If the San Francisco vegan quarterback didn’t exist, the wedge-issue gods couldn’t have invented him … He’s like a dream for Trump. So yes … but the thing is, the NFL had this handled last year. The best thing they could do was ride it out [and not force players to stand]. They had some fine public-relations and diplomatic initiatives, and giving all this money to the players’ coalition and seemingly genuinely sitting down with players and having discussions … But in May this year they totally flipped [and announced that teams would be fined if their players kneeled]. I don’t know if Roger Goodell was listening to more-conservative owners or if he felt like he owed Jerry Jones for standing down on his contract or there was a handshake deal with Rupert Murdoch after Fox gave the NFL billions of dollars [to broadcast Thursday-night football]. But they knew it was a disaster immediately and they basically reversed it and now they don’t know what they’re doing.

Strauss: You and your colleague Ken Belson obtained a tape from a meeting last year between players and owners where they discuss what to do about the anthem, including one owner’s suggestion that the league hire a black Charlton Heston to be a spokesman. What surprised you most about listening to that?