Is Trump’s NFL Critique Exploiting Divides Or Creating Them?

In this week’s politics chat, we dive into the motivations and effects of President Trump’s attacks on NFL players for protesting during the national anthem over police violence against black Americans. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): I’m going to throw three hypotheses about Trump’s attacks on the NFL at you. We’ll consider the evidence for/argue about each individually, but here are all three first:

Trump is attacking the NFL protests to shore up his base.
Trump is dividing the country.
Trump is a product of divides in the country that already existed.

So, first up …

Trump is attacking the NFL protests to shore up his base.

Do you buy this?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Sure, on some level he knows that his white, older base will like this, but I don’t think it’s all calculating — I definitely believe he holds these views. I’ll let Nate take the NFL grudge angle.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Not really. I think he’s attacking the NFL protests because he watches a lot of TV and has a short temper and doesn’t like it when he sees criticism of himself or the people he’s simpatico with, especially when it comes from minorities.

And, yeah, he also has a lot of beefs with the NFL, as he’d very much like to be part of the club of franchise owners.

perry: To Nate’s point about who Trump attacks and race … there’s this from The Washington Post:

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Well, if I can disagree slightly — I don’t think Trump woke up one morning and thought, “I need to shore up my base and therefore I’m going to attack the NFL.” Remember, his approval ratings have ticked up recently. Instead, I’d bet Trump felt a grievance and thought to himself that this might work as a political angle too. I bet the politics were secondary. Remember too, Trump tried and failed to buy my Buffalo Bills.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I think the NFL thing popped into Trump’s head on Friday night in Alabama. The crowd applauded loudly. And then he doubled and tripled down on it because the controversy drew the right enemies — black athletes, elites, the media — and the right allies — veterans, white conservatives.

natesilver: I mean, it’s possible that this will have the effect of rallying his base. But I don’t think that was Trump’s intent, necessarily.

clare.malone: Didn’t Bon Jovi try to buy the Bills too?

harry: He did. We didn’t want Bon Jovi because we thought he might move the team.

micah: Should we spend less time focused on Trump’s motivations? I mean, do they even matter? The effects on the country are the same regardless, aren’t they?

clare.malone: Yes, but obviously he’s the accelerant on a flame that was already there.

micah: Save that thought!

perry: So I don’t think this was some deeply calculated move initially. But I think the tweets on Sunday and Monday reflect that Trump thinks he has a winning hand here.

natesilver: Motivations matter, in so far as we’re trying to build a “model” of Trump’s actions. And I think you sort of have to pick one hypothesis or the other. The way The New York Times put it is that “the vehemence was tactical, but also visceral.” I don’t really think that makes sense. Tactical and visceral are not quite antonyms, but it’s hard to be both at once.

micah: Can’t something be viscerally tactical? I think you’re oversimplifying how people’s motivations actually work, Nate.

natesilver: But he often digs in on losing issues, no? Going back to the feud with the Khan family or Judge Curiel, for instance.

perry: Right. Although I’m not sure this is a losing issue.

clare.malone: The pivot to NASCAR was pretty blatant by Trump as a move to appeal to his base … it kinda felt like a stereotype by him of who voted for him.

natesilver: I’ll just point out that his approval rating had gone up over the past few weeks — a period when he’d been quite quiet on Twitter. So the conventional wisdom that his base loves this stuff seems to be wrong.

micah: Well, it depends how we’re defining “base.”

harry: Can I cite some very preliminary polling data?

micah: Please.

harry: So SurveyUSA polled California on Trump and the NFL. The poll showed a fairly narrow split on the actions taken by the NFL players, but pretty much everyone agreed that Trump should stay the heck out of it. I know it’s California, but 82 percent, for example, said Trump should not have called the “player who kneeled” a “son of a bitch.”

perry: From the poll Harry just linked:

Asked about the national anthem in general and not about NFL protests in specific, 46% of residents statewide say it is wrong not to stand for the national anthem. 40% statewide say not standing is an acceptable way to protest.

This goes to the real issue, which is that while people don’t like how Trump behaved in this or many instances, he is tapping into views people have.

micah: I mean, this is a whole different conversation, but public support would seem to totally depend on how you describe what’s going on. (Our colleague Kathryn is reporting on this.) But is all this about …

Oppression of black Americans?
Respect for the country/flag?
Free speech/unity?

Which of those you prioritize makes a big difference. Colin Kaepernick, who started this, says No. 1. Trump says No. 2. NFL mostly says No. 3.

Of course, this all started with No. 1.

clare.malone: I think where most people are confused about how they feel is probably No. 2.

micah: Yes, and that’s where Trump is on the safest ground, most likely, in terms of public opinion.

natesilver: But maybe the public doesn’t care about the details of the controversy so much as that Trump’s just yammering on and on about it while Puerto Rico is without electricity and there’s a major health care debate and a million other things are going on.

clare.malone: A lot of people grew up with the habit of saying the pledge at school, waiting for the anthem to play — it’s just so ingrained that it makes sense to me that it’s taking awhile for people to wrap their heads around the protest, even if they’re in favor of the free speech right to kneel.

perry: In terms of Trump, yes, he would be better off talking about other issues. I feel like his numbers went up slightly after the debt deal with Democrats. That is why I agree with Nate: This is not some brilliant tactical move.

natesilver: We’ve actually got some research coming out soon suggesting that Trump’s rage tweeting is associated with declines in his approval ratings. It’s possible that’s a correlation without a causation, but it’s at least pretty interesting.

harry: But your points get at something larger, Micah. The political impact this has will depend on how people view the issue.

micah: OK, let’s move to hypothesis No. 2.

Trump is dividing the country.

I’ve seen this idea in a lot of coverage — that Trump is widening divides in the U.S.

harry: Well, the SurveyUSA poll we already cited suggests that people think he is. In that survey, 70 percent think Trump is making the situation regarding the NFL worse. A national poll conducted about a week ago by The Washington Post and ABC News found roughly the same thing more generally:

clare.malone: We were already divided on this issue, and Trump is intentionally fanning the flames of a cultural/political issue. He’s certainly doing nothing to try to interpret or empathize with Kaepernick or anyone who thinks police violence against minorities is a big problem. In fact, he’s trying to paint these protests as mindless anti-Americanism, when in fact they’re trying to draw attention to a specific issue. It’s not an act of kneeling out of petulance — it’s to point out that the American system has an original sin.

natesilver: I mean … who’s going to deny that Trump is widening the divides? And also taking advantage of wide divides that were already there? A more interesting question is whether that trend will reverse itself at some point during (or shortly after) his tenure in office.

micah: Wait a sec.

perry: We already know America is divided along urban-rural/white-nonwhite/ Democrat-Republican lines. But Trump is introducing that divide into new issues. It’s just hard to see the Confederate monument debate playing out the way it is in the Virginia governor’s race, for example, if Hillary Clinton/Marco Rubio/Jeb Bush is president.

micah: Do we have any data showing divides getting wider?

I just think … this seems obviously true, but what’s the evidence for it?

clare.malone: I guess the counterargument is that now people are annoyed at Trump for being so insensitive, and they might become more sympathetic to the kneeling protest out of irritation with the president.

But I have no polling to cite on that.