Prominent athletes lined up to denounce President Trump after he rescinded a White House invitation to Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry on Saturday morning and attacked NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem, indirectly calling the football player a “son of a bitch,” at a rally on Friday night. Some of the most notable responses below:
U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!
A #POTUS who's name alone creates division and anger. Who's words inspire dissension and hatred can't possibly "Make America Great Again"
— Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) September 23, 2017
With everything that's going on in our country, why are YOU focused on who's kneeling and visiting the White House???#StayInYoLane
And I doubt he's man enough to call any of those players a son of a bitch to their face...
I support the NBA World Champion Golden State Warriors, their owners, players and fans.
It's really sad man ... our president is a asshole
Still wondering how this guy is running our country....
LeBron James’s tweet received hundreds of thousands of retweets and likes.
President Trump redoubled his position later in the day.
Earlier, he had tweeted that he was taking back a White House invitation to Curry, one of the best players in the NBA.
Curry has been outspoken in his criticism of Trump and said on Friday that he did not want to attend White House celebrations in honor of the Warriors who won the NBA title this year — so Trump’s tweet was the equivalent of “You can’t fire me, I quit!” After Trump’s tweets, the Warriors announcedthat nobody on their team would be visiting the White House, though the team will still make it to Washington.
JUST IN: Golden State Warriors announce they will not visit the White House: "President Trump has made it clear that we are not invited" pic.twitter.com/E56vo6aFIs
(Trump was probably moved to make his intemperate declaration about Curry by his favorite TV show, Fox & Friends, which had aired a segmenton the matter shortly before Trump’s tweet. Yes, this is real life.)
In a related development, the University of North Carolina championship basketball team announced it would not visit the White House this year. A spokesperson said the team was “fine with going” and cited scheduling conflicts.
At a rally in Alabama Friday night in support of Senator Luther Strange’s election bid, President Trump delivered one of his signature rants, focusing on players who have chosen to kneel as the national anthem is being played. Kaepernick, the now-blackballed quarterback who kicked off the trend in an effort to draw attention to racially biased policing (sparking an ongoing culture-war skirmish in the process), is the most prominent example.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump said. He encouraged fans to leave games when players kneel for the anthem.
He also went off on the NFL in general, denouncing the league for penalizing tackles that could lead to dangerous injuries — though he said that many owners were “friends of mine,” and indeed, several gave generously to his campaign. (Trump, it should be noted, once hastened the destruction of a league competitor.)
The president’s comments drew a vigorous response from the National Football League Players Association:
And NFL commissioner Roger Goodell issued an unusual, though much less strong, statement:
Colin Kaepernick’s mother had a more amusing take on the situation.
Trump referred to any NFL player who protests racism and police violence as a “son of a bitch’ who should be fired. http://es.pn/2fokdRK
Guess that makes me a proud bitch!
The hashtag #TakeAKnee was trending on Twitter Saturday morning, leading to speculation that more players would follow Kaepernick’s lead on Sunday.
Just last week — though it now seems like months ago — Trump criticizedESPN after Jemele Hill, a prominent black network personality, called the president a “white supremacist” on Twitter. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called for Hill to be fired from the network. In a message to employees, ESPN president John Skipper said that the network is “about sports” and that commentary about politics should not be “inflammatory or personal.” But in a world where the president routinely attacks athletes by name, it has become increasingly clear that the division between the two worlds has all but disappeared.
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