Why Trump Used a Megan Rapinoe Tweet to Go Off on the NBA
On Wednesday morning, President Trump fired off a tweet thread that was ostensibly about U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who's currently competing in the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in France.
Rapinoe had been asked if she'd attend the traditional White House coronation that comes after an American sports team wins a championship, and she forcefully responded that she would not. Trump answered back with the usual bluster, but his tweet also contained a peculiar, unrelated nugget: that the NBA dropped the term "owner." The origin of that random aside has a bit of a winding history.
On June 3, TMZ reported an "exclusive" that multiple NBA teams had decided against using the term "owner." The story did not garner much attention at the time, because, as TMZ noted, "there's no real pressure coming from the NBA to change [the] titles."
A few weeks later, TMZ successfully located NBA Commissioner Adam Silver in New York City, and asked him to comment on their scoop. He too noted that there's no hard-and-fast rule in place, and that he didn't want to "overreact to the term," but added that the league office had more or less moved away from "owner" in favor of "governor." He cited Draymond Green as a player who had publicly identified the obvious issue with the "owner" verbiage—in a league of predominantly black American players, it's demeaning to refer to your boss as an "owner." (The NBA, which is touted for its relative ideological diversity compared to other sports leagues, is made up of an almost exclusively white governorship group, with Michael Jordan and the Charlotte Hornets being a notable exception.)
On Tuesday, Carlson interviewed Lawrence Jones, the editor in chief of campusreform.com, a self-described "conservative watchdog to the nation’s higher education system." After Carlson led off with a (sarcastic) assertion that NBA players are oppressed, Jones weighed in on what he deemed to be a PC police problem. "Many of these players have their own businesses, and they call themselves the owners," he noted, which is true in a literal sense, though it ignores the racial disparity present in the NBA between players and upper management. Jones additionally pointed out that, "this is not a slave term, this is just a business term." Trump, who has deferred to Carlson's judgment on topics as serious as starting a war in Iran, seems to have caught the segment—and it's not surprising that a piece on sports ownership would resonate with the president.
Trump has long had ambitions to be a sports team owner himself. In the '80s, he bought the New Jersey Generals of the now-deceased United States Football League, a venture that blew up in spectacular fashion. More recently, in 2014, Trump bid on the NFL's Buffalo Bills, eventually losing out to fracking billionaire Terry Pegula. Trump later tweeted a classic actually I'm happy it didn't work out response. There may have been more to that episode: In February 2019, Michael Cohen testified that Trump allegedly inflated his net value during the bidding process in order to obtain a loan from Deutsche Bank.
Since launching his presidential campaign, Trump has used sports ownership as a culture-war cudgel, like when he famously said at a 2017 Alabama rally for then-Senate hopeful Luther Strange: “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!’” In the immediate aftermath, some high-level NFL executives and "owners" called out Trump's comments as "divisive." But by May 2018, they had succumbed to his rhetoric, unanimously approving a rule that every player on the field had to “stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem,” or risk their team being fined. The idea was so unpopular that it was killed not even two months later.
Rapinoe, the original target of Trump's NBA-adjacent tweets, fits in with a cross-section of players across different sports who are vocal about Trump and forced patriotism. She has been protesting during the national anthem for years. She began kneeling in solidarity with the NFL's Colin Kaepernick, and after that practice was banned by the U.S. Soccer Federation, she switched to standing in silence without her hand on her heart. Her teammate, Ali Krieger, responded to Trump's Twitter criticisms by referencing his history of alleged sexual misconduct, as well as his administration's anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant positions:
Regardless of their official titles, or the president's complaints, ownership groups still wield quite a bit of power—after the Toronto Raptors beat the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals, Raptors "owner" Larry Tanenbaum was presented with, and hoisted, the championship trophy before any of the players on the team did. In that same Finals series, Mark Stevens, a billionaire with an ownership stake in the Warriors, shoved Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry. His punishment was a one-year suspension from attending games, and a $500,000 fine that's the equivalent of $14.78 for someone making $68,000 a year. There was no word from the president on the incident.
Originally Appeared on GQ
