Donald Trump, a racist idiot with nothing better to do than whine on Twitter while U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico are facing what CNN calls “apocalyptic” conditions in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, spent his Saturday freaking out about NFL players taking a knee in protest during the National Anthem, referring to them as “son of a bitches” who should be fired. As we reported yesterday, this simply convinced all sorts of professional athletes and general famous people to join in on the protest, with even quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady making carefully apolitical Instagram posts about “brotherhood” and “unity”—possibly implying, but not explicitly saying, that they support their teammates’ right to kneel during the National Anthem.
Of course, when Donald Trump says something stupid that drives more people to oppose him, there’s only one person whose opinion really matters: Donald Trump. As reported by Variety, Trump is leaning further into his “son of a bitches” angle, suggesting now that fans should boycott the NFL “until players stop disrespecting our Flag & Country” (by which he probably means that they should stop disrespecting him). Trump also reiterates that players who kneel should be fired, which is something that Sarah Huckabee Sanders should’ve told him is against the rules.
With a lot of today’s football games having already kicked off, Trump has now taken a break from whatever he does when he’s not on Twitter (like making important government decisions and spending time with the family he definitely cares about) to offer some more thoughts on what private citizens should or should not be able to do. As it turns out, he’s totally fine with football players “standing with locked arms” (as some teams did today), but “kneeling is not acceptable.” He then added “Bad ratings!” to a tweet because that’s literally all he cares about.