Trump's Big NFL Blunder

The Democrats, even with their warmongering and their Wall Street agenda, have polled over 65 million votes in the last three presidential elections. Neither Trump, Romney nor McCain made it to 63 million.

But thanks to gerrymandering and the 200-plus-year-old gift to the slavocracy/plantocracy (Electoral College) Trump won the White House in 2016 by accumulating 304 electoral votes. He accomplished this primarily by flipping the industrial Midwest -- Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio -- as well as Pennsylvania. 

I didn't think it was possible. I thought the Southern Strategy was dead in presidential politics. I thought Obama had killed it; plus, there is the overall demographic trend, summarized in the August Newsweek story, "WHITE NATIONALISTS ARE RIGHT: AMERICA IS BECOMING LESS WHITE":

Nevertheless, under the current racial demographics widely accepted across the U.S., white people have seen signs that their dominance over the general population might be waning. The Census Bureau announced in 2012 that non-Hispanic whites made up a minority of births in the U.S. for the first time. That year, minorities made up 50.4 percent of the nation's infants, in part because of a booming Hispanic population. 

Some demographers have predicted the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation by 2050, with African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics and other minority groups outnumbering the people we call white. 

The shift in the nation's racial demographics have already been stark. In 1965, whites represented 85 percent of the population, with the other 15 percent made up of African-Americans. These days, white people make up just 60 percent of the nation, while Hispanics account for 18 percent and Asians about 6 percent. 

"The forces behind this transformation are a mix of immigration, births and deaths. The United States is more than four decades into what has been, in absolute numbers, the biggest immigration wave in its history–more than 40 million arrivals. Unlike previous waves that were almost entirely from Europe, the modern influx has been dominated by Hispanic and Asian immigrants," the Pew Research Center concluded in 2012. 

But I also believed in an acute public disdain for the progressive charlatanism of Obama and Clinton; my mistake is I thought that there was enough reality to the mythical minivan piloting soccer mom that a TV huckster like Trump wouldn't stand a chance in Keystone State and America's Dairyland suburbs. Of course those were the voters who gave Trump his 'W.'

Now Trump is going all in with the Southern Strategy, which you will recall was Kevin Phillips' plan after the 1968 presidential election for Nixon to co-opt George Wallace voters (blue-collar, lunch-bucket Democrat bigots) for the GOP. 

Trump is going all in by attacking the last refuge of national identity in the United States, the National Football League. He is sowing division by questioning the "Americanism" of players, overwhelming black, who are protesting institutional racism by kneeling or raising a clenched fist during the pre-game performance of the national anthem.

Trump has done this in the belief that it is good politics, that NFL viewership is "way down" because fans are turned off by player activism. By demanding that these players be fired and calling them "sons of bitches," Trump is looking to fluff up his approval ratings.

But Trump has been gulled by "fake news," as Manuela Tobias susses out in a PolitiFact piece published Sunday. The polls which purportedly establish anthem protests as a main reason for people not watching football are a joke:

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung pointed to a Seton Hall Sports Poll that found that 56 percent of 841 respondents cited players not standing for the national anthem as a reason for last year’s ratings drop.

But as CNBC pointed out, the poll asked why other people — rather than respondents — aren't watching football. About half the people polled said they either follow sports "not closely" or "not at all," but coverage of Kaepernick’s kneeling was widely covered by the media.

A similar J.D. Power survey Cheung cited also reported national anthem protests as the main reason NFL fans watched less games last season.

"Among the 12 percent who watch less (sports), 26 percent of them say national anthem protests are to blame, however those respondents reflect only 3 percent of the full, nationwide sample," the researchers wrote.

Various pundits criticized the survey results as negligible, pointing out that for every one person turned off by protests, 10 NFL fans tuned in.

"If a larger share of respondents claimed they watched more NFL, the fact that NFL ratings were actually down last year is good enough reason to discard this survey as meaningless," Patrick Redford wrote in Deadspin.

Like the Seton Hall survey, the reasons for tuning out were offered as a list for respondents to choose from, so people weren’t necessarily offering the anthem protests on their own, and respondents could provide multiple answers.

Paulsen said that NFL rating drops aren’t unprecedented, with similar declines in the ‘80s, ‘90s and the first half of the 2000s.

"It’s only now that people are deciding it’s a political issue, that people are really focusing on it. There’s any number of reasons to believe that what’s happening right now is not necessarily political," Paulsen said, including a loss of interest among younger viewers.

NFL viewership is down, which Tobias' story acknowledges -- eight percent in 2016 (it was double that the first part of the season, but rebounded later) and on pace for an equal drop this year. And Trump is right when he says "Boring games yes," but wrong when he attributes ultra-nationalism as a primary reason for fans tuning out the NFL. Why? The ratings drop has hit other sports as well, and in those sports, like soccer, anthem protests are not an issue.

The foremost reason for the NFL ratings drop is lopsided games. Even when the games are competitive, there is very little consistent action. Why is this?  Money. Owners don't want to see high-priced quarterbacks taking unnecessary risks. The best game I saw on Sunday was Houston-New England because Texans rookie QB Deshaun Watson played with abandon.

As for secondary and tertiary causes of the ratings drop, I think the incessant militarism of NFL telecasts and the deepening knowledge, both popular and scientific, of CTE are bigger reasons than an offended patriotism.

Trump is a shrewd operator. He thinks by fracturing the present-day foundation of American national identity he will make some political hay. Patrick Martin of World Socialist Web Site ("Behind Trump’s attack on the NFL football players") sees Trump producing a "Reichstag fire":

Under conditions of mounting war threats against North Korea; the devastation of Puerto Rico, a US territory, by Hurricane Maria; and the near-collapse of the latest attempt by the Republican-controlled Congress to repeal Obamacare, the US president devoted 12 tweets in 30 hours to the observance of the national anthem at sporting events. No other event warranted such attention.

What took place last weekend arose from a deliberate decision by the president of the United States to weigh in against a long-running campaign of protest against police brutality and violence, especially against African-American youth. Trump sought to provoke as much outrage as possible, particularly among the black athletes, who comprise 75 percent of NFL teams, and in that way arouse his ultra-right and fascistic social base.

Trump does not care that his positions are massively unpopular, or that the players have widespread support. He is not seeking to assemble an electoral or parliamentary majority, but to whip up a lynch-mob atmosphere within a minority of the population, which can be directed towards the violent suppression of any public opposition to the policies of his government, and particularly against opposition to the actions of the police and military.

Trump’s last tweet on Monday morning was perhaps the most brazenly racist, as he hailed the performance of NASCAR race drivers, nearly all white, contrasting the absence of protests at Sunday’s race in New Hampshire to the actions of football players, who protested in large numbers at 15 game sites.

This isn't 1933. Trump isn't the president of the Confederate States of America. Going after the NFL was a big mistake. At this point -- four autumns before the next presidential election -- I think Trump is doomed.