Trump: “Maybe [Kneeling NFL Players] Shouldn’t Be In the Country”

I wrote today about how forced patriotism is simply just fascism, and the President of the United States provided a perfect example of my point this morning on the most powerful TV show in the world, Fox & Friends.

“You have to stand proudly for the National Anthem. You shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe they shouldn’t be in the country…the NFL owners did the right thing” -President @realDonaldTrumppic.twitter.com/bt36t4EX5u

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) May 24, 2018

This hearkens back to last week’s ridiculous debate about Trump calling MS-13 gang members “animals,” and conservatives’ desire to read that quote independent of the man who said it, asserting how innocuous it is. Well, you can draw a direct line between “MS-13 gang members are animals” and “protesting NFL players shouldn’t be in the country.” They both have the same endgame in mind.

The message from Trump is crystal clear: if you are part of the “bad” group of people (read: dark-skinned), you are not American, and therefore are not deserving of constitutional rights. By declaring all MS-13 gang members “animals,” that opens the door for Trump to assert that anyone is a part of MS-13, and presto: they’re subhuman. It’s not hyperbolic to say that this movement’s endgame is in the same vein as Hitler’s final solution (who wrote in Mein Kampf how much he admired America, by the way), given the ethnic cleansing campaign currently being conducted by ICE.

We are literally separating children from their parents and putting them in what can only be defined as concentration camps on our military bases, where we have been unable to protect these kids from sexual assault. This kind of darkness is directly connected to Trump’s broadsides against the NFL, black lives matter and any other organization that scared white America identifies as nonwhite. Anyone who helps to rhetorically retract from any minority’s humanity right now will be remembered by history as a useful idiot doing the bidding of an evil force which has existed in this country since at least the dawn of slavery.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.