24th September, 2017
Photo: BBC/Reuters
US President Donald Trump has urged a boycott of the National Football League (NFL) to force teams to punish players who protest during the national anthem.
In a growing row with the sports world, Mr Trump repeated that such players should be fired or suspended.
The comments have been condemned as “offensive” and “divisive”.
At the start of the first game since Mr Trump’s remarks, many players and staff from the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Baltimore Ravens knelt in London.
Jacksonville Jaguars’ owner Shahid Khan – who donated $1m (£740,000) to the Trump campaign – locked his arms with players in an unusual scene, as owners rarely join players on the pitch.
Mr Trump’s remarks can be seen as an attempt to appeal to core supporters, BBC North America reporter Anthony Zurcher says.
This is a fight Mr Trump relishes, our reporter adds, because he knows his base will flock to him when he questions the patriotism of wealthy athletes. It may also be a way of deflecting attention after a difficult week, in which:
- His latest effort to repeal Obama-era healthcare legislation suffered a potentially fatal blow after Senator John McCain said he could not vote for it
- His candidate in Alabama’s Republican Senate runoff on Tuesday, Senator Luther Strange, lagged behind former State Supreme Court justice Roy Moore, polls suggests
In two tweets early on Sunday just hours before a series of NFL games, Mr Trump repeated his call for clubs to punish players who protested during the US anthem.
He was referring to a string of controversial protests started by player Colin Kaepernick last year when he sat or kneeled during the anthem to highlight the treatment of black Americans.
To a crowd of cheering supporters on Friday, Mr Trump asked: “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… he is fired’?”
-BBC