President Trump’s repeated attacks on professional football players who protest the national anthem are “appropriate,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday.
“This isn’t about the president being against anyone,” Sanders told reporters at the White House. “This is about the president being for something.”
Sanders said Trump’s focus was on “being for honoring our flag, honoring our national anthem,” and not on being against the growing number of football players who have knelt during the national anthem before NFL games to protest racial inequality in the U.S.
“I think that it’s always appropriate for the president of the United States to defend our flag, to defend the national anthem and to defend the men and women who fought and died to defend it,” Sanders said.
Trump said Friday during a rally in Huntsville, Ala. that NFL owners should remove any “son of a bitch” that declines to stand during the national anthem, and has in recent days called for players who protest the flag to be fired. His comments and subsequent tweets over the weekend have touched off a heated debate about free speech and the president’s priorities amid a standoff with North Korea, a humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico and a battle to repeal Obamacare on Capitol Hill.
“It really doesn’t take that long to type out 140 characters,” Sanders said when faced with questions Monday about why Trump sent so many tweets about football.
The press secretary challenged players protesting the flag to instead demonstrate against the police officers stationed at their NFL games, given that the football protests began with a player who knelt during the anthem to call attention to police brutality against black people.
“If the debate is really, for them, about police brutality, they should probably protest the officers on the field who are protecting them instead of the American flag,” Sanders said.
