Last week, President Donald Trump picked a fight with the NFL, arguing that players like Colin Kaepernick who take a knee during the national anthem should be fired. As he has done so many times before, the president kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Maybe the commotion will work to his short-term political advantage. But whether it does or not, he has once again demonstrated how trivial our politics has become.
In his Vanity of Human Wishes, the first-century satirist Juvenal lamented that the citizens of Rome, who used to “grant power, high office, the legions, everything,” had become obsessed with just two things, “bread and circuses.” The people, he argued, had forsaken the duties of citizenship and cared only for spectacle. So it goes in early-21st-century America, with the president himself serving as circus master.
The Trump agenda was thought by many to be about putting average people back in charge of the government. That was the clarion call the president made in his stark inaugural address in January. “Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs,” he intoned from the steps of the Capitol, “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”
But so far, he has accomplished precious little in these realms. Obamacare repeal stalled hopelessly in Congress. While tax reform appears to be on track, ambitions for a thoroughgoing reform have been scaled back to something resembling a typical Republican tax cut, focused on corporations and the wealthy. Trump has failed to get funding for his vaunted border wall. Meanwhile, his administration has been beset by staff turnovers and political scandal. All in all, his tenure seems to be that of a fairly typical, if more than typically incompetent, Republican.
And it has seemed of late that the core Trump electorate is growing a little restless. Steve Bannon, the former head of his populist brain trust, had barely left the White House when he unleashed the Breitbart forces on the opposite side of Trump in the Alabama Senate GOP run-off. Bannon backed Roy Moore against Trump’s (and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s) pick, Luther Strange. Sarah Palin, another major Trump supporter, also backed Moore. And so, for that matter, did Alabama’s primary voters. Moore cruised to an easy victory over Strange in the primary.
These sorts of reverses, of course, will not do much for Trump’s image as a fantastic dealmaker who is working on behalf of the people. So little wonder that he injected himself into the NFL’s melodrama over the national anthem. Never mind that the president’s constitutional duties have nothing to do with opining on sports. It was a way for him to signal his commitment to the values shared by his frustrated voters—without having to deliver any policy achievement of substance.
This kind of cheap showmanship has been Trump’s stock in trade since he declared his candidacy back in 2015. Recall that he really took off during the primaries when, in response to the San Bernardino shooting, he first called for an outright Muslim ban. Taken as a policy proposal, this was the height of irresponsibility: How could we hope to prosecute the global war on terror if we alienate Muslim allies? But Trump never meant it as an actual policy. It was a marketing gimmick—intended to reframe the political debate around Trump himself, with the calculation (correct, as it turned out) that Republican primary voters would find it deeply appealing on a gut level.
Even his campaign pledge to build a border wall was a publicity stunt. As he told the New York Times in January 2016, when he saw his audiences’ interest flagging, “I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.” Talk to actual border-security experts who are committed to keeping illegal immigration to a minimum, and they’ll tell you that money is better spent on other resources, especially more agents. But Trump understood that a killer line like “big beautiful wall” is what actually plays in Poughkeepsie. And, not coincidentally, Trump won 61 percent of the Poughkeepsie vote during the GOP primary.
This is what Trump has always had a preternatural talent for—not business per se, and certainly not government, but marketing, himself specifically. Given the manifest disappointments of his administration, it was time for Trump to remind his core voters why they fell in love with him. He knows this demographic like the back of his hand. Predominantly male, white, and older, his voters overlap to a remarkable degree with the NFL’s core audience. They’re offended by protests during the national anthem. Doubly so when the protesters are wealthy athletes who make more money playing a single game than they’ll see in a decade. Meanwhile, the NFL is taking a hands-off approach—caught between the (mostly) African-American players who deeply sympathize with Kaepernick’s cause and the (mostly) white fans who think he is ungrateful. It was a perfect opportunity for Trump, the consummate self-promoter, to transform it into a debate about himself.
And if the cultural elites are outraged—all the better! It helps him reinforce the notion that he stands for the average Joe, and they do not. Trump cleverly cast Jeb Bush in that role during the primaries, and he is just as happy for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to play the part now.
It seems almost quaint to point out that nothing of substance will come of this controversy. No citizen will be made better or worse off because of it. The government will not be reformed. The nation will not be made safer. There will be no great national conversation on race, policing, crime, celebrity, or anything of the sort. It’s all a show, intended to arouse the passions of the mob. For Trump, against Trump—it does not matter, so long as the people are riled up. The actual problems our nation faces will have to wait while the citizens enjoy their bread and circuses, served up by their president for his own ends.
Jay Cost is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
