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New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees earned the ire of President Donald Trump in recent weeks by changing his perspective on peaceful protests during the national anthem, acknowledging that those demonstrations had nothing to do with disrespecting the American flag or military and were instead focused on raising awareness of racial inequality.
Brees said as much in a statement to the President from his own Instagram page, emphasizing the need to look past the image of NFL players kneeling during the anthem rather than standing. However, President Trump ignored that advice.
Trump addressed Brees’ public statements during an interview with his son on the Team Trump YouTube page, calling the Saints quarterback’s initial remarks a “beautiful statement,” and describing the sequence of events as, “Proud of the flag. Proud of the country. Proud of everything. Talked about his father and his grandfather serving and then the following day, was almost like ‘I take it back.’”
Brees has spoken before about the meaning of the national anthem to him personally, having had grandparents serve in World War II; the President mistakenly identified Brees’ father as another family member who joined the armed forces, but that was not the case.
“I was shocked, because I consider him a great football player, but I consider him a champion and a star and I didn’t understand what was going on,” President Trump continued. “And he took it back and I’ve never seen anything like it and I think he hurt himself very badly.
“I was going to put out that he’ll regret that in the future years because you stand for the flag. You have to stand for the flag and our anthem. The national anthem. You have to stand. I think the NFL’s gonna have a lot of problems if they don’t.”
This was the complaint many of Brees’ teammates and critics leveled at him when this drama first started — that he was too wrapped up in the symbolism of anthem procedures to grasp the deeper issues and motivations at play. Despite Brees’ thorough breakdown of why he changed his opinion, the President doesn’t seem interested in reading it, chalking up the gesture to bad advice from a public relations manager.
We’ll see if Brees responds to the President again, but both men probably have more important issues to address right now, between Brees’ charitable efforts and the responsibilities leveled on the Oval Office.
Donald Trump spoke about #Saints QB Drew Brees (and U.S. Soccer and Roger Goodell) tonight during the "Triggered" interview with his son.
Here's the transcript from that segment: pic.twitter.com/FNobk9MD8N
— Amie Just (@Amie_Just) June 19, 2020
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