President Trump is right. NBA head coaches Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich are massive cowards for dodging easy questions this week about the NBA siding with communist China against the Hong Kong protesters.
Trump also has little room to criticize anyone else on the issue of sucking up to the communist Chinese.
“I watch this guy Steve Kerr,” the president said this week, referring to the Golden State Warriors head coach. “And he was like a little boy, he was so scared to be even answering the question.”
“He couldn’t answer the question,” Trump added. “He was shaking ‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ He didn’t know how to answer the question. And yet he’ll talk about the United States very badly.”
The president then turned to Popovich’s weaselly response to questions about China and Hong Kong, saying the San Antonio Spurs head coach at least “didn’t look quite as scared.”
The president also criticized the NBA as a whole, saying, “I watch the way that Kerr, Popovich, and some of the others were pandering to China and yet to our own country, they don’t, it’s like they don’t respect it.”
For the record, this is what Kerr said this week about the NBA/China debacle:
What I’ve found is that it’s easy to speak on issues that I’m passionate about that I feel like I’m well-versed on and I’ve found that it makes the most sense to stick to topics that fall in that category. So I try to keep my comments to those things and so it’s not difficult. It’s more I’m just trying to learn.
My brother-in-law is actually a Chinese history professor and I emailed him today to tell me what I should be learning about all this and what’s happening and so I’m trying to learn just like everybody else.
Here is Popovich’s bizarre, nonsensical, and winding anti-Trump answer to a simple question about the NBA acquiescing to communist China:
He came out strongly for freedom of speech. I felt great again. He’s been a heck of a leader in that respect and very courageous. Then you compare it to what we’ve had to live through the past three years, it’s a big difference. A big gap there, leadership-wise and courage-wise. It wasn’t easy for him to say. He said that in an environment fraught with possible economic peril.
But he sided with the principles that we all hold dearly, or most of us did until the last three years. I’m thrilled with what he said. The courage and leadership displayed is off the charts by comparison.
Trump is not wrong when he says these are cowardly responses to very easy questions. The Communist Party of China, which is responsible for the murder of an estimated 45 million people and has another 3 million currently imprisoned in concentration camps, is the bad guy; Hong Kong is the good guy. This is not difficult.
Trump’s message, however, would probably have a lot more punch to it were it not for the fact he was the one who tweeted last week, “Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!”
Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2019
If we want to talk about “pandering to China,” let’s talk about the president of the United States hailing the 70th anniversary of the birth of its murderous communist regime. Kerr and Popovich’s nonanswers this week are acts of cowardice, certainly, but Trump’s tweet was an act of pro-China sycophancy, no different from the New York Times‘ glowing 1976 obituary for Chairman Mao Zedong, after whom Chinese President Xi Jinping styles himself, or former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrongly (and knowingly) insisting that Xi is not a dictator. Yes, bureaucratic American lickspittles have in the past tripped over themselves to congratulate China on the start of its despotic regime. But that is not really a defense of Trump, who ran on a platform promising to make American foreign policy tough and, dare I say, great again, now is it?
Further, though they are cowards, nothing Kerr and Popovich have said or done compares to the damage caused by the president’s pro-anniversary message. He is the president of the United States, after all, and he is continuing the sorry tradition of American leaders legitimizing the violent takeover of China by a mass-murdering government.
It would be nice if we had a commander in chief who could argue from a position of authority that fellow Americans should never pander to despotic regimes. But that isn’t the president that we have.
