Los Angeles Lakers small forward LeBron James made yet another divisive comment about the president this week.
At the opening of his I Promise School in Akron, Ohio, James did a sit-down interview with CNN — and used the platform to go after President Trump.
“[Trump] is dividing us and what I’ve noticed over the last few months is that he’s kinda used sport to kinda divide us,” James said, “and that’s something that I can’t relate to because I know that sport was the first time I ever was around someone white and I got the opportunity to see them and learn about them and they got an opportunity to learn about me and we became very good friends.”
“Sports has never been something that divides people, it’s always been something that brings someone together,” he added.
James is essentially saying that Trump uses sports to divide people. He has the right to believe this, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s wrong. It’s the athletes themselves, along with some coaches and the mainstream media’s slanted wall-to-wall coverage of it all, that is causing the divide.
Trump was not the one to kneel for the national anthem in 2016, irking millions of people. That was Colin Kaepernick, and Trump wasn’t even in office when that debacle began. He only truly made his feelings clear at a rally for former Sen. Luther Strange, R-Ala., in September 2017 — the start of the second straight season that featured NFL players kneeling for the anthem.
Trump didn’t start the feud over championship sports teams visiting the White House either. It was the players who decided to skip out on White House visits for political reasons and talk to the press about how they did not want to see the president. Trump only disinvited the Golden State Warriors and Philadelphia Eagles when none of them wanted to show up. He had pleasant meetings with the Chicago Cubs, Houston Astros, Pittsburgh Penguins, the Alabama Crimson Tide football team, and even a number of New England Patriots, when players put their differences aside and paid him a visit.
Plus, it was James who said Trump does not “give a fuck” about people and San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich who called the president a “soulless coward,” just to name a couple of examples. By contrast, Trump has called James, “a great guy” in the past.
Trump also isn’t responsible for the media outlets enabling this divisive rhetoric. He’s not the one working for ESPN who called the president a “white supremacist” like Jemele Hill, nor did he encourage athletes to boycott a White House visit like Max Kellerman. He also wasn’t the Boston Globe sports columnist who demanded an explanation from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick for their relationships with the commander in chief.
There is no doubt that James has done great work for the community, and for that he should absolutely be applauded. But when it comes to politicizing sports, he’s actually part of the problem. James is the one who said he would never sit down face-to-face with Trump. Trump, on the other hand, invited Kaepernick to a race summit and asked NFL players to find people for him to pardon. If that is any indication, then maybe one of them is a little more open-minded when it comes to people who think differently than them.
Perhaps James is just a little upset that his campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Ohio was useless and that Trump had the best performance in the state for a presidential candidate since 1988. If James really cared about not using sports to divide people, maybe he would not have used his platform to support a deeply polarizing Democratic candidate. Before going after Trump again, perhaps James should take some time to reflect on his own actions.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
