Trump basks in chants of ‘LeBron James sucks’ at Pennsylvania rally
“How about basketball? How about LeBron?” Trump began as the crowd began to boo.
Saying he “felt badly for LeBron,” Trump claimed that ratings for the sixth and deciding game of the NBA Finals, in which James’s Lakers defeated the Miami Heat, were “down 71 percent” from 2019.
“I didn’t watch one shot — I get bored,” the president said. “Back, forth, back, forth. You know why? When they don’t respect our country, when they don’t respect our flag, nobody wants to watch. Nobody. And the NFL is way down. You got to stand for our flag, you got to really be great to our flag and to our anthem, and if you don’t do that, we’re not watching.”
At that point, Trump turned to listen to chants of “LeBron James sucks!”
“What a crowd! What a crowd!” he exclaimed.
He also was part of a multimillion-dollar effort by celebrities and Mike Bloomberg to pay off lingering court fines and fees for Florida felons so that roughly 13,000 of them would be eligible to vote in the presidential election, according to the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald and ProPublica. Although the number fell short of expectations, the report noted that the number of voters added could be significant in a key state.
Last month, in an interview with Rush Limbaugh, Trump called James “a spokesman for the Democratic Party, and a very nasty spokesman.”
“He’s a great basketball player, but people don’t want to see a guy that’s that way,” Trump said. “They don’t want to see that. You know, we have enough difficulty during the week. You don’t want to sit down and watch a basketball game and then watch somebody that hates your guts, okay? And he’s a hater.”
James subsequently referred to Trump in telling the New York Times that he “won’t go back and forth with that guy.” A few days later, however, during the final presidential debate, he reportedly shared on social media a split-screen image of Trump and Joe Biden that had a clown face placed over the president’s head. “Please vote!!!!” James added in a text block with the image.
Ratings for the NBA Finals last month were down markedly compared to last year, although reports have differed on how much and for what reasons. Trump tweeted a Breitbart story after the Finals ended that claimed a “66 percent drop,” from 18.34 million viewers in 2019 to a peak of 6.028 million viewers this year, which the president cited as proof of “Zero interest!”
According to a report from Bloomberg, Nielsen data showed a 51 percent decline from 2019 in average viewership of the Finals, which were staged four months later than usual because of the coronavirus pandemic. Sports Media Watch had viewership for the decisive Game 6 at 8.29 million viewers, making for a 56 percent drop from 2019′s 18.76 million. A search for a report of a 71 percent drop showed that number claimed by RT.com, a Russia-backed news network.
In a town hall aired by Sinclair Broadcast Group last month, Trump took a question via video from former NFL star Brett Favre, who said: “The NBA and the NFL are struggling with lower ratings as fans clearly do not want political messaging mixed with their sports. So how should the leagues support and promote an anti-racism position without becoming political and alienating fans?”
Claiming then that ratings for the NBA Finals were “down 70 percent, more than that,” Trump said: “People don’t want to see all of the politics. They’ve got enough politics, with me and with everybody else. And they don’t want to see it with football or sports, on Sunday or whenever they happen to be watching.”
“I think that football ought to get back to football and basketball to basketball,” he added. “And let politics remain separate.”
A blunter version of that sentiment was famously uttered in 2018 by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who told James and fellow NBA star Kevin Durant to “shut up and dribble.” She was responding to comments those two had made about Trump that included James declaring that the president “really don’t give a f— about the people.”
James addressed Ingraham’s remarks by asserting that he “will definitely not shut up and dribble.” Describing himself as “more than an athlete,” James said, “I mean too much to so many kids that feel like they don’t have a way out, and they need someone to help lead them out of the situation they’re in.”
After James and almost every other NBA player and coach joined in kneeling during the anthem when the NBA resumed its season in July, he praised former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick — himself a target in the past of Trump’s criticism — for providing the inspiration.
“Kaep was someone who stood up when times weren’t comfortable, when people didn’t understand, when people refused to listen to what he was saying,” James said. “If you go back and listen to his postgame interviews when he was talking about why he was kneeling, it had absolutely nothing to do with the flag. It had absolutely nothing to do about the soldiers, the men and women that keep our land free.
“He explained that, and the ears were closed. People never listened. They refused to listen. I did. A lot of my people in the Black community did listen.”
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