Two days later, Kaepernick expanded on his explanation. “I’m seeing things happen to people that don’t have a voice, people that don’t have a platform to talk and have their voices heard and effect change. So I’m in the position where I can do that and I’m going to do that for people that can’t,” he told the local media. “I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice—for everyone. That’s not happening. People are dying in vain because this country isn’t holding their end of the bargain up.”19
Kaepernick also noted of the two presidential nominees, “You have Hillary who has called black teens or black kids ‘super predators,’ you have Donald Trump who’s openly racist.”
The anthem protest blitzed America’s consciousness in a way that no sports-related story had since the turn of the century. Within a week of the NFL.com interview, just about every media outlet in the country was covering Colin Kaepernick—and everyone, it seemed, had an opinion.
Sensing an opportunity to further rile his base, Trump pounced. “Well, I have followed it and I think it’s personally not a good thing. I think it’s a terrible thing,” the Republican nominee told a conservative talk radio show in Seattle. “Maybe he should find a country that works better for him.”20
Kaepernick was an imperfect messenger. On August 31, amid the national uproar over his protest, a local reporter tweeted out a photograph of the quarterback at practice a few weeks earlier wearing socks that showed pigs dressed like police officers. Months later, after the election concluded, Kaepernick revealed that he did not vote, drawing harsh criticism from liberal commentators who questioned his seriousness as a social activist.
Yet he had launched a national dialogue virtually overnight. And though he wasn’t backing down, Kaepernick did make an attempt to refine the contours of that dialogue. Before the team’s final preseason game in San Diego, he met with Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret who had played briefly in the NFL. The two decided that kneeling, rather than sitting on the bench, was a more respectful gesture. At the game, while being pelted with boos, Kaepernick was joined on a knee by his teammate Eric Reid.
By September, Kaepernick was on the cover of Time magazine. Dozens of professional athletes across other sports had joined in the demonstration. Stories popped up across the country of black high-schoolers kneeling before their games as well.
Trump could not have asked for anything more. The controversy was perfectly suited to his campaign’s narrative of a culture in rebellion against the country’s traditional values, with anyone holding said values made to feel backward and bigoted for rebelling against the rebellion. Even sweeter for the Republican nominee: His opponent played right into it.
“You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said on September 9 at an LGBT for Hillary gala in New York City, “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”
Arguing that Trump had “given voice” to those elements, she continued, “Some of those folks—they are irredeemable. But thankfully, they are not America.”
THE FIRST GENERAL ELECTION DEBATE, HELD SEPTEMBER 26 AT HOFSTRA University in New York, served as a ninety-minute microcosm of the Trump-Clinton contrast. With a record eighty-four million people tuning in, Clinton was steady if unspectacular, giving safe and crisp answers while keeping her cool throughout. She was clearly well prepared. Trump, on the other hand, was out of his depth. He was baited into damaging sound bites and fitful, long, rambling responses. He was blindingly unprepared.
Clinton was scored the consensus winner. Even the Republican’s cable news advocate struggled to spin his performance.
“The good news for Donald Trump is that he discussed serious issues for ninety minutes,” Howard Kurtz, the conservative media reporter, said on Fox News afterward. “But Hillary Clinton won the night on points. She was aggressive out of the gate, and in basketball terms, she controlled the ball. He started to talk louder, faster, trying to compete with her. And as time went on, it seemed to me that he got a little more disjointed.”
To Trump, the verdicts of his debate defeat were reflective of nothing more than a biased jury of journalists. The Republican nominee had used the media as a foil throughout the campaign, tapping into decades of percolating distrust of (and bitterness toward) the press corps among conservatives. He called out and derided individual reporters by name. He blacklisted certain publications—the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, the Des Moines Register—refusing to grant them access to cover his campaign events. He accused the Fourth Estate of peddling “fake news” to deceive the masses (a perversion of the term used to describe attempts by foreign troublemakers to sow chaos in the electorate by propagating deceptive information online).
In an era defined by friction over “snowflakes” (overly sensitive people) acting “woke” (highly attuned to political correctness) in response to “microaggressions” (perceived slights to marginalized persons or communities), Trump’s hostility toward the press, increasingly perceived as the arbiters of American dialogue, made him a hero to the right.
He was not always wrong with his charges of bias or hysteria. Twitter-happy reporters and click-drunk newsrooms and advertising-mad cable news shows turned no small number of molehills into mountains. In early August, during a rally in Virginia, Trump teased a mother about her crying baby, flippantly remarking, “You can get the baby out of here.”21 After dozens of outlets reported that he’d ejected an infant from his event, PolitiFact was forced to weigh in: “Donald Trump accurately says media wrong that he kicked baby out of rally.”
Even so, the GOP nominee deserved the historic number of negative headlines dropped on his campaign. Trump told hundreds and likely thousands of provable lies during the 2016 campaign, falsehoods both big (his supposed opposition to the Iraq War) and small (his endorsement from Immigration and Customs Enforcement). He routinely said things far outside the mainstream of political discourse, be they personal insults or pointless boasts or menacing threats.
Even when he stood to benefit from a news cycle, such as when the New York Times and other prominent outlets reported on the details of the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s emails (tough press coverage the right never seemed bothered by), Trump had a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The same day that the State Department’s inspector general released a report excoriating Clinton for her email habits, he stole headlines by lashing out at the Republican governor of New Mexico.
Professional press-bashers on the right, such as the Media Research Center, waged a campaign to delegitimize the coverage of Trump. The group’s signage—“DON’T BELIEVE THE LIBERAL MEDIA!”—was ubiquitous around Cleveland the week of the convention, “LIBERAL MEDIA” written in bloody red. And yet it was the MRC’s president, the longtime conservative activist Brent Bozell, who had been among the most strident essayists in the infamous National Review issue, calling Trump “the greatest charlatan” he’d ever seen in politics.22 Bozell, a Cruz supporter in the primary, also called Trump a “huckster” and a “shameless self-promoter” in one Fox News appearance, concluding, “God help this country if this man were president.”