During a freewheeling speech to a raucous crowd in Wisconsin, Donald Trump lamented the absence of sports from American TV screens for much of the summer – and complained that too much politics has been shown instead.
Mr Trump is a famously voracious consumer of political TV shows, in particular on Fox News; at a recent White House press conference, he recalled watching a total nine hours of the network’s opinion shows almost in one sitting.
However, in the midst of a rambling monologue calling for NFL players to stand and sing the national anthem rather than “taking a knee” in protest at violent anti-Black racism, the president voiced regret that the absence of sports has inadvertently given him more airtime.
“You know what, we have enough politics, right? We have politics here, we have politics all over. In fact, sometimes I have to turn it off, I just – I can’t do it anymore. I can’t watch me, it’s always – I can't watch me, I can’t watch. But no, we have enough politics. We don’t want to watch now on Sunday, oh, here we go again with the politics.”
He then returned to the well-worn culture war theme of the take-a-knee protests.
“Let ‘em play football, let ‘em stand or salute, put your hand on your heart and be proud of our great American flag, and then go home to the mansion, have a good time, take a nice sauna, and if you want, after you recover, you come out and you go and you do your thing, whatever the thing may be.”
The president’s TV consumption was core part of his political persona even before he began running for president. Since his election, he has routinely picked fights with news networks and individual TV journalists he considers his enemies.
His most notorious attacks have been on MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, whom he has falsely accused of murdering an intern two decades ago, and his wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski, whom he has called “low IQ crazy Mika” and accused of once arriving at his Mar-a-Lago resort “bleeding badly from a facelift.”
In recent months, he has even taken umbrage at some of the coverage broadcast by the usually loyal Fox News, instead pointing viewers towards the formerly obscure One America News, a far-right network that has been condemned for broadcasting misinformation and conspiracy theories.
