The Summer of Stephen Ross continues.
The Dolphins owner, who drew sharp criticism for hosting a six-figure fundraiser for President Trump earlier this month, addressed the Commander-in-Chief’s role in a June interview with Yahoo Finance. The quotes emerged on Friday.
“I supported the players initially,” Ross said at the time. “When Trump made it about the military, that was a different story.”
Ross doesn’t explain why he and other NFL owners sat idly by while the underlying basis for the anthem protests -- to bring attention to concerns regarding police brutality against and other systemic oppression of minorities -- became warped and twisted for political purposes. Instead, Ross apparently went along with the effort to co-opt the narrative.
“Whenever you’re really protesting against the military, I think nobody in this country really wants [to protest that],” Ross said. But, again, that’s not what the players were protesting, a point that they made repeatedly but that repeatedly fell on deaf ears. Or, more accurately, ears into which a false narrative was being continuously whispered.
Ross claims that he continues to tell his players, “I got your back. Do what you feel is right.” Some may wonder whether that’s actually the case, given the support Ross has given to the man who, as Ross has admitted, took the true basis for the protests and transmogrified it into something that would appeal to his base of voters.