these players, of course, they re risking in some cases like colin kaepernick, he doesn t play for an nfl team anymore. he s lost his ability to make a living as an athlete because of his stance on this issue, but they are courageous. they have a right to be heard, to protest, to disagree. and they ought to be heard. erin d., is there a sense in your mind that the president went too far this time? i m just going to speak based on the conversations i ve had throughout this day. they have been very passionate. and at least from the anchor desk, it feels like this is different. this has ignited a national debate. and when donald trump threw out this line in alabama on friday night, his supporters cheered. but he was there to advocate for luther strange, an alabama senate primary. he wasn t there to start a national conversation on this issue. and you have to wonder why the president chose to wade into this territory. this is igniting protests all over the country, emotions are high. a
a knee over a flag that many of our generation preceding us have died to protect the freedoms there, they somehow get honored as martyrs by the media. the president is pointing out that shouldn t be accepted. they have a first amendment right to do that, but nfl owners also have a right to fire the players. the president is not looking at through through a racial lens. there s plenty of african-american athletes on all of the championships that the president welcomed to the white house. they re the ones who chose to make a political issue out of this. joining me now is joe watkins, a republican strategist. erin dell more, whom i m going to call erin d., because we also welcome in erin mcpike, for independent general review. i m going to begin with joe to keep it simple. so talk to me about the significance of what we re watching unfold here, and your reaction to the white house, joe, blaming the players for making this political. well, i think the players
there s a question over whether players are right to be taking a knee, and then there s a question over whether the president was right to weigh in with the terms he did. for a president who has historically low approval ratings, who has been seen as divisive since he took office in january, people are asking the question now, why is he wading into this issue and further dividing people? and erin, how does the president s base perceive all this? because i m going to guess that there are a lot of football fans among his base as well. look, i think donald trump s most fervent supporters support him on this. unfortunately. i was on another network this morning defending both steph curry and the nfl players who are choosing to protest. and my twitter feed has been lighting up with people saying that i am radical and terrible for saying so. but look, i think you played a clip from mark short, the legislative director at the white house, saying they shouldn t be protesting. they have a r
but, you know, this is unfortunate because it s the national ant anthem and they neo respect the military. look, at every professional sports game, you do see a tribute paid to service members. this is not about disrespecting the country or disrespecting members of the military. and in fact, earlier in this hour, morgan radford interviewed a man who said just this. this is not about that at all. this is about people who don t have a voice and the nfl standing up for those people. i think that is a really important distinction and it is not intellectually honest for people like mark short to just say, oh, wait a minute, they shouldn t be disrespecting the country or the national anthem. in fact, they re being very patriotic. they clearly care about the country and they re taking this moment when everybody is paying attention to them for the national anthem saying we would rather we are proud of the country and we want this to be better. this is patriotic, what they re doing. not unpat