NBA fans have heard some strong denunciations of President-elect Donald Trump from NBA coaches this week. Steve Kerr voiced concerns over his children’s reaction to Trump and Stan Van Gundy called Trump a “misogynist leader.” However, we hadn’t yet had anyone go biblical with his diatribe, until now.
Well, he almost went biblical.
“We are Rome,” said San Antonio Spurs Head Coach Gregg Popovich at the end of a fairly unhinged tirade. That tirade, captured by MySanAntonio.com, went on for several minutes and included insults to both Trump and his voters:
“The disgusting tenor and tone and all the comments [during Trump’s campaign] that have been xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, and I live in a country where half the people ignored all that to elect someone.
“That’s the scariest part of the whole thing to me. Got nothing to do with the environment, Obamacare and all the other stuff. We live in a country that ignored all those values that we would hold our kids accountable for. They’d be grounded for years if they acted and said the things that’s been said in that campaign by Donald Trump.”
Far from done, Popovich then called Trump a bully. He said that Trump “used that fearmongering and all the comments, from Day 1, the race-baiting, with trying to make Barack Obama, our first black president, illegitimate. It leaves me wondering where I’ve been living, and with whom I’m living and the fact that people can just gloss that over. … Now we see that he’s already backing off immigration, Obamacare and other things, so was it a big fake? Which makes you feel that’s even more disgusting and cynical. That somebody would use that, to get the base that fired up to get elected.”
Not sure where Popovich got the idea that Trump has walked back all of his campaign promises. The two provisions of Obamacare that Trump mentioned wanting to keep happen to be the most popular provisions of the law, and neither has anything to do with denying you the right to choose your own coverage or hiking premiums to some ridiculous degree. In fact, Republicans, at least twice, have offered alternatives to Obamacare that included those provisions.
So, Trump has not come off his dime in any way. Popovich, however, has completely come undone. What’s different about Popovich’s rant, as opposed to Kerr’s and Van Gundy’s, is that instead of mostly confining his criticisms to Trump, “Pop” makes a point of going after Trump’s supporters.
Probably not a great move, considering Popovich lives and works in a state that Trump won by nearly ten percent.
Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn