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TRUMPadelphia: Welcome to the culture wars

For Trump, calling athletes like Colin Kaepernick and Malcolm Jenkins "sons of bitches" is a way of having your cake and eating it, too, and all for the easy price of embroiling yourself in an already incredibly high-stakes debate about the meaning of patriotism.

Eagles players Jason Kelce (left), Brent Celek and Lane Johnson hook arms during the playing of the national anthem before the game against the Giants at Lincoln Financial Field September 24, 2017. The Eagles won 27-24.
Eagles players Jason Kelce (left), Brent Celek and Lane Johnson hook arms during the playing of the national anthem before the game against the Giants at Lincoln Financial Field September 24, 2017. The Eagles won 27-24.Read moreClem Murray

Good morning, friends, from the depths of the culture war — one that Philly found itself smack in the middle of this weekend.

This newsletter covers President Trump and how his policies affect greater Philadelphia. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox, for free, every week. You can send suggestions/complaints/questions my way by email or on Twitter, and if you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend!

Aubrey Whelan

Today, let’s talk about football.

What’s at stake

President Trump is on quite a tear this week — in the midst of another national healthcare debate and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, he's spent most of his fuel criticizing athletes taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. He was slammed by owners and players on nearly every NFL team, including the Eagles, who locked arms during the national anthem at Sunday's game.

Outside the stadium, my colleague Michael Boren covered an anti-Trump protest which drew some high fives and some extremely ugly language from Eagles fans. (This isn't the first time this has happened.)

The local angle

And this isn't, of course, the first time debates over the flag and the anthem and what they represent have roiled the country. But sports arenas a particularly potent place for these kinds of protests, said Penn communications professor Carolyn Marvin — because they play on the same themes of sacrifice and unity that we associate with national symbols.

"But when we have have people sacrificing for the country, we want it to be a worthy sacrifice. That was the problem with Vietnam," Marvin told me. "And today, these athletes are talking about a sacrifice taking place on the streets — people who are sacrificed by the police. And that's what they're protesting."

In 1989, Marvin burned a flag on Penn's campus in the wake of a controversial Supreme Court decision that legalized flag burning — to show her students, she told me, the intense emotions that have always surrounded the American flag, and likely always will.

"People say, 'You can have your opinions, but you should find a better way to express it,'" she said of the most recent protests during the anthem. "But that's a kind of soft censorship — freedom of speech means the ability for you to choose how to express yourself."

What’s ahead

Trump being Trump, there's another layer to the president's fixation on athletes' protests: there's a Senate primary in Alabama, and Trump has decided to endorse the mainstream Republican candidate, Luther Strange, over his much more MAGA-friendly challenger, Roy Moore. The president's choice trails in polls. So calling athletes like Colin Kaepernick and Malcolm Jenkins "sons of bitches" is a pretty good way of having your cake and eating it, too, and all for the easy price of embroiling yourself in an already incredibly high-stakes debate about the meaning of patriotism.

What they’re saying

"U bum." — a succinct LeBron James after President Trump bashed Steph Curry (are we seeing a pattern here?) on Twitter.

"We're going to press on." — Sen. Lindsey Graham on his Obamacare repeal that appeared to fail just before he debated Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar on live television last night.

"I got 30 percent of the crew that's not loyal to the flag." — Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, speaking to an oil-industry crowd and alleging disloyalty to himself and Trump in his ranks.

In other news…

  1. The latest attempt at an Obamacare repeal, which experts say would have slammed Pennsylvania and New Jersey — in other words, states that expanded Medicaid — with billions of dollars in federal funding losses, is mostly dead in the water despite the best efforts of former PA Sen. Rick Santorum, who helped draft the bill after getting his hair cut next to Lindsey Graham.

  2. Pennsylvania was one of 21 states whose election systems were the victim of a Russian hacking attempt.

  3. A new Department of Homeland Security rule is directing agents to include social media handles and search results in all immigrants' files — including permanent residents and naturalized citizens. Also, there's a new travel ban.

What I’m reading

  1. An absolutely devastating account from the Washington Post on the destruction in Puerto Rico.

  2. A fascinating read from Buzzfeed on the political bind Facebook and its increasingly all-powerful algorithm find themselves in. (Semi-relatedly, Mark Zuckerberg, apparently having carefully researched how humans order cheesesteaks, went to Pat's this week.)

  3. My colleague Stephen Salisbury on the statue of civil-rights hero Octavius Catto that's going up in front of City Hall today, a long-overdue honor that comes after a summer of controversy over who we enshrine in bronze.

A non-political palate cleanser

You should really read my colleague Stephanie Farr's sad, inspiring, lovely story about a Vietnam war veteran who is tracking down the mass graves of his former enemies.