No one yet knows who broke into the home of New York Giants’ fullback Nikita Whitlock, drew swastikas and wrote “Trump” and racist remarks on his walls, but multiple sports media exploited the crime to characterize President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters as racists.
Three talking heads at ESPN2 took up the verbal assault. Max Kellerman and Stephen A. Smith, who co-host of the program First Take, and His & Hers cohost Jemele Hill, all piled on Trump and his supporters on Dec. 9th. Here’s Kellerman:
The fact of the matter is that Donald Trump was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. That’s a fact. I’m not making that up. And that there was an appeal to white nationalists. How else can you say these things?
Kellerman pressed his case further, saying Trump needs to respond to every incident of this type of racism.
This is not the first time that something like this has happened since the election and some reference to Trump was made, Trump country, Trump’s America, and to Donald Trump’s credit, he did, in a nationally televised broadcast at one point say it should stop, that’s terrible. But couple things need to happen. Either he needs to do that every time something like this becomes public information, or if the idea is this is happening so much that he couldn’t possibly [denounce it every time], then he needs to address that, too. Doesn’t he?
Kellerman’s co-host, Smith, took up the attack from there, asserting Trump needs to be “more active” in condemning racism – “not just with his words, but with his actions.” Smith also said Trump’s presidency “doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at being successful if he doesn’t address this matter.”
Smith offered a left-handed “compliment” to Trump by claiming, “Those ignorant, racist few out there very well may not epitomize everybody that vote for Trump.”
Hill tied her criticism of Trump to his Twitter complaint about Saturday Night Live.
Whoever the burglars are ‘Trump’ on the wall and, I’m just saying, instead of tweeting about ‘Saturday Night Live,’ maybe if I’m him I may want to say something about people who keep using his name in connection of awful incidents like this.
Writing for CBS Sports, Jared Dubin claimed, “The (Whitlock) incident is part of a rising trend of hate crimes that have taken place since the Nov. 8 presidential election.”
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