In the current era of protesting, woke, social justice warrior-athletes, the media deride NFL owners who oppose them as out-of-touch "white billionaires." However, today many in the sports media are making an exception to that narrative with the arrival of David Tepper, the white billionaire hedge fund manager and new owner of the Carolina Panthers. He's earning a hero's welcome with his history of anti-Trump tirades.
For Sports Illustrated, CBS Sports, Yahoo! Sports and the Charlotte Observer, among others, the focus of their coverage was about Tepper tearing apart the “scumbag” President Trump who might destroy the world.
Jonathan Jones, of Sports Illustrated, writes that in Tepper, President Trump will now get more resistance from the NFL. "Donald Trump has been fighting against—and losing to—the National Football League for more than three decades. Now, one of his richest rivals is about join the fray." He was referring to Tepper's blunt remarks last month to first-year business students at Carnegie Mellon University:
“The economy’s really good right now, despite different things. …Whether I like the person or not I’m not going to get into that—although I did call him a demented, narcissistic scumbag. And if you look up demented, narcissistic scumbag, you’ll see my name calling Trump that. Just Google those three words.”
This was music to the ears of Jones and encouraged the SI writer to start piling on Trump over the president's past dealings with the NFL. As owner of the USFL's New Jersey Generals, Trump sued the NFL in 1986, won only $1 and his league collapsed. Trump failed in an attempt to purchase the Buffalo Bills in 2014. Last fall, the president inserted himself into the protest controversy by calling the kneelers SOBs, and Eagles' owner Jeffrey Lurie called Trump’s presidency “disastrous."
Even though Tepper voted for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Jones says we can't call him a "bleeding heart liberal" because he supported Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush before voting for Democrat presidential candidates.
As Jones relates, Tepper went on CNBC's Squawk Box and blasted Trump for insufficient charitable giving. Tepper donated $200,000 in gift cards to families impacted by Hurricane Sandy and donated $3 million to hurricane victims in Houston and Puerto Rico last year. But since Trump became a billionaire several of his charitable donations are "dubious," he didn't give a dime to Hurricane Sandy relief and he complained about how hurricane damage in Puerto Rico threw the budget "a little out of whack." Jones did not mention The Washington Post's 93-page list of Trump's charitable contributions.
Jones is confident going ahead that Tepper will feud with the president, as one of the NFL’s "biggest agitators." Now an instant favorite of the media, Tepper is the man who went on CNBC and mocked Trump and warned of impending world disaster under his leadership:
“This is a guy, and you talk about calamity, this is a guy that has to remind himself on the podium to stay on message. 'Stay on message, Donald. Stay on message.' The reason people are nervous about this guy is, is he going to get in the Oval Office and say, ‘Don’t press that button, Donald. Don’t press that red button.’ It could be dangerous. I don’t want a guy that talks like that to himself after he’s reminding himself to stay on message.
“It makes people nervous. And that’s economics. If the world’s destroyed, I don’t have anything. So that’s not good for me.”
For now though, while the world is still turning, Tepper is a media darling of the anti-Trump sports crowd.
