Dave Zirin Attacks ‘Lizard Brain’ Trump Over LaVar Ball Tweet: ‘Racism Comes to Him Like a Tick’

EXCERPT:

MELVIN: "Dave Zirin, sports editor for 'The Nation' joins me now. So it wasn’t just Ball this week. Yesterday the president taking some time to tweet, 'Marshawn Lynch of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders stands for the Mexican Anthem and sits down to boos for our National Anthem. Great disrespect! Next time NFL should suspend him for remainder of season.' And he goes on about the attendance and the ratings for the NFL. What does the president stand to gain by feuding with the sports community, Dave Zirin?"
ZIRIN: "Well, first of all, let’s be clear, Craig, he feuds with black descenters within the sports community. And Donald Trump does this for two reasons. One, I think we have a lot of evidence to say that racism comes to him like a tick, like an instinct, like someone hitting his knee with one of those hammers at the doctor’s office. And second, it absolutely thrills his base even though we know what they would say if any other president maybe Republican or Democrat demanded thanks for freeing somebody from a Chinese prison. It's really so outrageous. It also needs to be said, Craig, that this is a very old play book in terms of attacking well-known black athletes. I mean I can cite stuff back to Jack Johnson through Jackie Robinson through Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick. They are a very good target for people who play this game of divide and distract for the simple reason that black people in the United States, when they are big in the world of sports, they have a huge cultural platform and they become these symbols of resentment for people who say, 'Well why did they have all that money? Why did they have all that fame?' So they become as if they haven’t worked so hard their entire lives to achieve this precipice. So -- so it becomes this thing where you target, you demonize, you distract. It's a playbook that goes back 100 years. So Trump is doing nothing new. It's tired and it's wrong."