New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady continues to be hounded by the media for his refusal to denounce his “good friend” Donald Trump.
Prior to the Patriots Super Bowl victory over the Atlanta Falcons, pressure mounted on Brady to repudiate Trump and speak out against his controversial executive order on immigration. Now, a number of Brady’s teammates have decided to boycott the winning team’s ceremonial trip to the White House, some for explicitly political reasons.
The media continues to pester Brady about his relationship with Trump, and a number of outlets seized on comments the QB made during an interview with NBC’s Pro Football Talk, in which Brady, who has made numerous trips to the White House as Super Bowl champion, said he never viewed the trip as a “political thing.”
Mic dot com, a photo blog for bored millennials, *clapped back* at Brady, insisting that visiting (or not visiting) the White House is a very meaningful political act, especially when Trump is “the most openly bigoted president in recent memory.”
Brady’s remarks were relatively mundane, but USA Today generated plenty of outrage by taking his remarks out of context. “Brady says his teammates should put ‘politics aside’ when it comes to visiting the White House,” the paper tweeted, suggested that Brady was criticizing his teammates who had already decided to skip the White House meeting.
But that’s not what Brady said. The full quote make clear Brady was expressing his personal opinion about the “politics” of visiting the White House, while respecting the right of his teammates to make their own decisions:
Everybody has their own choice. There’s certain years, like a couple years ago, I wanted to go and didn’t get the opportunity based on the schedule—we didn’t get told until I think like 10 days before we were going, and at that point I had something I’d been planning for months and couldn’t get there. It really is a great experience. Putting politics aside, it never was a political thing. At least, it never was to me. It meant you won a championship and you got to experience something cool with your team, with your teammates. Everyone has their own choice. It’s an offseason. These days are valuable for everybody. You only get so much time with your family and friends, and if people don’t want to go they don’t want to go and that’s their choice.
Since Trump’s election, politics have been popping up more and more in the world of sports. The New York Times magazine recently argued that “Trump’s presidency, with its daily explosions, has made it impossible to cover pro sports…without detouring onto the White House lawn.”
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