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Just a few months later, the President went off on football players who protested racial inequality by kneeling during the national anthem, calling them in a speech sons of bitches who should lose their jobs. (He also lamented that rule changes meant to reduce head injuries were ruining the game.)

Will the divisions stoked over the past four years remain?

That was the demarcation point, the moment when sports and politics and culture collided in a way that hadnt really happened before. Certain athletes have taken political stances, particularly on civil-rights issues, over the decades, and those had inflamed their own controversies, but the prospect of the U.S. President picking a fight with professional athletes was highly unusual. The anthem issue, which had been all but forgotten, became a new thing for some NFL players to rally around, although support was far from universal, and athletes in other sports spoke up in their defence, most notably in the NBA, where superstars, coaches and role players alike were not shy about criticizing Trumps characterization of athletes who had opted for a peaceful protest. That split, with a number of high-profile athletes on one side and Trump and many of his supporters on the other, has persisted for years. It has been a strange storyline of the sports business in the recent past, where events that had long been apolitical were suddenly a big stage in the culture wars.

Much like how Trumps presidency made a certain degree of chaos an everyday occurrence, the outsized influence he had on the sports world also quickly came to feel normal, even though it wasnt. Stories about declining television ratings for pro sports considered whether the spectacle of kneeling players had driven away viewers, or whether anti-Trump statements from athletes like LeBron James or Steph Curry had dented their sports overall popularity, even though television ratings, as traditionally measured, have been declining across all programs for many years. Trump, of course, insisted that the NFL was headed straight to irrelevance if it didnt fire players who knelt during the national anthem. The NFL has managed to avoid this fate. White House visits became radioactive, with some championship teams attending the traditional ceremony with the President of the day and earning criticism for doing so and others choosing not to go. This exercise reached the perfect level of farce in 2018, when the some of the Philadelphia Eagles were going to attend the White House but the ceremony was cancelled a day ahead of time. The reasons for the cancellation were never quite clear, although there were suggestions that the number of attending players would have been small enough to be embarrassing, and Trump took the opportunity to insist, again, that football players should always stand for the national anthem. Whatever else one might think of his political acumen, he figured out early that that particular message stand for the anthem, you ungrateful athletes plays very well with many of his supporters.

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In the Trump era, sports became a major front in the culture wars. So are those battles now over? - National Post