The day after President Donald Trump criticized NFL players who kneel during the National Anthem, he moved onto another target: the NBA.
Donald Trump has picked a Twitter fight with the superstars of the NBA
LeBron James and other NBA stars have criticized the president after he rescinded an invitation for Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors to visit the White House.
Brian Resnick was Vox’s science and health editor and is the co-creator of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about unanswered questions in science.
In what has to be an unprecedented move, Trump announced on Twitter Saturday morning that he was no longer inviting the Golden State Warriors (or possibly just not inviting the team’s star player Steph Curry) to attend an event celebrating their victory in the NBA finals.
“Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team,” Trump tweeted. “Stephen Curry is hesitating, therefore invitation is withdrawn!”
This did not go over well — particularly on the heels of Trump’s comments Friday night that players who kneel during the National Anthem and attempts to prevent concussions are “ruining the game” of football. The result was a barrage of tweets at Trump from some of basketball’s biggest stars, and not just from the Warriors.
Kobe Bryant even weighed in from retirement:
Typically, championship-winning teams — victors from the Super Bowl, the NBA finals, the World Series, and Stanley Cup, plus NCAA champions in college sports — are invited to the White House for a photo opportunity during their off-season. These are usually pretty boring events: The president says something nice about the team, something nice about the city they represent, something cheeky (if the president is a fan of a rival team), and then everyone poses for a picture.
But with Trump in the White House, the decision of whether to visit has suddenly become more fraught. (When the New England Patriots visited the White House in May after winning the Super Bowl, quarterback Tom Brady skipped the event.) Curry, as well as NBA Finals MVP Kevin Durant, has made clear he has no desire to attend any such event at the White House.
The Warriors had planned on making a collective decision on whether to attend, the Associated Press reports, and hadn’t yet come to a conclusion. Nor had the White House formally invited them.
Curry himself has been firm. As he told reporters Friday, he hopes that not going “will inspire some change when it comes to what we tolerate in this country and what is accepted and what we turn a blind eye to.”
