Tyler Cowen, Columnist

Dial Down the National Anthem at Sporting Events

A football game isn't the place for escalating patriotic loyalty tests.

September 25, 2017 at 5:05 PM UTC

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

Why mix football and the flag?
Photographer: Abbie Parr/Getty Images

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An American president, especially one with the media skills of Donald Trump, can politicize anything he wishes to. Over the weekend, his target was the National Football League and its players. Instead of ratcheting up this dispute, a better outcome would be to sever politics from sports. Rethinking the presentation of our national anthem is one place to start.

At a rally on Friday and on Twitter since, we have seen President Trump taking pokes at NFL players who do not show what he considers sufficient respect for the national anthem, namely by kneeling in protest during the song (is it so bad to kneel in public on a Sunday?). On the other side, some NASCAR team owners have threatened to fire drivers and crew members who don’t show proper respect during the anthem. Such disputes won’t improve the quality of either our sports or our politics.