After Donald Trump won the presidential election on Tuesday night, several NBA coaches have been very open about how they felt about the controversial business tycoon becoming the President of the United States. On Wednesday, Pistons head coach Stan Van Gundy went on a long rant sounding off on both Trump and his supporters.
Stan Van Gundy was extremely candid about the election. https://t.co/eCTIBbA4LW
— SB Nation (@SBNation) November 9, 2016
Warriors head coach Steve Kerr followed suit by saying the outcome of the election left him and many others around him feeling “disgusted and disappointed.”
https://twitter.com/erikmal/status/796534987528933376
On Friday, it was Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich’s turn to share his thoughts on Trump.
Right now, I’m just trying to formulate thoughts. It’s too early. I’m still sick to my stomach. And not basically because the Republicans won or anything. But the disgusting tenor and tone and all the comments that have been xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, and…I live in a country where half of the people ignored all that to elect someone.
That’s the scariest part of the whole thing to me. It had nothing to do with the environment and Obamacare and all the other stuff. We live in a country that ignored all those values that we would hold our kids accountable for. They would be grounded for years if they acted and said the things that have been said in that campaign by Donald Trump. I look at the Evangelicals and I wonder, ‘Those values don’t mean anything to them?’ All those values, to me, are more important than anybody’s skill in business or anything else. It tells who we are and how we want to live and what kind of people we are. That’s why I have great respect for people like Lindsey Graham and John McCain and John Kasich, who I disagree with on a lot of political things. But they had enough fiber and respect for humanity and tolerance for other groups to say what they said about the man.
That’s what worries me. I get it. Of course we want to be successful. We’re all going to say that. Everybody wants to be successful. It’s our country. We don’t want it to go down the drain. Any reasonable person would come to that conclusion. But it does not take away the fact that he used that fear-mongering and all the comments from day one. The race-baiting with trying to make Barack Obama, our first black president, illegitimate. So it leaves me wondering where I’ve been living and with whom I’m living. And the fact that people can just gloss that over and start talking about the transition team and we’re all going to be Kumbaya now and trying to make the country good without talking about any of those things.
And now we see that he’s already backing off on immigration, on Obamacare, on other things. So was it a big fake? Which makes you feel that it’s even more disgusting and cynical, that somebody would use that to get the base that fired up, to get elected. And what gets lost in the process are African-Americans and Hispanics and women and the gay population, not to mention the eighth-grade developmental stage exhibited by him when he made fun of the handicapped person. I mean, come on. That’s what a seventh grade, eighth grade bully does, and he was elected President of the United States.
We would have scolded our kids, we would have had discussions and talked until we were blue in the face to get them to understand these things, and he is in charge of our country. That’s disgusting…One could go on and on. We didn’t make this stuff up. He’s angry at the media because they reported what he said and how he acted. That’s ironic to me. It just makes no sense. That’s my real fear, and that’s what gives me so much pause and makes me feel so badly that the country is willing to be that intolerant and not understand the empathy that is necessary to understand other groups’ situations.
I’m a rich white guy, and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it. I can’t imagine being a Muslim right now or a woman or an African-American, a Hispanic, a handicapped person—how disenfranchised they must feel. And for anyone in those groups that voted for him, it’s just beyond my comprehension how they ignore all that. And so my final conclusion is, my big fear is—we are Rome.