Donald Trump spent part of a Thursday as president of the United States watching tape of LeBron James loosening his shoulders before tip-off. He's the one who went looking for a culture-war news cycle, and a warmup routine would do.
Before Philadelphia's season opener on Tuesday in New York, James stood in line with his teammates during the national anthem and moved his arms, what plenty of people described as a golf-swing and jump-shot motion. He didn't kneel or speak, just swung his arms the way athletes do most nights of the year. Trump posted a video of it on Truth Social, captioned "LeBron working on his golf swing pregame," wrote that James is "no good, a TOTAL DISGRACE," and said he "should apologize to all of those Great American Warriors and Heroes who died for the American Flag." At an Iowa rally the same day he called it "a big scandal kind of a story" and said, "During the national anthem, he's practicing his golf swing. I said, 'What the hell is that?'"
There's no scandal here, just a man loosening up before a game and a president acting like that counts as spitting on the dead. The complaint grew out of nothing more than ordinary pregame body language. You don't need to invent an insult when nobody actually gave you one.
James didn't take the bait. He gave the reporters around him one line: "It's a slow news day at the office, you know. Slow news day in the office." That was the right call. Arguing the merits, insisting that swinging your arms doesn't desecrate a flag, would have been the trap: it treats the accusation like a real debate with two sides, and it isn't one. A shrug starves the fight of oxygen and treats the premise with the contempt it earned.
Some wanted the 2017 James back, the one who fired off the "U bum" tweet when Trump rescinded Golden State's White House invitation and set social-media records doing it. Fire back, call him out directly. But the loud version is exactly what Trump was fishing for. A screaming match with LeBron James is a win for a man who wants to be screaming at LeBron James all week. The quiet dismissal costs him something real: it says the attack wasn't worth a full sentence.
The two have gone at this for years. Trump mocked James's intelligence in 2018, which drew defenses from Michael Jordan and others, and they clashed again in 2020 over players kneeling. The president keeps picking the fight, and he picks James because it's cheap, and it reliably fires up people who've resented him for the better part of a decade.
James has three Olympic gold medals for the country he supposedly disrespected. He loosened up before a basketball game. The disgrace belongs to the man in the White House who went hunting for a scandal and found a jump shot.
