The amount of insidious vitriol in the political spectrum these days is at times overwhelming but it’s more annoying like a thorn in one’s side than anything else. It’s tiresome.
Nobody perpetuates anti-President Trump liberal propaganda more than those across the entertainment and media spectrums. The majority of them are liberal so what do you expect?
And one Raptors star is refusing to visit the White House after winning the most recent NBA championship but here’s why his statement is hilariously silly.
One of the biggest misnomers about athletes visiting the White House is that it began under President Reagan’s administration, but you’d be wrong to think that.
The first time was all the way back on August 30, 1865 when President Andrew Johnson hosted two amateur baseball clubs, the Brooklyn Atlantics and the Washington Nationals. Yes, baseball is that old.
Only several years later, Ulysses S. Grant welcomed the first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.
But the first championship team of the World Series era didn’t happen until 1924 when President Calvin Coolidge had the team over to the most famous house in America. The Pittsburgh Steelers were the first Super Bowl Champions invited, quarterbacked by Terry Bradshaw; they attended Jimmy Carter’s White House in February 1980.
Reagan was the one who made it a regular thing to invite every championship team. That was the confusion.
But when did the first athlete decide not to accept the invitation? It was in 1984 under Reagan, and Boston Celtics Larry Bird audaciously said, “If the president wants to see me, he knows where to find me.”
Now the championship winning athletes who refuse to visit President Trump’s White House are a dime a dozen. It seems about half of the teams accept Trump’s invitations.
And now that the Toronto Raptors defeated the back-to-back reigning champions, the Golden State Warriors (which also famously refused and Trump disinvited them altogether), star guard Danny Green was recently asked if he would go and he said, “hard no.”
Green told Yahoo Sports, “I just don’t think that we accept. To put it politely. And I try to respect everybody in every field that they do regardless of how crazy things are. But he makes it really hard. He makes it very, very tough to respect how he goes about things and does things. To put it politely, I think it’s a hard no. I’m sure he’s going to take his invite back if we do decide.”
That last jab was referencing Trump’s disinvite after Steph Curry’s comment refusing to go.
But here’s the thing; the Toronto Raptors is a Canadian team.
Why in the world would President Trump invite a Canadian team to the America White House to celebrate? Shouldn’t that be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s responsibility to throw a party for them?
To be fair, Trump did say he would consider it but no formal invitation has been offered.
On June 20th Trump mentioned the Raptors in the Finals by saying, “They played phenomenal basketball. I watched a little bit of it. They were really terrific. Congratulations … that was a great job, by a great team. So we’ll think about that, if they’d like to do it.”
The only way Trump invites the Raptors is to spite the Golden State Warriors for famously not going two years in a row.