The Importance of Shedeur

The man who destroyed the USFL weighs in: 

What is wrong with NFL owners, are they STUPID?” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Deion Sanders was a great college football player, and was even greater in the NFL. He’s also a very good coach, streetwise and smart! Therefore, Shedeur, his quarterback son, has PHENOMENAL GENES, and is all set for Greatness. He should be ‘picked’ IMMEDIATELY by a team that wants to WIN. Good luck Shedeur, and say hello to your wonderful father

Alex Kirshner of Slate explained "the industry consensus on Sanders was that he was something like the 20th or 40th best player in the draft, depending on one's evaluation of him." However

Any other quarterback will join a team as a backup trying to work his way up, and Sanders did not distinguish himself in the pre-draft process. He reportedly came off disinterested in interviews with teams. He passed up numerous chances to work out in front of scouts. His celebrity father used his megaphone to promise Shedeur would be a top-five pick and to threaten to manipulate the draft process so that Shedeur would only go to a team the Sanders family wanted him to go to, à la Eli Manning in 2004.

In other words: Sanders is good enough to be at least a second-round pick, but teams don’t want the pain in the ass of a development quarterback with the capacity to create drama.

Nonetheless, this goes way beyond the story of yet another greatly talented, spoiled athlete and even beyond an unusually spoiled athlete. It goes to Donald J. Trump and the reason for his assessment of the value of Shedeur Sanders to an NFL team.  Last October, ethicist Daphne O. Martschenko wrote

In a recent interview with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump drew a link between immigration, violent crime, and genetics, stating, “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”  Comments such as these are not new. Claims regarding genes and human behavior have long been used to perpetuate social harm. Understanding this history shows just how pervasive and harmful the former president’s comments are. They also illustrate how influential they can be in shaping social policies.

Trump’s interview with Hewitt wasn’t the first time the former President made disparaging comments about migrants. During his October presidential debate with Kamala Harris, for instance, he claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating pets – harmful misinformation that has left many members of the Haitian community fearful for their safety.  The Hewitt interview also wasn’t the first time Trump vocalized false ideas about genes. In 1988, for example, he was recorded on the Oprah Winfrey Show saying to its host, “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” Later, while running for president in 2016 and throughout his tenure in the White House, Trump was captured in video recordings making statements like “some people cannot genetically handle pressure.”

The former president’s latest comments about immigrants bringing “bad genes” into the United States are part of a longer, racialized history in which claims about genetic difference have been used to further social divisions, explain social inequalities, and justify racial violence. Specifically, such claims have been used to resist the abolition of slavery, prohibit interracial marriage, forcibly sterilize the poor and communities of color, restrict immigration, and even rationalize mass-shootings.

Donald Trump's second term thus far has been marked by many things: siding with a brutal dictator in his war of aggression in eastern Europe; a disastrous economic policy; a shakedown on law firms; lawsuits against media outlets; invocation of "DEI" in an effort to bring down major universities and critical funding of medical and scientific research; impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress; arbitrary, wholesale, and dangerous cuts to the federal workforce; corruption, and so much more.

And an extremist immigration policy. When Trump spoke to Hewitt about immigrants, he argued "you know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now." Then- Presidential press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded in part "this comes from the same vile statements that we've had, that we've heard about migrants being poison, poisoning the blood- that's disgusting."

Jean-Pierre was being generous. She probably did not want to use the word "racist" for fear of being slammed as just another liberal accusing good, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth conservatives of being racist. "Racist" or not, the previous December

“They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told the crowd at a rally in New Hampshire. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

Trump then repeated the use of “poisoning” in a post on his social media website Truth Social, saying overnight in an all-caps post, that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”

The term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” in which he criticized immigration and the mixing of races. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote.

President Trump's immigration policies are a mere reflection of his creed of eugenics. Now, he has stressed- with capital letters so that no one can misunderstand the dark place he's coming from- that Shedeur Sanders is "all set for Greatness" because he has "PHENOMENAL GENES.:

Sanders is only a football player and whatever happens to him is far less important than the potential impact in America and abroad of Trump's belief in nature rather than nurture, that good and bad are inevitable outcome of genetic makeup. Whether cause or effect of the perspective Trump holds, in mid-October, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated of autistic children "These are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted."

As Politico found, this belief is very much flawed. However, as Jennifer Grose wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times, "the grimmest part of what he said is not about the ability to play baseball; it's that he started this litany with paying taxes and having jobs. That implies that those who are not able to be gainfully employed are somehow lesser citizens- that they're destroyed." 

This fellow who believes that some citizens, for reasons beyond their control, are lesser than others will be in charge of the nation's response to a pandemic. He will share responsibility with a president who himself believes that some citizens are lesser than others. He reportedly told Trump Plaza Hotel and casino manager Jack O'Donnell in the 1980s "laziness is a trait in blacks"- a trait. In 2007, he remarked to Larry King "But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot."

   

Call it racist, fascist, or "hateful" and "disgusting" as Jean-Pierre politely did in response to Trump's comment to  Hewitt. Whatever the characterization, danger lurks with leaders who believe that some "poison the blood" while some have "phenomenal genes" and thus are set for greatness. Draconian immigration policy may be only the first, and far less significant, manifestation of the presidency of a man who believes that the most important measure of a person may be the sum total of his or her chromosomes.

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