Chris Cuomo of CNN’s “New Day” responded to Donald Trump’s comments on “Fox and Friends” about his friends who own NFL teams.
“It does sound a little bit — and obviously you can come at me on Twitter for this — like he’s saying: ‘Control your dog. Control your dog,’ to the owners,” Cuomo said in a conversation with The Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avalon.
Avalon said of the president, “He’s effectively trolling the owners, and it’s the language he understands of fear and goading.”
In an interview on “Fox and Friends” Thursday morning, Trump said he thought some NFL team owners are “afraid” of their players, again calling on the NFL create a rule banning players from kneeling during the national anthem.
“I’m trying to map it here,” Cuomo continued. “They’re his friends, the owners, OK. To his friends, he creates a false issue, which puts them in a huge bind.”
“Then, he says ‘Well, I feel bad about what’s happening there with these guys’ — which clearly he does not, because he created this issue to foment political tension,” Cuomo said. “And now he says they’re fearful of the players, so he is setting up the ugliest kind of tension you can.”
“He seems to feel his core job is to enflame culture wars,” said Avalon. “To distract, and not actually do his job as it relates to North Korea, passing major legislation. And there are folks in the White House who think this is a win, and presumably the president does too. But it is divisive and it is a distraction.”
Watch their conversation in the clip above.