The NBA returns to the White House. Milwaukee Bucks, current champion, will visit Joe Biden, president of the United States, on November 8 coinciding with his visit to Washington to face the Wizards. It will be the first time that a franchise has gone to the center of the executive branch of the North American country since November 2016 when LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers fired Barack Obama.
Why so many years of absence? The reason, Donald Trump. NBA players, the vast majority of whom are African-American, did not want to present the Larry O’Brien trophy to a president they considered a racist. In addition, Trump did not help, with insults and recriminations to the stars of the League.
He even withdrawn the invitation to the Golden State Warriors when some of its members expressed doubts about whether or not to visit the White House. Neither San Francisco (champions in 2017 and 2018) nor Toronto Raptors (2019) attended. Last year, in 2020, the Lakers were not in April either because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Conflicto Trump-NBA
The animosity between the NBA and Trump was not only focused on those visits. From the moment he was elected, the New Yorker was not well received by the majority of North American professional basketball. “My guts are churning and not because the Republican Party won the elections. But because of the disgusting xenophobic, homophobic, racist and misogynistic comments. I live in a country where half of its population has ignored these facts when voting for Trump. That’s what scares me the most, ”said San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, one of the most critical voices during his four-year tenure.
Trump was not silent and always had some loaded tweet or election speech ready to throw to the NBA. In his last days in the Oval Office, falling audiences were his main throwing weapon.. The negative relationship between the parties grew exponentially with the deaths of African Americans at the hands of the police. George Floyd’s was the last straw that led big stars like LeBron James to focus on projects to increase electoral participation in the African-American community, hard hit by the 2008 crisis and by the coronavirus crisis, a niche of voters who had lost weight with their lowest turnout in the last 20 years in the 2016 election, according to Paw Research. A problem if Trump was to be evicted from the White House and that was key to Biden’s triumph.
