Washington • I suspect I share this with many others: Over the last 500 or so days, I often wanted to ditch politics entirely. Sports became my shelter from the storm, a field of competition in which performance can be judged with a degree of objectivity and blustery hot takes on Twitter do not threaten the republic.
And sports are by no means an airtight sanctuary from political discord. Trump’s war on NFL player protests and the capitulation of the league’s owners to his campaign of intimidation are maddening for many reasons. One of them is the president’s inability to allow a sphere of life to remain independent of his influence.