‘This is what the league should do!’ Donald Trump applauds Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones for requiring his players to ‘stand during the anthem, toe on the line’

President Donald Trump praised Jerry Jones on Friday morning after the Dallas Cowboys owner announced that his players would be required to stand on the field during the national anthem.

‘Way to go Jerry,’ read the tweet from Trump. ‘This is what the league should do!’

Trump was re-tweeting a recent article that quoted Jones on Wednesday, when he told reporters that his players would be forbidden from protesting or remaining in the locker room during The Star-Spangled Banner.

‘Our policy is you stand during the anthem, toe on the line,’ Jones in Oxnard,California, where the Cowboys opened training camp this week. 

Jones’s son Stephen, the Cowboys’ executive vice president, took the position a step further Thursday, telling KTCK 96.7 FM that players need to stand ‘if they want to be a Dallas Cowboy.’

‘We certainly are supportive of them when they have their personal issues or their personal things that they want to pursue,’ Stephen Jones said. ‘And we’ll help them pursue them on Tuesdays. But when you’re wearing the Dallas Cowboy uniform and a Dallas Cowboy helmet and you’re working for the Dallas Cowboys, you check the “I” and the “me” at the door, and you’re a part of a team.’

Aimed to raising awareness of inequality and police brutality, the protests have remained in the news during the NFL offseason. 

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First, in May, commissioner Roger Goodell announced that the league would institute a new policy allowing players to remain in the locker room during the anthem, while requiring any team personnel on the field to stand. Teams can be penalized for any non-compliance and those franchises can then choose to fine players individually. 

Since 2009, NFL players have been required to be on the field during the anthem. 

On July 5, Trump said the new policy was ‘worse’ because it allowed players to remain in the locker room. 

Then, on July 19, the NFL announced that it would put its two-month-old policy on hold while the league and the players’ union discussed a compromise. 

‘The NFL and NFLPA, through recent discussions, have been working on a resolution to the anthem issue,’ the statement read. ‘In order to allow this constructive dialogue to continue, we have come to a standstill agreement on the NFLPA’s grievance and on the NFL’s anthem policy. 

‘No new rules relating to the anthem will be issued or enforced for the next several weeks while these confidential discussions are ongoing,’ the statement continued. 

That same day, the Associated Press reported that Miami Dolphins players who protest on the field during the anthem would face a four-game suspension. 

Other owners have been more sympathetic to the players’ position.  

Jets chairman Christopher Johnson – whose brother Woody raised money for Trump’s presidential campaign and now serves as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain – told Newsday in May that he would be willing to pay any anthem fines without punishing protesting players because he believed it’s the players’ right.

The Cowboys are one of only a handful of teams who have not had a single player protest, besides September of last season, when Dallas players, Jones and the Arizona Cardinals locked arms and knelt before the anthem only to stand together as the song began to play.

Outside of that single incident – which was in response to Trump’s criticism of the protests during a rally in Alabama – Jones has been critical of any demonstrations, and even threatened to bench any player who knelt.

Jones has also been critical of Goodell’s handling of the controversy – a sentiment shared by Trump. 

‘[Trump’s] interest in what we’re doing is problematic, from my chair, and I would say in general the owners’ chair,’ Jones said, as quoted by ESPN. ‘It’s unprecedented, if you really think about it. But like the very game itself, that’s the way it is and we’ll deal with it.

‘We feel strongly about how we deal with it and we’ll do so accordingly, but, yes, I, like everybody, would like for it to go away.’

Trump recently demanded on Twitter that the ‘$40,000,000 commissioner’ of the NFL suspend players for a whole season if they kneel during national anthem more than once.

‘The NFL National Anthem Debate is alive and well again – can’t believe it!,’ Trump wrote in the tweet.

Giants co-owner Steve Tisch told The Hollywood Reporter at a recent premiere that Trump ‘has no understanding of why they take a knee or why they’re protesting.’

‘Hopefully he’ll have much more going on that he’s going have to deal with and should deal with and must deal with than worrying about what NFL players do,’ Tisch said.

Beginning with a September rally in Alabama, Trump has turned the controversy over the protests into a constant theme, referring to the demonstrating players as ‘sons of b******.’

The protests began in 2016 when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem as a way to raise awareness about inequality and police brutality against minorities.

The demonstrations were primarily a reaction to the deaths of African-American men at the hands of law enforcement.

The NFL did not institute any rule requiring players to stand for the anthem during the 2017 season, which resulted in further criticism from Trump. 

Protests during the national anthem were not unheard of before 2016.

Former NBA player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the anthem in 1996 because, he explained, he saw the flag as a symbol of tyranny. After receiving several fines, Abdul-Rauf and the league eventually worked out a compromise where he would stand in prayer during the anthem.

Two years later he left the NBA to play for Istanbul’s Fenerbahçe.

Even Jackie Robinson expressed misgivings about the national anthem in his autobiography, ‘I Never Had It Made,’ with Alfred Duckett in 1972.

‘I cannot stand and sing the anthem,’ wrote Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier when he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. ‘I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.’