Saquon Barkley is clearing the air…
The Philadelphia Eagles are visiting the White House today, April 28th, and despite one of their team leaders not making a statement one way or another if he’d be in attendance, another one has made it abundantly clear he’ll be there.
Saquon Barkley, the former Penn State Nittany Lion all-electric factory and New York Giants number two overall pick, was photographed spending time with president Donald Trump at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey yesterday. The two flew on Marine One (the president’s helicopter) together and played a round of golf.
This comes just days after Jalen Hurts, star quarterback and Super Bowl LIX MVP, dodged a question from the media on whether he’d be attending the team’s White House visit.
You don’t need me to tell you tensions around politics are high these days. Admittedly, it does seem the vitriol is calming down on both sides (objectively a good thing) but there’s no shortage of hate being thrown at the current president and his administration. Therefore, you’ve probably seen some of the comments surrounding Saquon Barkley’s time spent with President Trump.
Some are downright horrible and, though I don’t use this word lightly, racist. I will not be showing those here but there was a lot of hate directed his way online over the past few hours:
Saquon responded to these comments with a short statement on X this morning, basically saying him spending time with Trump is not an endorsement of everything he’s doing, rather just taking advantage of an extremely rare opportunity to golf with a sitting president of the United States:
“lol some people are really upset cause I played golfed and flew to the White House with the PRESIDENT. Maybe I just respect the office, not a hard concept to understand. Just golfed with Obama not too long ago…and look forward to finishing my round with Trump ! Now ya get out my mentions with all this politics and have amazing day”
As he mentioned, he also golfed with Obama, despite a lot of people really not liking him or his policies…
This was naturally going to happen when an athlete of Barkley stature decides to publicly be around Donald Trump. Do I think the backlash is a bit ridiculous? Yeah, of course, but it’s also completely foreseeable. Even his explanation of why he went, because he respects the office, has people all fired up, but again, of course it does. We’re talking about Donald Trump here and even though he won the last election with a majority of votes, there’s huge sections of our population that will never, ever, in a million years, accept anyone acknowledging him as a person rather than a devil.
We’ll see if this kicks off a firestorm of responses from his team members but I’d imagine it won’t. Saquon is a generational talent and an unbelievable, all-around good guy that helped bring the city of Philadelphia a Super Bowl. He’ll be okay…
