by Paul Teetor
For the last two weeks the great American gymnast Simone Biles has been the most famous – or at least the most publicized – woman in the world.
Winning seven Olympic gold medals will do that for you. And on Friday she used her once-every-four-years world wide platform to not-so-subtly call out the latest rhetorical weirdness coming from Donald Trump.
“I love my black job,” Biles said on X, formerly known as Twitter. She didn’t mention Trump but there was no doubt it was aimed at him.
A little background: During the June 27 debate in which President Joe Biden stumbled so badly that he withdrew from the presidential race three excruciating weeks later, Trump introduced the phrase “Black jobs,” into the cultural conversation.
“They’re taking Black jobs now and it could be 18, it could be 19 and even 20 million people,” he said about the role immigrants play in the U.S. economy. “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”
He made that fact-free claim as a way to blame the border mess on Biden and get Blacks and Latinos to vote for him — ignoring the reality that the southern border was a sieve when George Bush was president, when Barack Obama was president, when Trump was President, and when Biden was president.
In the debate he never defined what he meant by “Black jobs,” but it was clear to anyone with a working brain that he meant menial, lob-paying jobs that didn’t require any education. What he was trying to do in his heavy-handed way was to stir up Blacks and Latinos to vote for him as a way of protesting Biden’s border policies.
Indeed, Trump doubled down this week when he sat for an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago. The group had the gall to fact check him in real time, which made him even more wacky and weird than usual.
“I will tell you that coming from the border are millions and millions of people that happen to be taking Black jobs,” Trump told the group – all of whom happened to be high paid, highly educated Black professionals.
Asked to define a “Black job,” Trump said: “A Black job is anybody that has a job. They’re taking the employment away from Black people.”
Huh?
On Thursday, Ricky Davila – who describes himself in his X bio as a “singer-songwriter, foodie and political junkie” – posted two photos of Biles with the women’s all-round Gold Medal she won earlier that day.
“Simone Biles being the GOAT, winning Gold Medals and dominating gymnastics is her Black job,” Davila wrote in the post.
Then on Friday Biles re-posted Davila’s post, along with her own comment about loving her black job.
Within minutes the Lakers star LeBron James, who called Trump “a bum” a few years ago, re-posted Biles’ post and called her the Black Goat – short for Greatest of All Time.
Even Biden got in on the mocking of Trumps racist, demeaning comments, saying a few days after the debate: “I know what a black job is: it’s the vice president of the United States.”
As usual, it was impossible to know precisely if Trump was being racist, devious, clueless or insensitive – or some combination of all four of his dominant character traits.
But thanks to Biles, we know for sure that it was a stupid comment – and that the voting public deserves better than this kind of juvenile blather from the 78-year-old Republican presidential nominee.
How about a real debate on border policies at the presidential debate scheduled for September 10 on ABC?
How about a real debate about the bi-partisan border bill negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford that appeared to have overwhelming support – until Trump ordered his Congressional minions in the House of Representatives to kill it so he could continue running on the immigration mess?
But Mr. “any time, any place, anywhere” says his commitment to the September 10 ABC debate is “terminated” because Kamala Harris has replaced Joe Biden. Translation: I could bluster, bully and lie Biden into submission but I’m afraid that Harris, the former prosecutor, would take me apart blatant lie by blatant lie.
I guess Trump – who played baseball at the military academy where his exasperated father sent the out-of-control teenager — has forgotten the baseball term “pinch hitter.”
The rule in high school, college or big-league baseball is simple: The game must go on no matter who the batter is.
Incredibly, a day later some bizarre comments about Biles that Trump’s running mate JD Vance made in 2021 resurfaced.
Vance questioned why the gymnast should be praised after she withdrew from the Tokyo Olympics to focus on her mental health. Biles said she had developed something gymnasts call the “twisties,” meaning a mental struggle with the physical risk inherent in certain gymnastic moves.
But Vance is apparently lacking the empathy gene.
“I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people, not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments,” Vance said in 2021.
At the time, All Ball praised Biles for her courage in going public with her mental health struggles. Her goal, she later said, was to give hope to others who were struggling with mental health issues, to see that there is a way out if they seek help like she did.
With her latest accomplishments as of Monday, Biles has won 12 Olympic medals, seven of them gold.
She’s a winner, many times over – both in competition and in life.
Now she deserves one more gold medal: for calling out Trump’s race-baiting trash talk.
Just What the Chargers Didn’t Need
The LA Chargers made some news in their first week of camp at the team’s sparkling new training center in El Segundo, known as The Bolt.
This news hit them like a bolt of lightning: Quarterback Justin Herbert, the best player on the team, the key to their whole season and the man who holds almost all the NFL records for a quarterback’s first four years in the league, has a bad case of plantar fasciitis.
The initial diagnosis is that he will be in a walking boot for two weeks, and then he will be re-evaluated.
Plantar fasciitis is the inflammation of the plantar fascia, tissue in the foot used during walking and foot movement. Plantar fasciitis can be caused by a number of factors, including type of shoes, foot structure, overuse and types of walking surfaces. The main symptom of plantar fasciitis is heel pain.
Here’s hoping that Jim Harbaugh, the Chargers new coach, is smart enough to give Herbert all the time he needs to let his foot heal completely. Plantar fasciitis has a way of lingering much longer than expected, and it would be wiser to have him miss a couple of games at the start of the season than to take a risk, re-injure it, and miss most or all of the season.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com
