Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

NFL Owners Robert Kraft And Jeffrey Lurie Slam ‘Disastrous’ Trump On Secret Tape

An audio tape of a confidential meeting last October reveals that NFL owners — including two prominent Jews — were highly concerned about President Donald Trump’s comments that were critical of players kneeling during the national anthem.

The New York Times reports that it obtained the audio recording of the three-hour session in which owners, players and executives discussed the comments and felt Trump’s words were fueling an unprecedented amount of backlash against the league.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a longtime personal friend of Trump, was highly critical of the President. This despite contributing $1 million to the Trump campaign.

“The problem we have is, we have a president (Trump) who will use (kneeling) as fodder to do his mission,” Kraft said. “I don’t feel is in the best interests of America,

Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie used this word to describe Trump’s presidency: “Disastrous.”

Lurie urged players to not become divided and warned that everybody needed to be cautious in their responses.

“We’ve got to be careful not to be baited by Trump or whomever else,” Lurie said.

When the subject turned to former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, former teammate Eric Reid didn’t mince words. He told the group of people in the room that the NFL was blackballing Kaepernick over his anthem stance.

“I feel like he was hung out to dry,” Reid said of Kaepernick. “We all let him become Public Enemy No. 1 in this country, and he still doesn’t have a job.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version