Amid global fallout over an embarrassing book, increasing pressure related to Russia’s election meddling and international stresses in North Korea and China, Donald Trump returned on Thursday to bashing the National Football League.
The president retweeted a photo of a grief-stricken widow lying on her husband’s military grave, carrying a stern declaration: ‘THIS IS WHY WE STAND.’
‘So beautiful,’ Trump wrote on Twitter. ‘Show this picture to the NFL players who still kneel!’
DailyMail.com can now disclose that the woman in the picture is 35-year-old Jenn Budenz from San Diego.
President Donald Trump restarted his feud with the NFL on Thursday after five weeks of cease-fire
This image from a Liberty University student’s Twitter feed found its way to the president, who retweeted it as a statement against NFL players who won’t stand for the National Anthem
Trump wrote: ‘So beautiful….Show this picture to the NFL players who still kneel!’
The woman in the viral photo has been revealed to be 35-year-old Jenn Budenz from San Diego and her son. Budenz is the widow of Major Andrew Mykle Budenz who died in 2013
The photo, which shows her and her infant child resting on a military graveyard while stretched out on a blanket printed with her wedding photos, was taken during one of her daily visits to Miramar National Cemetery where her husband Major Andrew Mykle Budenz is buried.
Budenz, a Marine C-130 pilot, was 34 when he died in a motorcycle crash in Palomar Mountain in September 2013, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
Mrs Budenz was 12 weeks pregnant with the couple’s son at the time of his death and continued to visit her husband daily after their son, Andrew Jr. was born.
The Marine veteran served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The viral picture was shared online last September by Corey Jones, a student at the evangelical Liberty University in Virginia, as a statement against the NFL national anthem protests.
The protests were a topic of contention for most of the 2017 football season.
A mostly black contingent of athletes, unified but small compared to the size of the league, followed the lead of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and knelt instead of standing as The Star Spangled Banner was played or sung.
Budenz died in a motorcycle accident in Palomar Mountain leaving behind his 12-week pregnant wife. Mrs Budenz gave birth to a son who she name after her late husband and continued to visit his grave daily
The protest was intended as a statement of support for black victims of police brutality, but was taken in pats of the country as a gut-punch to America’s national identity.
Kaepernick, stung by poor performance on a third-rate team, didn’t play this year.
But the protests continued, alternatively surging and waning until the final regular-season games last Sunday when only about 16 players – less than one per cent of those on team rosters – failed to stand up.
The protest numbers reached as high as 200 duing one week in the fall, after the president said team owners should bench any player who failed to stand for the Anthem.
Trump had asked a frenied crowd during a September campaign-style rally in Alabama: ‘Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, “Get that son of a b***h off the field right now! Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!”‘
As the league came to grips with how to respond, Trump poured gasoline on the fire.
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, center, started the protest trend in 2016 as a statement against race-fueled police brutality, but found himself unable to win a spot on a team this year
TV commentators have noticed tons of empty seats at NFL games this season, a phenomenon that Trump has linked to the protests
Trump hadn’t tweeted about the football pre-game protests since November 28, just after the Thanksgiving Day holiday
‘If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem,’ he tweeted at one point. ‘If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!’
The NFL protests coincided with a season-long attendance slump as well, and Trump commented repeatedly on the empty seats – even in stadiums where teams were winning.
By late November, the last time Trump had weighed in publicly until Thursday morning, the protest episode had become more of a business parable for him than a finger-wagging patriotism lecture.
‘At least 24 players kneeling this weekend at NFL stadiums that are now having a very hard time filling up,’ he observed after the Thanksgiving weekend.
‘The American public is fed up with the disrespect the NFL is paying to our Country, our Flag and our National Anthem. Weak and out of control!’