Last week, Auburn head football coach Tommy Tuberville received President Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total” endorsement in the race for Alabama’s U.S. Senate seat up this November, which was viewed by many to be a shot in the arm for Tuberville’s effort.
Some attributed Trump’s endorsement to Tuberville’s opponent, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Department of Justice investigation into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump has been openly critical of Sessions’ decision on numerous occasions. During an interview with Alabama Public Television’s Don Dailey that aired Friday, Tuberville likened it to a quarterback taking a knee in the first quarter, which he said would have an impact on the entire team.
“You don’t get many chances in life,” he said. “I’ll put it this way: If I had a quarterback who came to me and took a knee in the first quarter and just said, ‘I’m not going to play the rest of the game,’ that tends to tear down your team, so to speak. It takes the moral loyalty out of it. For something like that to happen now, it’s a big break-up of the entire team that President Trump had put together. And so, you’ve got to make your own decision, and I’d had never done that, I promise you that because I know where we are at in this country, and we are losing daily to socialism. And we have to put a stop to it.”
“What Jeff Sessions did is he turned over that witch hunt to 200-300 lawyers, liberal lawyers and sicced them on President Trump,” Tuberville continued. “And look at what he and his family had to go through for two years. And at the end of the day, he knew when you’re innocent, and you’re fighting it, and you’re wondering why are they doing this? It’s that much more stress that you put on yourself. Thank God we’ve got President Trump. He is strong. He is strong-willed.”
Tuberville credited the president for working through the investigation and argued it made him strong over time.
“I’ve dealt with teams all my life,” Tuberville said. “I’ve dealt with good times, tough times. I’ve dealt with people who have stood up and fought for what they believed in – in more than just athletics. I’ve been in a lot of wars in my life, and you can see the people who stand up and see the people who don’t. And you’ve got to stand up – you’ve got to look at the entire picture. You can’t just look at one or two small things. You’ve got to look at the entire picture – what your decision is going to unfold.”
“Did it, happened, we worked through it,” he continued. “Unfortunately, we spent $32 million of our taxpayer money on this witch hunt. And they found zero. All said and done – it’s over. It’s made our president stronger. It has done that now – it’s made him stronger. He’s got people around him now that he really believes in, and it takes a while.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly and host of Huntsville’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN.
