Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, who is also the coach of Team USA at the 2024 Paris Olympics, recently tried to summarize the emotions of his team after an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Kerr called the incident “terrible” and a “demoralizing day for our country.”
“This is a time where we feel very proud to represent our country wearing USA on our chest, competing in the Olympics,” Kerr said, via ESPN's Brian Windhorst. “We've talked to the players about how important it is to show the best version of us as human beings to represent our country in a respectful, dignified manner. It makes you want to do that even more so, because this is really shameful for us to sit here and think about what happened and what's going on in our country.”
Kerr has a long history of criticizing gun violence. His father, Malcolm Kerr, was assassinated in 1984 in Beirut, Lebanon. The militant group Islamic Jihad targeted Malcolm because he served as president of the American University of Beirut.
“It's such a demoralizing day for our country,” Kerr said. “It's yet another example of not only our political division but also gun culture. A 20-year-old with an AR-15 trying to shoot the former president. It's hard to process everything, and it's scary to think about where this goes because of the issues that already exist in the country. So this is a terrible day.”
The incident occurred at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday night. Trump said that he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” Trump was quickly whisked from the stage by Secret Service agents, his ear covered in blood. Early Sunday morning, the FBI identified the suspected gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Warriors' Steve Kerr, Team USA players respond to Donald Trump shooting
“It's obviously a very sad time in general,” Warriors point guard Stephen Curry said. “All the conversations around the election and the state of politics in our country. Then you have a situation like this, which just [evokes] a lot of emotions around things that we need to correct as a people.”
Martina Strong, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, addressed the team on Sunday. Team USA will stay in the Middle East this week before playing a couple warm up games ahead of the Paris Olympics. They will face Australia on Monday and Serbia on Wednesday.
“Obviously what we're doing is very trivial, just playing basketball,” Kerr said. “But we want to put our best selves out there to try to give people a glimpse of what our country can be about. And then you hear something like this and it's just so demoralizing and obviously so sad.”
“Thank God Trump wasn't hit,” Kerr concluded, “but it's just so demoralizing in every which way.”
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