ESPN's Ryan Clark Says That He Doesn't Respect Donald Trump In Dramatic Video, Seems To Think People Care
In a stunning turn of events that absolutely nobody could have seen coming, an ESPN employee has expressed that they do not respect President-Elect Donald Trump. The employee of the four-letter network who shared the opinion - one that undoubtedly aligns with most inside the company walls - is former NFL safety turned commentator, Ryan Clark.
To get the full story here, we need to go back to November 6, the day after Election Day, when it became crystal clear that Trump was running away with the 2024 Presidential Election. Clark reacted to the news with a completely level-headed post on X, formerly Twitter, that some may even argue was a patriotic message as he explained that he would respect Trump and his office.
While Clark's message may have been entirely normal and respectful, social media is a place where disrespect and dramatic opinions reign supreme. His mentions were flooded with people calling him out for saying that he would respect the President-Elect and the Oval Office because, for a moment, he forgot that Orange Man Bad.
After taking heat online from complete and total strangers and likely losing hundreds of followers for saying that he would respect both the office and the man who resides in it, Clark went to work on a three-minute, over-dramatized video explaining that he was wrong in saying that he would respect Trump.
In the video, he explains that his oldest daughter woke up to the news, and laid in bed and cried next to his mother. This, of course, coming after he openly admitted that strangers on the Internet influenced him to walk back his take. The video then turns into a love letter for former President Barack Obama, before he threw jabs in Trump's direction, the same man he said he would show respect for five days earlier.
"We elected someone that ran a campaign based in bigotry and based in hate, and for those four years, it wasn't great," Clark said, referencing Trump's first presidency. "I remember in ‘16, someone sitting in that office (Trump) calling people who peacefully protested ’sons of bitches' and then in 2020, his last year, it wasn't about just COVID to me, it was the most divided this country had ever been."
"It's going to be forever hard to respect the man, and I don't, and I won't, but I will respect the office," Clark continued. "I want to be a sane man in an insane society. I want to be a reasonable man, in an unreasonable world. So, I won't be divisive, but I do hope for all of our sake that he understands that he's our President."
It's genuinely hilarious to sit back and think that Clark reached a point while scrolling through his mentions and watching his follower count go down where his brain told him that getting together a production team and putting together a video explaining that he was wrong for saying he would respect the President-Elect was the logical next move.
The wildest part of this entire situation is Clark thinking anyone – outside of the strangers online that he admitted influenced him – cares what his political opinion is.
Clark voted for Kamala Harris just like 71 million other Americans did, and while he was oh-so-close to taking the Harris defeat with class and dignity, he couldn't stick to his own opinion and was so heavily influenced that he succumbed to the pressure to disavow the President-Elect.