Detroit Pistons Coach Stan Van Gundy Blisters Donald Trump: ‘Brazenly Racist, Misogynistic, Ethnic-Centric’

Detroit Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy was firing on all cylinders at a news conference Wednesday when he let President-elect Donald Trump have it in a blistering, six-minute diatribe a day after the fiery Republican took a campaign many had scoffed at to the highest office in the land.

Speaking with reporters Wednesday, Van Gundy said he assumed players were quietly reflecting on the embarrassment of an earlier 23-point loss to the Los Angeles Clippers during an unusually somber bus ride to the Talking Stick Resort Arena in Phoenix for Wednesday night’s face-off with the Arizona.

Nope, backup center Aron Baynes told the coach, it was Trump’s win, not the Pistons’ loss. So instead of using a media availability to talk about the Pistons’ chance of redeeming themselves against the Suns, Van Gundy let loose.

“I don't think anybody can deny this guy is openly and brazenly racist and misogynistic and ethnic-centric,” Van Gundy began, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press. “We have just thrown a good part of our population under the bus, and I have problems with thinking this is where we are as a country.”

The coach was just getting warmed up.

“It’s just, we have said — and my daughters, the three of them — our society has said, ‘No, we think you should be second-class citizens. We want you to be second-class citizens. And we embrace a guy who is openly misogynistic as our leader.' I don’t know how we get past that.”

With that, he quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice.”

“I would have believed in that for a long time, but not today. … What we have done to minorities … in this election is despicable. I’m having a hard time dealing with it. This isn’t your normal candidate. I don’t know even know if I have political differences with him. I don’t even know what are his politics. I don’t know, other than to build a wall and 'I hate people of color, and women are to be treated as sex objects and as servants to men.' I don’t know how you get past that. I don’t know how you walk into the booth and vote for that.”

Van Gundy said that after electing Trump, Americans have little room to criticize human rights abuses by leaders of other countries.

“We presume to tell other countries about human-rights abuses and everything else. We better never do that again, when our leaders talk to China or anybody else about human-rights abuses,” he said. “We just elected an openly, brazen misogynist leader and we should keep our mouths shut and realize that we need to be learning maybe from the rest of the world, because we don’t got anything to teach anybody.”

Van Gundy said he is embarrassed and ashamed for the country.

“I can’t say I’ve ever been ashamed of our country until today. Until today. We all have to find our way to move forward, but that was — and I’m not even trying to make a political statement. To me, that’s beyond politics,” he said.

Before he was done, Van Gundy took on conservative Christians for backing Trump.

“What Bible are you reading?” he said. “... You’re supposed to be — at least you pride yourself on being the moral compass of our society. And you said, ‘Yeah, the guy can talk about women like that. I’m fine with that. He can disparage every ethnic group, and I’m fine with that.'”

Finally, he concluded:

“It’s incredible. I don’t know how you go about it, if you’re a person of color today or a Latino. Because white society just said to you, again — not like we haven’t forever — but again, and emphatically, that I don’t think you deserve equality. We don’t think you deserve respect. And the same with women. That’s what we say today, as a country. We should be ashamed for what we stand for as the United States today.”

When he was done, Van Gundy said he didn’t “have anything to say about the game.”

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons