CNN political analyist Van Jones explained to Brooke Baldwin that President Donald Trump simply didn't understand players taking a knee, even though the topic seemed to preoccupy the Commander in Chief despite the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.
"Presidents can do more than one thing at the same time, so it's conceivable that he wasn't distracted," the former White House staffer noted. "His Twitter feed would tell you something different."
"The reality is taking a knee in sports is what do you when someone has been injured," Jones noted. "I got kids who play soccer, somebody gets hurt on the soccer field, everybody takes a knee."
"What [Colin] Kaepernick and these guys are trying to say is our democracy has been injured, civil rights have been injured because of the issue of policing," Jones explained. "We've gotten so far away from the policing issue."
"I think it is in bad form," Jones concluded.
"You have people on those playing fields, putting on their jerseys, who when they get off the field, they have text messages from their cousins who are having a horrific experience in America," Jones noted. "Americans are being killed -- sometimes unjustly -- by American law enforcement."
"If that's not a state of emergency, I don't know what is," Jones explained. "I don't think that is a threat democracy, that's what democracy is."
"It is an act of democracy and I think the president does the country a disservice, and he especially does his base a disservice, by acting as if they don't love the country," Jones explained. "These guys love America, they want to make America better. I think Trump needs to have more respect for what they're trying to do."
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