Among Patriots’ Relationships with Trump, Robert Kraft’s Is Most Troubling
Tom Brady has been taking a lot of heat lately, and deservedly so. The New England Patriots quarterback, preparing to play for his fifth Super Bowl ring against the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday, has been skirting questions about his support for Donald Trump ever since September 2015, when he displayed Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign hat in his locker. Brady has recently doubled down on defending his relationship with Trump, first expressing bewilderment that anyone would criticize their friendship, and this week pleading ignorance about “what’s going on in the world.”
This is significant, as The Nation’s Dave Zirin and others have explained. So, too, is the support for Trump from Patriots head coach Bill Belichick. Trump — whose ban on refugees from Syria and six other majority-Muslim nations has sparked mass protests, and whose administration threatens to roll back civil rights advances for marginalized groups across the board — has repeatedly used both Brady and Belichick as political props. He read aloud a letter of encouragement from Belichick on the eve of the election. He name-dropped Brady the night before his inauguration and told the world that Brady had voted for him. When your friend is the President of the United States and he uses you for political gain, your friendship becomes inescapably political.
But it’s Trump’s relationship with Robert Kraft — billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and owner of the Patriots — that should really be raising eyebrows. Without Kraft, Brady and Belichick may have never even met Trump. And without Kraft, it’s unlikely that Brady and Belichick — two men who, as far as I can tell, have football on the brain almost 24/7 — would have ever found themselves caught up in a political fracas.
Kraft, on the other hand, is a complex, influential figure. He is one of the most powerful people in New England, with a net worth of $5.2 billion that he accrued through a packaging and paper empire and various other investments. Kraft has donated more than $100 million to charity over the past few decades, including millions to Israel and numerous Jewish causes in the United States. He’s a lifelong Democrat, but he has made campaign contributions across the aisle — in 2008, for example, he gave $25,000 to both Barack Obama and John McCain. In 2014, he gave to Democrat Ed Markey and to Republicans Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and John Cornyn. His politics may be hazy, but Kraft clearly seeks political sway.
We also know that Kraft and Trump are dear friends. The pair met on the golf course 20 years ago at Trump’s club in Florida, and today Kraft speaks about the fierce loyalty that Trump has shown him ever since. In 2011, when Kraft’s wife Myra passed away, Trump called Kraft once a week for an entire year.
It was Kraft who procured the “Make America Great Again” hat that landed inside Brady’s locker. And it may have been Kraft who coached Brady — a man whom Kraft describes as being “like a son” to him — on how to dodge political bullets. In February, before the Massachusetts state primary, Kraft said: “While I am not comfortable discussing politics publicly, I am very comfortable talking about my friendships with people who happen to be in politics.”
This month, Kraft told the New York Times: “Loyalty is important to me, and [Trump] has been a wonderful friend.”
Days later, Brady had this to say about Trump during a radio interview: “He’s been very supportive of me for a long time. It’s just a friendship. I have a lot of friends. I call a lot of people.”
Brady also seems to be following Kraft’s lead as he fields questions from the Super Bowl media in Houston. Kraft has declined to talk about Trump because, according to one columnist, “it doesn’t fit his theme of joy this week.”
Brady, meanwhile, when asked about “what’s going on in the world,” offered this response: “What’s going on in the world? I haven’t paid much attention. I’m just a positive person.” Like owner, like son.
Not surprisingly, Brady — the face of the Patriots’ franchise and perhaps the greatest quarterback ever — has grabbed most of the headlines. But unlike Brady, Kraft has the wherewithal to make a tangible impact under a Trump presidency. When Brady says he and Trump are just friends, he actually means it. With Kraft, it’s safe to say there’s more going on.
That’s what makes a statement like this one from Kraft so alarming: “I think one of the great problems in the country today is the working poor, the middle class, that there hasn’t been growth in income on an equal basis, and I really think the policies [Trump] is going to bring to bear are going to be great for the economic side of America.”
It’s quite a thing to say about a president whose cabinet is stacked with former Goldman Sachs executives, including a Treasury Secretary whose bank employed “harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive” foreclosure practices and who failed to disclose his Cayman Islands holdings to the Senate Finance Committee.
Adding nuance and weight to Kraft’s relationship with Trump is Kraft’s unwavering support for Israel and his political clout there. Last year, Kraft donated $6 million for a football complex in Jerusalem. Kraft and his late wife Myra sponsor a program for Jewish teens to tour the country. And until 2008, Kraft had a controlling interest in Israel-based Carmel Container Systems, the largest packaging company in the Middle East.
At the same time, Kraft is buddies with right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Trump ally who has been condemned internationally for expanding Israel’s settlement program and for overseeing a brutal attack on Gaza in 2014. Kraft and Netanyahu have been tight for years — Kraft even played a key role in convincing the Israeli airline El Al to run daily nonstop flights between Israel and Boston.
“Long ago, as he started getting rich, Robert Kraft found a place that needed everything he had to offer — his power, his money, and his philanthropy,” writes Robert Huber in a 2015 profile of Kraft in Boston Magazine. “In Israel, he would gain the ear of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who consulted him not just for economic insight, but for his political viewpoint as well.”
Around the National Football League, Kraft is known to take anyone and everyone on trips to Israel, including Brady in 2006 and Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman, who is Jewish, in 2015. Also in 2015, Kraft led a group to Israel of 19 members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. When the players met with Netanyahu, the prime minister took the opportunity to urge them to oppose President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Kraft has said his goal is to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians — the Boston Magazine profile states that he believes the best way to support Israel is by creating “economic interdependency between Israel and Palestine, between Jews and Arabs.” At one point, Kraft farmed out some manufacturing for his packaging company to Palestinian territories, albeit “without much success.”
In 2005, Kraft donated $500,000 to his alma mater, Columbia University, to create the Kraft Family Fund for Interfaith and Intercultural Awareness.
“More and more, Kraft said, he is focusing on strategizing and bringing people together. Like Arabs and Jews,” reads the recent New York Times piece, pointing to Kraft’s attempts to “broker Middle East conciliation through sports and investments.”
But statements by Kraft and his late wife Myra paint a more complicated picture, especially in light of Kraft’s cozy relationship with Netanyahu and Trump. Robert has spoken in more general terms, but both he and Myra view Israel much like Netanyahu does — as a nation constantly under attack in a hostile region, with little acknowledgement of Israel’s American-backed occupation in the West Bank, expansion of settlements, and restrictions on travel and trade that have contributed to dire conditions in Gaza.
“That whole concept of team and teamwork and team first — that’s how Israel, in my opinion, has survived in the Middle East,” Kraft said in an interview this week with Forward. “Everyone has different opinions, and everyone is a hakham [a wise man], except in times of stress and, unfortunately, war, where everyone bands together and puts the team first.”
In 2008, Kraft suggested it’s hard for non-Jews in America who have never been to Israel to “understand what Israel is about,” adding that “the way it’s represented in the media is sometimes so far from what the truth is.”
Myra Kraft, who was board chair for Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies, was much more candid about her views. In a 2007 New York Times feature, she placed the blame for the Palestinian refugee crisis squarely on Palestinians and Arab governments.
“You don’t solve problems by blowing yourself up in public buildings and killing innocent people — that’s not going to solve the problem,” she said. “I understand, if I were a Palestinian, and the third generation now in a refugee camp, I’d probably be doing the same thing to myself, because it’s wrong. But it’s not Israel’s fault.”
In a 2008 interview with the Jerusalem Post, Kraft said that, while she would not want one of her four sons to join the U.S. army, she would be happy to have one of them enlist in the Israeli military.
“I would go with him,” she said. “As for joining the army, over Vietnam, I would have had an issue, because I didn’t believe in it. The same goes for the war in Iraq. I don’t know why we’re there. I would hate to have one of my sons fighting there. Iran’s the problem, not Iraq. But, as far as fighting for Israel is concerned, there is no problem.”
Asked what issues she would be considering in the 2008 presidential election, she named “Israel, the economy, [and] the plans for getting out of Iraq quickly.”
As for Robert Kraft, it’s hard to know to what extent his support of Trump is explained by their shared right-wing views on Israel. But by singing Trump’s praises, Kraft in many ways embodies what has been so maddening to Americans in recent weeks. By most accounts, Kraft is a mensch, generous with his fortunes and ostensibly committed to making the world a better place. And yet, when it comes to Trump, he seems willing to kick morality to the curb in the name of friendship, safety and political gain.
Friends don’t stay silent while friends take cues from Steve Bannon, the founder of a white nationalist empire. They don’t stay silent while friends appoint David Friedman — who has said left-leaning Jewish Americans are worse than Nazi collaborators — as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. They don’t stay silent while friends fail to mention Jews in a statement about the Holocaust. They don’t stay silent while Jews, Muslims, immigrants, women, African-Americans and LGBTQ people are all at risk.
Sure, it was nice of Trump to comfort Kraft in a time of need. And it’s okay to have friends whose views don’t always mirror your own. But by unflinchingly backing Trump, Kraft quite simply has come down on the wrong side of history. Perhaps Tom Brady and Bill Belichick can’t understand that, but Robert Kraft should.
