(Photo: Raja Sambasivan)
I would like to take a moment, here on this calamitous anniversary, to contemplate the political and cultural impact of bad pizza upon our zany little world. I am, of course, referring to the massive international chain restaurant called Papa John’s, and to its wealthy owner, Mr. John Schnatter of St. Louis. The two entities — the subpar pizza joint and the man with all the dough — sit at the core of a small confluence of absurdity that explains nearly everything you need to know about Year One in the Age of Trump.
Ridiculous? Certainly. True? You tell me.
There are more than 5,000 Papa John’s pizzerias in 45 countries around the world. It is the most widely recognized advertiser for the National Football League; if you watch the NFL on Sundays, like as not you’ll see the face of “Papa” John Schnatter a dozen times mugging it up with the likes of Peyton Manning and the guy who mows the playing field. His connections to the NFL run deeper than TV commercials. Dallas Cowboys owner and billionaire oilman Jerry Jones owns more than 120 Papa John’s franchises.
Schnatter played in Republican politics behind the scenes for a time, holding fundraisers for Mitt Romney in 2012 and donating to Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. He made his first ham-fisted entrance onto the public political stage about five years ago, when the passage of the Affordable Care Act motivated him to take out his rage on his customers and employees. If the ACA wasn’t repealed, he said at the time, he would be forced to jack up the price of his pizza, and some of his franchises would have to cut workers’ hours. Because this was nonsense, there was a fairly damaging backlash and Schnatter backed down.
Odds are Schnatter would have kept his head down for good after that mess, but then several things happened almost simultaneously: NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police violence against people of color, several players joined him, Donald Trump attacked them…