A former Minnesota Viking on Friday vowed to keep protesting his home city’s official embrace of Donald Trump and the president’s MAGA political movement.
Chris Kluwe, a punter for the Vikings from 2005 to 2012, took the podium at the City Council meeting Tuesday in Huntington Beach, Calif., in opposition to a plaque that was changed to include an ode to Trump. Within minutes, he was arrested.
Added to the design were the words Magical, Alluring, Galvanizing, Adventurous. They construct the same acronym as Trump’s signature campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, or MAGA.
The plaque was approved to go on the city’s central library in honor of the library system’s 50th anniversary.
On “CNN News Central” Friday, Kluwe repeated many of his objections to Trump’s actions since Inauguration Day and again warned that “I believe we’re on the path that Nazi Germany went down under Hitler. And I say that as a political science and history major, as someone who has studied history. And the parallels are very, very clear.”
Kluwe added, “I plan to keep on showing up to the City Council meetings unless they ban me. ... I definitely plan on speaking out on the issue because, as an American citizen, I care about my country.”
On Tuesday before the suburban Los Angeles council, the 43-year-old Kluwe rolled out a long list of what he believes MAGA stands for, including “resegregation and racism … censorship and book bans … firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling a research on veteran suicide.”
But the comment that raised the biggest ruckus was that “MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.”
