Tommy Tuberville’s odd, odious and opportunistic odyssey

The U.S. Senator's positions and rhetoric run counter to some of what he did in his previous life as a college football coach. Is there a way to make sense of it?

Tommy Tuberville had himself a month.

Over the course of 31 days in May, the college football coach-turned United States Senator committed what would have been described in a decidedly more normal era of American politics as a series of gaffes – except for the fact that Tuberville seems to steadfastly believe what he said and did.

On May 10, while speaking to a Birmingham-area radio station, the first-term Alabama Senator was asked whether he believes white nationalists should be permitted to serve in the military, with reports from various news organizations and governmental bodies indicating that white supremacy is on the rise within the ranks of the country’s armed forces. A question that would have once come with a chip-shot field goal of an answer produced something else entirely from Tuberville, who said he doesn’t label them that way.

“I call them Americans,” Tuberville said.

Two weeks later, in an interview with Donald Trump Jr., Tuberville took aim at an increasingly popular target for those on one end of the political spectrum – public school teachers.

“The COVID really brought it out how bad our schools are and how bad our teachers are, in the inner city,” Tuberville said. “Most of them in the inner city, I don’t know how they got degrees. I don’t know whether they can read and write. And they want a raise. They want less time to work, less time in school. It’s just, we’ve ruined work ethic in this country. We don’t work at it anymore. We push an easy life.”

With a brazen lack of subtlety – and doing so while sitting next to a living, breathing example of how exorbitantly expensive private schools can also fail their students – it wasn’t hard to parse what Tuberville was trying to say. As has often been said over the better part of the past decade, the dog whistle has become a bullhorn.

Both of Tuberville’s comments drew sharp and swift criticism, but he wasn’t even done there. On May 26, the Washington Post reported that his top military aide – Morgan Murphy, a former food critic – advised Tuberville to stall a slew of senior military nominations in order to try to stop a new Defense Department policy that helps ensure access to abortions for service members. Five days later, Murphy resigned.

For those who follow college football, the headlines he has generated serve as a surreal reminder that, yes, the man still largely thought of as the former Auburn coach is now among the 100 or so most powerful people in the country.

The path he blazed to the halls of Congress was undeniably and perhaps unapologetically unconventional. For those who support him, it gives him an outsider panache. But for everyone else, it begs a question – how in the hell did we get here?