This article analyzes Donald Trump's attendance at the Super Bowl and its implications for American politics. The author contrasts the enthusiastic reception Trump received with the jeering of Taylor Swift, highlighting the growing polarization and intolerance within society.
Many years ago, when I was a sports journalist, I was fortunate enough to attend the Super Bowl , the climax of the American football season and an event like no other, one which captures the attention of an entire nation. During an interview session with one of the sport’s most successful coaches, there was persistent questioning about one of his players with whom he’d had a very public disagreement. He held his hands up to offer his own explanation of the contretemps.
“Hey,” he said, “this is not a game for well-adjusted individuals.” I recalled that comment in the early hours of Monday morning while watching this year’s Super Bowl contest between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. And it was nothing to do with the arcane, hand-to-hand combat on the field of play. Donald Trump became the first sitting President to attend a Super Bowl in person, and as the huge screens in the New Orleans Superdome showed him during the national anthem giving a military salute (a borderline disrespectful gesture, given he’d never seen active service), the crowd cheered him to the rafters. Meanwhile, the girlfriend of Travis Kelce, one of the Kansas City players, was shown on screen, she was booed. This was hardly surprising because half of the stadium was supporting Philadelphia, but it was a little shocking nevertheless. Visibly discomfited, she appeared to mouth “What’s going on?” to no one in particular. And in that, she vocalised my thoughts exactly. What, indeed, was going on? An establishment figure is acclaimed by an ostensibly non-partisan (politically-speaking) sports crowd while a widely-adored pop star was jeered. This can be regarded as the apogee of the cult of Trump, and, boy, did he enjoy it, using his Truth Social platform to troll Taylor Swift. “The only one that had a tougher night than the Kansas City Chiefs,” he wrote “was Taylor Swift. She got BOOED out of the Stadium. Maga is very unforgiving!” This infers that Swift has not been forgiven for her support of Kamala Harris in last November’s election, but the implication is clear: anyone who expresses a contradictory opinion to Trump will be publicly excoriated. Maga is all-powerful. This is a quasi-dictatorship. It is a form of politics that the modern Western world has not recently experienced, a cruel, narcissistic, and, yes, unforgiving disposition which seeks to aggrandise itself by belittling others. It is telling that Trump chose to go to the Super Bowl on Sunday. Never one to pass up a photo op, he was pictured with family members of victims of the New Year’s Eve attack on New Orleans and was seen shaking hands with emergency workers. But the symbolism went deeper than that. American football is “America’s game”, a sport which uses military terminology – “blitz”, “bomb”, “air raid” and “trenches” are all employed in its tactical lexicon – and whose take-no-prisoners, confrontational nature seems suited to the nation Trump is trying to build. What’s more, it’s a sport with grandiose pretentions that also chimes with Trump’s natural tendencies. The Super Bowl is called the “World Championship” even though it is a competition in which only teams from the United States take part, and it’s counted in Roman numerals, in the way that only popes or monarchs are. This latest contest was Super Bowl LIX, which is slightly at odds with a history that goes back less than 60 years. It is the best example of how sport can bring people of all persuasions together in common purpose, of how it can, in fact, be a unifying force. How utterly depressing, therefore, that Donald Trump should use the power of sport for his own means, to divide rather than unite. But then maybe politics, too, is...
SUPER BOWL DONALD TRUMP TAYLOR SWIFT POLITICAL DIVISION AMERICAN FOOTBALL MAGA TRUTH SOCIAL
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