Trump, Expected to Attend Super Bowl, Has Had a Fraught Relationship With the NFL

Duration The first mandate of President Trump, his relationship with the NFL was controversial.

He minimized the severity of brain shocks in football just when the League plays to reduce trauma in the head in the game, and suggested that football was decreasing that it is not as violent as it is once. At all times, in 2017, NFL owners urged to fire players who did not defend the national anthem to protest against racial injustice and police brutity.

That led to a reprimand throughout the League or Mr. Trump, and many more players joined the protests and also some of their followers within the NFL, including team owners, criticizing their comments. After the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl of that season, Trump canceled the traditional celebration of the White House championship when it was clear that most players would refuse to attend.

“They do not agree with their president because they insist that they proudly defend the national anthem, the hand in the heart, in honor of the great men of our army and the people of our country,” he said in a statement seven years ago.

The times have changed. On Sunday, Trump became the first president of the United States to attend a Super Bowl in person. He was in the Superdome in New Orleans to see the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City bosses as the guest of Gayle Benson, the owner of the Saints of New Orleans.

Hey wrote the game on Friday morning in Truth Social, praising several players and coaches (he did not think about his name) while it was also a blow to the new rules of start of the league, as he has done before.

“Two great field marshal in this game. In addition, an incredible corridor and the best wing of football (never!). Mr. Trump wrote.

Most politicians like to be close to football due to their excessive popularity and the amount of components they can simply appear in a game or together with a star or coach. Trump is an atypical case because the connection with the League dates from decades and has varied as an aspirational to openly antagonistic.

From the early 1980s, Trump showed interest in buying a team, including the Baltimore Colts, the New England patriots and the Buffalo Bills. Unable to get a franchise, he bought the New Jersey generals of the incipient United States Soccer League in 1984. He pushed the other owners to sue the NFL for trying to avoid the USFL, a spring league, play in autumn. After a bitter judgment, the USFL received three dollars in damage. The USFL collapsed shortly after.

Mr. Trump, who enjoys attributing sporting events such as UFC fights and university football championship games, was also a usual guest of the owner of Patriots Robert Kraft before entering politics. When he ran for president in 2015 and 2016, he used his connections with the team to help raise his profile with football fans. The Patriots Campo Marshal, Tom Brady, briefly kept a Make America Great Again cap in his locker and the team coach, Bill Belichick, wrote a letter in support that Mr. Trump read on television. After being chosen, Mr. Kraft and six other NFL team owners donated $ 1 million to its inauguration of 2017.

Then their criticisms and the players’ reaction came. But the NFL is in a different place now than then. The players are no longer kneeling in protest. And the League was not in the “end of racism” phrase in one of the final areas of the Super Bowl for the first time since 2021, a decision that occurs when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to make diversity, the capital initiative.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump once again has the opportunity to talk about football.

“Historically, it has been a time to talk about unity and union and simply celebrate these magnificent vacations in our national civic religion,” Michael MacCambridge, author of “America’s Game: The Epic Story of Sayed A”, “It is difficult to make Donald Trump celebrate football, especially because something problematic with the NFL and its players.”

The vice presidents have attended Super Bowls in the past, but the presidents have limited their connection with the game with a traditional television interview that is broadcast in the hours before the beginning with the network that transmits the confrontation of that year. Those interviews, which date from 2009, are a way to reach a mass television audience and transmit their love for the game and the notion that the Super Bowl is one of the few events in American life that unites several groups. (President Biden chose not to participate in a television interview for the last two years and President Trump decreased in 2018).

Trump was also expected to meet with the survivors of the attack in the French quarter of the city on New Year’s Day, and the emergency medical workers who helped them. It was being shown on video screens inside the super dome.

Many presidents, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, have played football and talked about the game and NFL with love. President Richard M. Nixon was particularly obsessed with football and sent plays to coaches, including George Allen and Don Shula. He also called to congratulate Shula after the Dolphins won the Super Bowl VII in 1973.

Like other presidents, Barack Obama invited Super Bowl champions to the White House. But he said that if he had a child, “he would have to think a lot” before letting him play football due to violence.

Three Vice Presidents have attended the Super Bowl. Spiro Agnew, who had been governor of Maryland, was the first. He went to Super Bowl III as guest of the owner of the Baltimore Colts, Carroll Rosenbloom.

Vice Presidents and Presidents also attended regular seasonal games from time to time. In 2017, Vice President Mike Pence went to a game of the Colts in his native state of Indiana and defended the national anthem as a counterpoint to Colin Kaepernick and other players who were kneeling making the game of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

In October, the duration of the campaign, Trump attended a game between Jets and Steelers in Pittsburgh.

The Super Bowl on Sunday, he thought, has a much larger audience, with more than 100 million viewers in the United States and many more millions abroad.