When the New England Patriots made the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history, treading the Atlanta Falcons’ dreams firmly into the dust, President Donald Trump knew that he was on to a winner. The dumbed-down embodiment of a coked-up Charlie Sheen even tweeted as much.
Though he left his own Super Bowl party early, in a huff when the Patriots appeared to be dead and done, he found a connection all the same before excitedly hammering into his keyboard, ‘Tom Brady, Bob Kraft and Coach B are total winners. Wow!’.
But Trump was more than breathlessly ascending the bandwagon. His close ties with Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are well known. Brady is one of his golfing buddies, while love letters from Belichick sustained him as the long months of presidential campaigning drew to their importunate close.
What’s more, the head coach and his star player had just conjured the sort of storyline Trump and his cohorts could hardly resist: two of the most corrupt sporting figures of their generation showing less than a couple of years after Deflategate that indefatigable assholes often do emerge on top.
Reddened cheeks and moist faces out on the turf of NRG Stadium indicated the extent to which Brady and Belichick were overcome. But when they were invited for champagne and meatloaf to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s cut-price quasi-presidential Palm Beach estate, things soon went awry. First Trump agitated neighbours and town zoning officials by putting up grossly oversized, Patriots-themed goalposts.
Then he repeatedly failed to catch a Tom Brady celebratory throw. While Trump – amid ‘locker room’ talk too vulgar to mention – gently ribbed Brady in his own faltering way, asking him why he couldn’t replicate his form of the Super Bowl fourth quarter, onlookers instead cast withering glances towards Trump’s tiny hands.
But when Bill Belichick suggested that Trump wouldn’t make a good running back or wide receiver, Trump cried ‘Discrimination!’, before summoning Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sean Spicer as Team White House rallied, initiating a fierce rushing play.
Under the heft of the four men, Brady inevitably wilted, but as he fell Trump leaned in close and gripped him firmly by the palm. One white millionaire giving a helping arm to another: now that’s Trump’s winning mentality, now that’s how he’ll Make America Great Again.
