During his first weeks as president, Donald Trump has spent much of his time shaking the foundations of the federal bureaucracy. Now, as he prepares to become the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl, he seems to be aiming his disruptor’s gaze at American sports culture.
Until now, most presidents have preferred to sit for a taped interview to be shown on game day (though Joe Biden skipped two of those). Trump, however, seems to be encouraged by the rousing receptions he’s received at college football games recently, where chants of “USA! USA!” greeted him.
Trump’s critics have already complained, ironically, that he is a polarizing figure who will destroy the unifying nature of the big game. Their criticism ignores how the NFL itself, like much of American sports, has gone through its own divisive phase over the last several years. Players and NFL brass have pushed left-wing politics out of line with those of football fans, who tend to lean right. This wokeism, cresting a few years ago, has begun to fade. Trump’s appearance is likely intended to drive it even further out of not only the NFL but also American sports in general. He may succeed.
The big game was not always such a flashpoint. The only Super Bowl I’ve ever attended was probably the most unifying in its history—though it took place against a turbulent backdrop. I saw the Buffalo Bills play the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXV on January 27, 1991, ten days after the beginning of the Gulf War.
As a Giants season ticket holder, I’d won a lottery giving me rights to two Super Bowl tickets. All the Giants had to do to get to Tampa was win the NFC championship game against the Joe Montana-led San Francisco 49ers—then trying to achieve a “threepeat” as Super Bowl champions, as the Kansas City Chiefs will look to do this Sunday. Led by a backup quarterback named Jeff Hostetler and a defense that featured maybe the greatest defensive player of all time in Lawrence Taylor, the Giants pulled it off. In that pre-Internet era, I tried to figure out how to get to Tampa amid a national crisis, with plane tickets scarce. My brother and I instead hopped on an Amtrak train for an 18-hour ride to Florida (including a four-hour layover at Washington’s Union Station). We got off in Orlando, which had plenty of hotel rooms available near Disneyland because kids were back in school after Christmas break. We then rented a car and made the hour and a half journey to Tampa.
Warnings circulated about enhanced security and intensive spectator screening. (This was ten years before the September 11 terror attacks.) My brother and I got there early, parked, dawdled for a while, and then lingered in the formidable security line hours before the game. We waited and waited to pass through x-ray machines, a first for many of us. The only consolation was that it was a democratic inconvenience, with celebrities forced to cool their heels along with us. His NFL-legend status notwithstanding, Terry Bradshaw stood just a few feet away.
Because there wasn’t much to do when we got into the stadium, we loitered around the TV monitors, watching what surely was the most extraordinary pregame show in NFL history: scenes of refineries on fire in the Middle East and sorties flown by allied jets, interspersed with NFL player interviews. As the stadium filled up, we began hearing cheering and chants, and the monitors showed soldiers in “undisclosed locations” in the Middle East. By the time several color guards marched on to the field for the national anthem, the stadium overflowed with nearly 74,000 fans waving small American flags distributed by the organizers (what a different time this was!).
What followed was an iconic rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Whitney Houston, so defining a moment that her performance was later released as a single. The next three hours saw an exhilarating football game, the best in Super Bowl history to that point, punctuated by frequent chants and cheers as the stadium monitors flashed pictures from the Middle East. The TV telecast, which I recorded, is a faded but extraordinary document. Instead of the usual barrage of irreverent commercials, we get constant, somber cutaways to the war zone.
Watching that broadcast, it’s easy to forget that the war itself was controversial. Some called it a great crusade against tyranny; others saw only a crass grab for oil. But there was no controversy in the stadium that day.
That was another era. Now, though Trump’s critics deride him as divisive, it’s been the Left and its causes that have driven much of the discord seen at the Super Bowl in the last decade or so.
Beyonce’s Black Panther-themed halftime show in 2016 led to protest rallies in front of the NFL offices in New York days after the game. The league’s decision in recent years to have “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “black national anthem,” performed pregame has also angered fans. In 2023, several performers, including reportedly Jay-Z and Rihanna, refused to perform at the Super Bowl because they believed that NFL owners had “frozen out” Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who initiated national anthem protests before games.
Now comes Trump, parachuting into the Super Bowl at the eleventh hour. This won’t be Tuscaloosa, where cheering crowds greeted him when he attended a September college game between Alabama and Georgia; or Landover, Maryland, where President-elect Trump watched the Army-Navy game in December. This is Trump at his most audacious, showing up at the NFL’s biggest show, one of the few remaining events watched by a broad cross-section of the public. The potential outcomes range from a rousing, old-fashioned Super Bowl celebration of the American spirit on the one hand, to a massive embarrassment for the NFL—player protests, a halftime-show debacle, or the like—on the other. At least the league knows that lots of people will be watching.
Top Photo by Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images