Brady's Friendship with Trump Will Be the Biggest Story Line of Super Bowl Week, and I'm Fine With It
Kellyanne Conway: President Trump Is Grateful For His ‘Loyal’ Friend Tom Brady https://t.co/h2o1e65lZl pic.twitter.com/bK0HbpUCEY
— The Smoke Room (@thesmokeroom) January 24, 2017
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SI – The fact that we have such an intense obsession with a football player’s celebrity friends feels at times asinine. Except we’re not talking about any pedestrian friendship—this is a divisive incoming president who continues to strategically use his relationship with the Patriots, and Brady in particular, as an asset. When Trump, at his pre-Inauguration Day dinner last Thursday, immediately pivoted from thanking his family to telling attendee Robert Kraft, “Your friend Tom just called, he feels good. He called to congratulate us, he feels good,” that was news that transcended sports. When Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway appeared on national television and said, “President Trump is just so grateful that friends like Tom Brady are loyal and can ignore the shrapnel, the verbal shrapnel,” hell no, we’re not just going to move on and start dissecting the offensive line.
NY Daily News - If you’re friends with Trump, you’re friends with racism, bigotry and misogyny. Just like if you voted for Trump, you voted for racism, bigotry and misogyny. … By being friends with Trump and having that friendship be public, Brady is tacitly condoning the president whether he means to or not.
Boston Herald – Our country has been transformed into a coast-to-coast high school cafeteria, and a food fight of biblical proportions is just getting under way. Who you voted for, who you supported, all is a big deal.
We’ve barely begun the pre-Super Bowl LI hype, and the world is already tipping its hand that the big story line of the week is going to Trump’s friendships with the Patriots. We’re going to hear The Donald brought up more times than Dan Quinn, Malcolm Butler and Mohamed Sanu combined to the 10th power. Trump will be mentioned in the first two questions asked every time Brady, Belichick and Mr. Kraft step behind a podium. And I have no problem with it.
Even more to the point, I say: Bring it. Give them your worst. The Patriots are despised anyway, why not go all in? Everyone besides the 60 million who voted for Trump see him as a sinister, cat-stroking archvillain hellbent on nuking the world and enslaving the survivors, I say the Pats might as well be his evil, eye-patched Number Two.
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Of course it’s ridiculous to make it an issue. Brady, Belichick and Mr. Kraft are no different than hundreds of other famous, successful people who’ve made friends with Trump over his 40-something years in the public eye. Except for one thing: Their loyalty. Plenty of his old friends ran for the shadows when the heat was turned up. But these three stuck by their golf buddy at the risk of pissing off millions of marchers in vagina hats who think friendship means you condone grabbing women by the pussy and sizing up a 10-year-old’s future dateability.
I could argue against it, but I won’t. I don’t care that half the owners who’ve been to the Super Bowl have enabled real life, actual wife beaters and manage to skate on it. Or that Trump actually won the whole region the Falcons come from but no one will ask them about him. I simply don’t. As far as I’m concerned, you can grapple Trump unto the Patriots’ soul with hoops of steel*. He’s become an empty vessel into which most of America has poured all their worst fears, hatred and anger. So have the Patriots. He’s been wildly successful against all odds. So have the Patriots. He’s made history doing things completely against the grain. So have the Patriots. He’s treated most of the media like hot garbage. So have the Patriots. And he’s despised by anyone that hasn’t benefited from his success. Just like the Pats. So embrace it. Go full wrestling heel and enjoy the fact that if the Pats win, it will not only aggravate the haters into fits of hysteria, it will make for the best White House visit in history.
(*Hamlet, Laertes’ speech to Polonius. Just showing off that Bridgewater State education.)