In the United States, professional football is a big deal.
It’s highly dangerous, to the players, and vastly entertaining. Billions of dollars are spent each year on players’ salaries and the salaries of the coaches and supporting staff, and many fans spend their life savings to attend.
The New England Patriots have won five Super Bowls. So have the Denver Broncos, a team which your solitary reporter likes, generally speaking, since he lives in Denver (in Denver, it is an article of faith that the Broncos, 5-11 in 2017, will return to their former glory, one day).
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is a big supporter of Donald Trump.
Brady's team, which was widely favored to win yesterday’s Super Bowl 52, lost to the Philadelphia Eagles, 41-33. The Eagles’ second-string quarterback, Nick Foles, was the game’s MVP. It was the first Super Bowl win for the Eagles, who hail from the City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love.
The ads broadcast during the game were noticeably milder and gentler than usual. Associate solitary reporter Sylvia Patterson, a lifelong Broncos fan, tells us that the primary reason for the change in tenor of the ads is a general revulsion against Donald Trump’s constant yelling and screaming about NFL players taking a knee at the outset of NFL games to protest against police brutality directed against people of color.
“No sensible voters support Trump anymore,” Patterson said.
Trump was not at the game, which was held at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Instead, closely observed as usual by associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones, Trump was meeting with his highly evangelical vice president, former conservative Indiana talk show host Mike Pence.
Trump had at least partially forgotten that Pence would be on his way today to PyeongChang for the winter olympics in South Korea, but once his Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, reminded him, Trump told Pence to make a three hour speech during the opening ceremony against North Korea, its deadly nuclear program, and its lengthy history of extreme cruelty to its citizens .
Because the Patriots were supposed to win the Super Bowl, the capacity crowd watching the game at U.S. Bank Stadium spent the greater majority of their time pondering the continuing efficacy of the USA Patriot Act, because under that law the FBI obtained authority from the secret FISA Court for surveillance of Carter Page, an American citizen and former Trump campaign adviser who has been a person of interest to the FBI for some time now because of his close ties to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
At the conclusion of the game, Patterson spoke individually with all 66,655 who were at the game to ask their opinion of Trump. To a person, they said that Trump is the worst US Commander in Chief in modern memory. Patterson also conducted a poll of the millions of TV viewers who watched the game. None of them said they approve of Trump or his agenda.
Finally, Patterson congratulated Foles on his victory. Foles is an evangelical Christian, like Pence, and he is currently an online graduate student at Liberty University, the world’s largest evangelical university. He hopes to become an evangelical pastor after he retires from football. Patterson asked Foles what he thinks of Trump, who, for reasons never fully understood, won an outsized portion of evangelical votes in 2016.
“Sylvia,” Foles said, “no man who so disrespects women, and who refuses to acknowledge the significance of the First Amendment, deserves anybody’s vote."