A record audience is expected to watch the Super Bowl this weekend, including Donald Trump, who will be the first sitting president to attend the game in person.
Trump’s Disdain for the Eagles
While polls suggest a majority of Americans will be rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles to defeat the dynastic Kansas City Chiefs, Trump won’t be one of them. He hasn’t explicitly expressed his preference, but he’s left a breadcrumb trail suggesting nothing would make him happier than to see the Eagles get slaughtered in the biggest event in American sports.
The Super Bowl Victory and Fallout
Trump’s disdain for the NFL team traces back to 2018, the first and only time the Eagles have ever won a Super Bowl. The game took place against the backdrop of an unusually politicized season, marked by the polarizing issue of players refusing to stand for the national anthem in symbolic protest of racism. In his first year as president, Trump objected to the practice, harshly criticizing players who took a knee.
At the time, the Eagles were recognized as an especially socially conscious franchise, from owner Jeffrey Lurie — a Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama donor who was reported by the New York Times to have disparaged Trump in a private meeting with other NFL owners — all the way down to the team’s key players. After winning the Super Bowl in 2018, most of those players said they would boycott the traditional White House event held for championship squads. The clearly peeved president disinvited the team in response.
“The Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow,” Trump said in a statement at the time. “They disagree with their president because he insists that they proudly stand for the national anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country.”
Continued Tensions and Political Drama
In the years since then, the wound festered. Trump made clear that his low regard for the Eagles also applied to the city of Philadelphia itself. In his first 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he made a false claim about poll watchers being blocked from observing the first day of in-person early voting in the city. “Bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things,” Trump said.
Then came the election itself.
In the contentious aftermath, Trump singled out the City of Brotherly Love as a hive of election fraud and villainy, along with Detroit.
To accentuate the point, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani leaned on Philadelphia’s reputation for bad fan behavior. Election fraud in Philly, he said, is “about as frequent as getting beaten up at a Philadelphia Eagles football game.”
After days of painstaking vote-counting, the overwhelmingly Democratic city indeed delivered the margin that gave the key swing state of Pennsylvania to Biden. Outside the convention center where rival camps of Trump supporters and opponents had gathered, a lone protester stood on Arch Street with a handmade cardboard sign that nodded to the Eagles’ Super Bowl victory several years earlier.
“LIST OF ASSHOLES DEFEATED BY PHILADELPHIA,” the sign, written in black Sharpie and all caps, said. “KING GEORGE. TOM BRADY. DONALD TRUMP.”
The Shift in Political Winds
Trump’s defeat, it turned out, proved the beginning of a pro-Eagles interregnum. Incoming first lady Jill Biden, a Philadelphia area native, was revealed to be a die-hard Birds fan. Her husband, a more casual supporter, was once spotted wearing an Eagles t-shirt while on vacation.
In early 2023, before a speech to the Democratic National Committee in Philadelphia that occurred on the eve of another Eagles’ appearance in the Super Bowl, Joe Biden used the occasion to rally the crowd.
“Fly, Eagles, fly!” he said, before referring to gleefully unhinged, long-suffering Philadelphia fans as “the most informed, obnoxious fans in the world.”
Continued Rivalry and Football Politics
Even after Biden announced he would not seek reelection, the Eagles continued to occupy an oversized political role. In advance of the first debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris last September — which took place in Philadelphia — mysterious counterfeit ads appeared on city bus shelters claiming that Harris had been endorsed by the Eagles. The ensuing flap forced the team to publicly disavow the ads and clarify that they were not sanctioned by the franchise.
If you think a seven-year-old White House snub, the Biden family’s support of the Eagles or any of the rest of it has been forgotten, then you haven’t been reading Trump’s Truth Social feed in the run-up to the Super Bowl.
Two weeks ago, when both the Chiefs and the Eagles dispatched their conference rivals to win a berth in the Super Bowl, just one of those two teams received Trump’s congratulations. The other squad was pointedly ignored.
“Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs. What a GREAT Team, Coach, Quarterback, and virtually everything else, including those fantastic FANS, that voted for me (MAGA!) in record numbers. Likewise, congratulations to the Buffalo Bills on a tremendous season. They will do a lot of winning long into the future!!!” the president wrote.
Trump’s warm feelings toward the Chiefs weren’t exactly a surprise. In September, after Brittany Mahomes, wife of star K.C. quarterback Patrick Mahomes, was reported to have liked an Instagram post by Trump (and was attacked for it), Trump responded enthusiastically to her.
“I want to thank beautiful Brittany Mahomes for so strongly defending me, and the fact that MAGA is the greatest and most powerful Political Movement in the History of our now Failing Country,” he wrote on Truth Social.
This week, sandwiched between his historic purge of the federal government bureaucracy and today’s White House visit from Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Trump found time Thursday to reach out to the Mahomes family once again.
“Congratulations to the Chiefs GREAT Quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, and his very beautiful and BRILLIANT wife, Brittany, on the birth of their new baby daughter, Golden Raye. This is what I call a baby with great genes, both mother and father. It’s happy times in the wonderful Mahomes family. See you all on Sunday!” he wrote.
Officially, of course, the president isn’t rooting for one team or another. It’s the smart political play given Pennsylvania’s role as a key swing state, and Trump’s undeniably improved performance across the state’s most populous city in 2024.
But when asked this week in the Oval Office who he wanted to win the Super Bowl, Trump might have given it away. “I don’t wanna say,” he responded, “but there’s a certain quarterback that seems to be a pretty good winner.”
