Trump has avoided choosing sides in Sunday’s matchup despite public comments and social media posts that suggest an affinity for Kansas City.
Donald Trump, in his earlier years as a student, participated in high school football. Later on, during his business career, he ventured into team ownership in a league that competed with the NFL and even engaged in legal battles with the established organization. As the president of the United States, he openly criticized professional players who knelt during the national anthem as a form of protest for social justice.
On Sunday, he adds to that complicated history with the sport when he becomes the first president in office to attend a Super Bowl.
Recently, Trump attended a game at the Superdome in New Orleans where the Kansas City Chiefs faced off against the Philadelphia Eagles. This came after the NFL made a decision to get rid of the “End Racism” slogans that had been displayed in the end zones since 2021.
There are opinions that the NFL’s choice to remove the slogans was influenced by Trump’s directives to halt programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within the federal government. Despite this, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell asserted that the league’s initiatives for diversity are not contradictory to the Trump administration’s actions against federal DEI programs.
Trump, who attended the Super Bowl in 1992, has avoided choosing sides in Sunday’s matchup despite public comments and social media posts that suggest an affinity for Kansas City.
Last week, when asked which team would win, Trump said, “I don’t want to say, but there’s a certain quarterback that seems to be a pretty good winner.” That appeared to be a reference to the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes.
Trump also posted congratulations to the Chiefs in January after they won the AFC Championship.
The president played football as a student at the New York Military Academy. As a New York businessman in the early 1980s, he owned the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League. Trump had sued to force a merger of the USFL and the NFL. The USFL eventually folded.
Friction existed between Trump and the NFL during his first term as president.
Trump took issue with players kneeling during the national anthem to protest social or racial injustice. That movement began in 2016 with then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner” during an exhibition game in Denver.
Trump, through social media and other public comments, insisted that players stand for the national anthem and he called on team owners to fire any player who took a knee.
“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, you’d say, ’Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired,” Trump said to loud applause at a rally in Hunstville, Alabama, in 2017.
Trump is expected to watch the game from a box in the company of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., among others. Trump won Missouri and Pennsylvania — the states represented in the game — on his way to a second term in November.
His interest in sports extends beyond football. Trump is an avid golfer who owns multiple golf courses and has hosted tournaments. He sponsored boxing matches at his former casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and attended a UFC match at Madison Square Garden weeks after winning a second term.
Some NFL team owners have donated to his campaigns and Trump maintains friendships with Herschel Walker and Doug Flutie, who played for the Generals. Trump endorsed Walker’s unsuccessful bid as the Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia in 2022, and has tapped him to become ambassador to the Bahamas.
Trump signed an order last week that is intended to block transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports by targeting federal funding for schools that fail to comply.
Alvin Tillery, a politics professor and diversity expert at Northwestern University, said in an interview that the NFL’s decision to remove “End Racism” slogans was “shameful” given that the league “makes tens of billions of dollars largely on the bodies of Black men.”
He said the NFL should explain who it was aiming to please. The NFL said it was stenciling “Choose Love” in one of the end zones for the Super Bowl to encourage the country after a series of tragedies so far this year, including a New Year’s Day truck attack in the host city of New Orleans that killed 14 people and injured dozens more.
Tillery wasn’t convinced. “I think they removed it because Trump’s coming,” he said.
