Last year, President Joe Biden passed up a chance to be interviewed on the highly rated Super Bowl pregame show. This year, not only is President Donald Trump being interviewed, he is coming here for the big game in person.
By becoming the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, Trump is turning the NFL’s biggest spectacle of the year into another episode of “The Trump Show.”
The show has been on seemingly 24/7 since the inauguration last month. It takes many forms: news conferences, contentious announcements, AI-generated memes and all-caps Truth Social posts. All of it makes Trump the proverbial main character.
“I’ve been so busy that it’s hard to believe,” he said at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, prompting knowing laughter from the audience.
Every new president generates a lot of news, but something feels different this time. To the delight of his fans and dismay of his detractors, Trump has made so many pronouncements and held so many press Q&A’s that he has been all but impossible to avoid.
Think about it: A year ago you could go days without seeing or thinking about Biden. You’re lucky if you can go hours without thinking about Trump. And that’s just how he likes it.
White House aides have indicated the president’s ubiquity is partly a strategy to impress Republican voters and disorient Democratic opponents.
During White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s first briefing on January 28, she proudly brought along a headline about his omnipresence. “Politico summed it up best: ‘Trump is everywhere again.’ And that’s because President Trump has a great story to tell,” she said.
Trump’s long history of courting media attention suggests that it’s also partly about satiating his own ego.
In the new book about attention, “The Sirens’ Call,” MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes argued that Trump’s psychological needs are “so bottomless” that “he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him.”
Conversely, Trump boosters often argue that liberals play right into his hands by obsessing over all things Trump.
A strongman technique?
History professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” told CNN that Trump has a “personality cult” that views him as both a man of the people and a demigod, and his visibility is a key component.
“The strongman must appear not just omnipotent but also omnipresent, he is everywhere,” she said.
Trump seems to welcome every opportunity to show off his stamina and strike a contrast with Biden, even months after defeating him.
“He knows his base and how simple they are,” CNN contributor Cari Champion said during a recent “NewsNight” discussion of the “optics presidency” and how effective it’s been.
Trump “knows how to entertain them and it’s working,” she said.
In a Truth Social post on Friday, Trump previewed his Super Bowl pregame interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, which was recorded Saturday at Mar-a-Lago. “There hasn’t been one in four years (Gee, I wonder why?),” Trump wrote. (Biden participated in the pre-game tradition in 2021 and 2022.)
Even Biden would probably admit that Trump has superior attention-getting skills. Since retaking office, Trump has created so much purposeful chaos — including at federal agencies that are being gutted by the day — that journalists can barely keep up. News producers who wake up in the morning to prep an evening show know that many of the political stories will change by airtime.
This, of course, is what 2017 felt like. CNN even penned a similar story back then: “The inescapable Donald Trump.”
Google Trends search data shows that interest in Trump news peaked in 2017, then dissipated for the other three years of his first term, and then only spiked again when he tried to stay in office following his 2020 election loss. Interest is back at those 2020 levels now, but not quite as high as 2017, according to Google Trends.
Democratic strategist James Carville, who grew up in Louisiana and spends much of his time in New Orleans, said Trump being “white hot” would ultimately redound to the Democrats’ benefit.
Channeling Muhammad Ali’s famous “rope-a-dope” tactic, Carville said of Trump, “just go ahead and punch yourself out the first five rounds.”
Flooding the zone with cultural fights
Many of Trump’s events, and even some of his executive orders, are as much about performing the role of president as about changing government policy.
In an influential essay on his Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen wrote that Trump’s incessant posts and photo ops are “investments in changing the culture.”
Trump’s strategy, he wrote, seems to be the following: “Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import. Simply pass or announce or promise such policies. Do not worry about any other constraints. You don’t even have to do them! They don’t even all have to be legal! (Illegal might provoke more discussion.) They don’t all have to persist!”
Flooding the zone with the fights is “how you have an impact in an internet-intensive, attention-at-a-premium world,” Cowen wrote.
For Trump’s fans, it feels like nonstop “winning.”
Clay Travis, the conservative radio host and founder of OutKick, which bills itself as the “antidote to the mainstream sports media,” told CNN that Trump’s attendance at the Super Bowl was reflective of a “major vibe shift” in Trump’s favor.
“I’d even go so far as to say a majority of NFL players, owners and execs support him” now, he said.
Young men have also swung toward Trump in significant numbers.
“It’s night and day between what we saw with sports in 2017, when many athletes openly attacked Trump,” Travis said. “I expect Trump to be cheered in the stadium and for USA chants to break out.”
The Super Bowl, in so many ways, symbolizes American culture, from the combat on the field to the consumerism of the $8 million 30-second commercials. No wonder it’s where Trump wants to be on Sunday night: It’s the biggest show in the world.
