This is The Narcissist’s Archivist from Brain Iron dot com—a place to examine posts or essays or other things that I’ve written in the past that I think are worth revisiting. Previously written material will be presented as originally published without modification, unless otherwise noted. I’ll offer context and commentary about the piece, what I may have been right or wrong about, and perhaps reflect on anything I’ve learned or what’s changed in the intervening time. Today, I’ll be reading a post first published in February of 2020 at BrainIron.com, which I wrote as a response to then-president Donald Trump’s Super Bowl interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. First, though, a brief history of the relationship between two massive American institutions—the presidency and the Super Bowl.
Super Bowl LIV, like this year’s Super Bowl LVIII, was a game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs. Patrick Mahomes, quarterback of the victorious-in-both-years Chiefs, was named the Most Valuable Player of both games. 2020 was a presidential election year, as of course is 2024, and by all appearances we can expect a rematch of 2020’s contest—the first such presidential election rematch in the US since Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson for the second time in 1956—with now-incumbent president Joe Biden going up once again against Donald Trump. One difference from 2020 is that Biden did not sit for a pre-game interview this year, passing up the opportunity to appear on television in front of an audience of tens of millions of voters in what a White House spokesman suggested was an attempt to allow Americans to simply enjoy the game.
The pre-Super Bowl presidential interview has been a near-annual tradition since President Barack Obama started making appearances during the pre-game shows in 2009, but he was hardly the first president to take advantage of the game’s huge audience and to bask in the strange patriotic fervor that seems to always surround the festivities. President Richard Nixon phoned Don Shula, the coach of the Super Bowl-bound Miami Dolphins in 1972, and suggested a play for the coach to run in the big game. The next year, Nixon made a call to the Washington Redskins’ coach George Allen, and invited him to visit the White House before the 1973 game. (Nixon’s endorsement didn’t help either year—Shula’s Dolphins lost in 1972, and Allen’s Redskins fell to those Dolphins in ‘73.) The tradition of White House visits for Super Bowl champions dates back to the Pittsburgh Steelers getting invited to meet President Jimmy Carter in 1980, something President Ronald Reagan made into an annual occurrence during his years in office, a ritual that has played out virtually every year since.
Reagan performed the opening coin toss via satellite connection from the White House to Super Bowl XIX in Pasadena in 1985. President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush made a taped video appearance in the halftime show during the 1991 Super Bowl between the Giants and the Bills, delivering a message of gratitude to the children of active duty military personnel then serving in the Persian Gulf. Instead of running that halftime show live, however, ABC elected to air a fifteen-minute news segment anchored by Peter Jennings updating the goings on in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, which had begun ten days earlier. The halftime show featuring the Bushes aired after the game was over.
The first pre-Super Bowl presidential interview took place in 2004, when George W. Bush sat down in the Rose Garden for a live remote interview with CBS Sports’ Jim Nantz. President Barack Obama would turn that into an annual event, taking advantage of the built-in audience to give substantive news and policy-focused interviews to a news anchor of whichever network was airing the game that year. In 2009, he sat for a live twelve-minute interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer. Through the years, he would sit for lengthy interviews with CBS’s Katie Couric, Scott Pelley, and Gayle King, NBC’s Lauer again, and Savannah Guthrie, and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, the conversations usually an amiable combination of politics and policy and fluffy family stuff—though a bit more confrontational when O’Reilly was involved. He did these interviews in all eight years of his presidency, never missing the chance to appear before potentially the largest television audience of the year.
Donald Trump followed suit, giving the 2017 Super Bowl interview to Fox’s O’Reilly, and making quite a bit of news when he insisted that Vladimir Putin’s murderous record wasn’t so bad when compared to that of the United States. Trump opted out in 2018, declining NBC’s request, but returned in 2019 for a brief sit-down with CBS’s Maggie Brennan. In 2020, he sat for a friendly chat with Fox’s Sean Hannity, which is the subject of the post that follows.
Biden was interviewed before the Super Bowl by CBS’s Norah O’Donnell in 2021, and NBC’s Lester Holt in 2022, but turned down the opportunity in both 2023 and 2024. Perhaps after NBC decided to run only three minutes of his talk with Holt, the administration determined that putting the unpopular president in front of a perhaps mostly hostile audience for only a couple of minutes simply wasn’t worth the hassle and the potential downside. I worry that the strategy of hiding the president as much as possible will backfire, suggesting that those around him fear that he cannot make a strong case for himself against Trump. Then again, Trump himself has always been the best argument against more Trump, so perhaps keeping the clearly diminished Biden away from the camera is best. Only time will tell.
The 2020 Super Bowl interview with Hannity makes this point clearly: Trump is his own worst enemy, always telling you exactly who he is, in that weird way of his—while never exactly telling the truth, he’s always revealing it, at least about himself, if you’re willing to see and hear it.
It’s a deeply strange thing, this intertwining of the presidency and our country’s most popular cultural product, and I think looking back on Reagan’s and H. W. Bush’s early forays into the show make that plain. Obama’s full on embrace of the intrusion of the political into the cultural was a reflection of who he thought he was to Americans, and, to be fair, he wasn’t wrong—he was a cultural force unlike any I had seen up to that point, and it weirded me out. I tend to think Trump’s political career would have been utterly impossible without the potency of Obama’s cultural celebrity—though I suspect Obama, like Trump, was simply taking advantage of a shift that was happening, rather than causing one himself. Perhaps, with another four years of a deeply unpopular presidency on the horizon, regardless of who wins, things will ebb back in the other direction, and the great American institution of the Super Bowl won’t want to associate itself with something so divisive and widely despised as the great American institution of the presidency.
It is said that the government we elect is the government we deserve, and though it’s a bit of a platitudinous tautology, I think the spirit of it is more or less correct. All I can do here, eight months or so out from the 2024 presidential election that is a matchup of two staggeringly unpopular presidents, neither of whom seems terribly likely to even survive the next five years, is hope that we get very slightly better than we deserve.
Donald Trump, World's Greatest Sports Fan
Donald Trump is always telling you exactly who he is. It helps that he is an extremely, almost hilariously uncomplicated person—a four-piece LEGO minifig of a man, all hairpiece and red painted-on tie, Frankenstein’d into a visceral stimulus creature about whom it is impossible to imagine an interior life that is at all at odds with his behavior in any given moment. Whether he is (poorly) reading prepared remarks, or ripping through a newly-updated enemies list from the East Room, or tweeting, or just kinda riffing for the cameras in front of Marine One, Trump is never not wholly Trump.
The constant Trumpiness gives life to the execrable and excrementous cliché voiced by Real Americans to every Coastal Elite Reporter dispatched to the diners of the heartland in search of answers—that Trump “just tells it like it is.” The “it” here is best understood not as “reality” as experienced and understood by virtually everyone else, but as whatever thoughts and emotions happen to flit from one neuron to another in his miraculous little brain. “It” is certainly not “truth” as it is widely understood, because truth, of course, doesn’t exist as some external identifiable objective standard. He’s just completely himself, that self-made and fully ablaze straw man, constantly telling us the story of his aggrievement, telling it like it is. He seems to lack even the concept that he ought to be any other way.
This punishing don’t-call-it-authenticity—it’s always freshly low tide with Trump, all of his needs and neuroses just there in the sun and mud—has made him the single greatest pop-psychology culture-wide case study in history. His sheer elemental reactivity makes it impossible to look away, whether he’s there to be watched or if you’re just watching other people react to him. He’s whatever the opposite of a universal solvent is.
And he’s always telling you exactly who he is, whether directly or because his feeble psyche can’t help but to project and amplify his every insecurity. In just the last week—a particularly bonkers week, even by his galactically inflated and cosmically expanding standard—he has provided dozens of examples of his disordered and disqualifying inhuman weirdness. To wit, just a few:
The big speech on Tuesday night was not so much an update on the current state of the Union as it was eighty minutes of Donald Trump attempting to demonstrate the incredible breadth of his own magnanimity. The Bestower in Chief gave a scholarship to a girl who didn’t need one, reunited a soldier with his family like it was the fifth inning of a Memorial Day baseball game, had his wife pin a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh’s moribund corpus, of all people, and handed a country to a wannabe coup artist. He was demonstrating his benevolence, basking in his own willingness to deploy his power so gently and generously, taking half a step back from the microphone whenever he deigned that the elected, terrified cultists in the audience stand and applaud. The second half of the speech was a sordid recap of the putrefying corpse of Democrat-controlled America, the carnage palpable:
…which his supporters, of course, found positively uplifting.
It was a bizarre speech, poorly delivered. He so rarely has any idea what the words he’s reading actually mean that he doesn’t know when in the text he’s meant to stop for applause.
On Thursday morning, at the definitely-not-parodic National Prayer Breakfast, Trump insulted the faith of his political enemies and openly mocked the possibility of such an event being remotely meaningful. On Thursday afternoon, he held court for over an hour in the East Room, calling his myriad enemies evil and corrupt and deranged while eulogizing the dignity of the assembled cultists, one by one. He betrayed his own withering shame while praising the slamming hot bod of another man, he expressed genuine disbelief that a wife would be quite upset when her husband was shot very nearly to death (because his own wives have always hated him), told a homely Congresswoman that he likes her name far more than her face, and pointed out that he probably wouldn’t be president any more if he hadn’t fired James Comey. Oh, also he thinks Lisa Page and Elise Stefanik are hot, put verbal scare quotes around the military rank of a Purple Heart recipient, and seemed to admit that either Barron is not his actual son, or at least that he hasn’t spent a single moment of the last fourteen years raising the boy.
Also this week, he was a mere nineteen Senate votes away from being the first US president to be removed from office by impeachment. It was a pretty crazy week!
But what prompted this post isn’t any of that, but something Trump said to Sean Hannity during his pre-Super Bowl interview last Sunday. No, not the petty and grade-schoolish name-calling of his potential presidential rivals, and not the lunatic claims of unprecedented accomplishment, and not the insistence that all of his enemies are just haters and liars. No, I’m here to talk about what Trump thinks makes sports great. It’s very weird, and very much in keeping with the established fact that, in everything he does and says, Trump is always telling you exactly who he is.
The transcript, beginning at 7:40:
Hannity: I love sports. I think sports mirror life, you know—
Trump: It’s true.
Hannity: You gotta learn to win, sometimes you don't always win. I know you're not sick of winning, is my guess, um. But also the harder you work, the better you do—that's very Americana. Um, what do you love about sports?
Trump: Well, it is. It's sort of a little bit of a microcosm of life. You know you have winners, you have champions, you have people that you expect to see that final play. You have great coaches like Belichick. Uh, you have people that you expect more out of, and often times they produce. But then you have people that you just don't expect they're gonna do it and often times they don't. It's a microcosm of life.
What Donald Trump professes to love about sports, despite being prompted in the question itself with a perfectly acceptable, human response, is precisely the opposite of what I would wager every other normally-functioning human being loves about sports. Trump is always telling you exactly who he is. Here, Trump is telling you that he’s deeply, deeply strange.
A—if not quite entirely the—fun thing about watching sports is the increasingly rare experience of the chaos and unpredictability of the live and unexpected. The reason live sports is just about the only thing people across the world all at once turn the television on for anymore is the possibility of seeing people do crazy and unexpected things in defiance of the established narrative about what everyone else thinks they can do. I watch sports to see people achieve the unthinkable, to transcend the essentialist limitations imposed by my own preconceived notions and handicapped imagination.
Trump, it turns out, to my great surprise, is the absolute worst sort of sports fan—the total determinist. The Winners Won because the Winners always Win, because they are Winners. The Losers Lost because the Losers always Lose, because they are Losers. What he likes about sports is that they reveal the barest truth about one’s predetermined character. He thinks this is what makes sports like life. That life is a series of tests that only peel back the facade of trying and determination and work and passion and luck—so much luck! Just an impossible amount of improbability made real by the unthinking bounce of the universe—rather than anything beautifully unknowable and imperfectly human.
What I love about sports is the opposite. What I love about life is the opposite. The not knowing. The never knowing. The transcendence of the established narrative—the surprising power of the human spirit to rage against and occasionally even overcome the tyrannical essentialism of someone else’s limited definition of who can achieve what.
Donald Trump is always telling you exactly who he is. Believe him.
This has been The Narcissist’s Archivist, and a revisiting of an essay from February of 2020. If you would like to support this and the other blogging and podcasting endeavors of the Brain Iron multinational media empire, please visit Brain Iron dot substack dot com, where you can become a paying subscriber. If you can think of anyone else who might enjoy whatever it is we’re up to around here, please consider sharing. Thanks—and barring the very real possibility that we get lost here in the narcissist’s archives, cursed to wander among all the things we’ve ever thought, an ego consuming itself forever, never to be seen or heard from again—we’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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