The Uncomfortable Love Affair Between Donald Trump and the New England Patriots [View all]

[DemocratSinceBirth]

“I’m not talking politics at all,” Tom Brady said in response to the first of several questions about, predictably, politics. Brady has been getting a lot of these, beginning with Super Bowl week’s Opening Night on Monday at Minute Maid Park in Houston. This is not your average stick-to-sports Super Bowl week in America. The chaos in Washington, bedlam at airports and protests across the country serve as an unsettling crowd noise to even the serene superstar quarterback for the New England Patriots.

Brady is friends with President Trump. So are the Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, and Coach Bill Belichick. No sports team has been more closely associated with a new president, or perhaps any president, at least since Richard Nixon very publicly adopted the Washington Redskins as his own and even called occasional plays for Coach George Allen. Like Trump, the Patriots are a divisive juggernaut that tend to engender strong passions for and against. The team represents a kind of sporting ideal of Trump’s promise to make “America win so much, you’ll be bored of winning.” New England, which will appear in an N.F.L.-record ninth Super Bowl on Sunday, is a team that wins so much that a lot of America has become, yes, bored of its winning. And no small number of fans are convinced that the Patriots (like Trump) achieve their victories through dubious means and wish they would just go away and get off their TVs forever.

The three main architects of the team’s success — Kraft, Belichick and Brady — have taken pains to emphasize that their allegiance to Trump is based on friendship and loyalty, nothing more. They play golf and attend weddings and call to congratulate one another on elections and Super Bowl wins, those kinds of everyday things.

They are quick to assert their bipartisan or apolitical bona fides. Kraft has been a supporter of many Democrats and Democratic causes over the years; Belichick declared himself apolitical in response to queries last fall after Trump at a campaign rally in New Hampshire read aloud from an effusive note of congratulations that Belichick had sent him.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/magazine/the-uncomfortable-love-affair-between-donald-trump-and-the-new-england-patriots.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0