We did not have much of a dog in the very one-sided fight that was Sunday’s Super Bowl — our opinion is that football season is over when the Pittsburgh Steelers are eliminated, which means we haven’t had much interest in a Super Bowl in 15 years. We did have a few bucks on a parlay that was kaput by halftime, much like the Kansas City Chiefs were kaput by halftime. Thus any hope that our economic situation might be even fractionally improved, or that we’d at least have made back the money we spent on chili ingredients and beer, went right out the window.
On the plus side, we were free to spend the second half indulging our theory that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement were the kiss of death for the Chiefs. Trump had announced ahead of time that he would be the first sitting president to ever attend a Super Bowl. You don’t need to have read Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears or watched that dull Ben Affleck adaptation of it to understand why this should have terrified Kansas City fans.
In fact, this picture from Doug Mills in the New York Times alone — Trump shaking hands with Chiefs defensive tackle Chris Jones on the field before the game — should have terrified everyone with even a vague rooting interest in the Chiefs. We would have canceled our bet if we had seen it before kickoff.
But the curse is more than just one handshake. It is more than the team’s refusal to change its racist name or its fans continuing to do the tomahawk chop at home games. Though in karmic terms, those probably don’t help.
For one, the family of the Chiefs’ superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes has long embraced Trump.
Last fall, the QB’s wife Brittany got roasted for liking an Instagram post on Trump’s account that shared 20 bullet points of his platform as the general election campaign was heating up. The graphic included such Trumpian worthies as “keeping men out of women’s sports,” sealing the border and stopping the alleged “invasion” of migrants, and forcing college students who had protested Israel’s slaughter in Gaza to bend the knee and make their campuses more “patriotic.”
Brittany Mahomes tried to defend herself at the time with a statement also on Instagram:
“To be a hater as an adult, you have to have some deep-rooted issues you refuse to heal from childhood. There’s no reason your brain is fully developed and you hate to see others doing well.”
Or you have to have a conscience and an ounce of humanity that has been repelled by Trump’s utter contempt for everyone who doesn’t tickle the approval nodes in the mess of wet cardboard and rat poison that passes for his brain. But hey, at least Trump keeps the taxes low on Brittany’s husband’s hundreds of millions of dollars in net worth.
It’s not just Mahomes’s wife. During Sunday night’s game, the QB’s mother, brother and sister posed for a picture with Trump. The QB’s idiot brother also posted a picture of himself alone with Trump that had been taken at the same time. In the background you can see the turf that Patrick spent most of the game getting stomped into by the Philadelphia Eagles’ defense:
Patrick Mahomes played about the worst game of his career on Sunday night. We’re not suggesting it was karma for his family being a bunch of MAGA hoseheads, but it was totally karma for his family being a bunch of MAGA hoseheads.
The signs and portents were everywhere. Travis Kelce, the Chiefs star tight end who has in the past earned the enmity of MAGA for promoting the COVID vaccine, had earlier in the week said it would be an “honor” to play in front of the president. (Which, even if he was just being magnanimous, sometimes it’s possible just to say nothing.) Kelce had four catches for 39 yards with a couple of drops, and was such a non-factor in the game that you would have been forgiven for not realizing he had even made it to the stadium.
Kelce is also known for dating Taylor Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris last year and has made it known pretty clearly over the years that she is not onboard with Trump’s agenda. She even went so far as to endorse Kamala Harris last fall, which sent Leni Riefenstahl — excuse us, Megyn Kelly — into a life-affirming meltdown.
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In addition to Kelly, Swift’s positions have pissed off both the bed-wetters at Fox News and Trump, who once said he was a bigger fan of Mrs. Mahomes. It also pissed off many of Trump’s more misogynistic and racist fans — but we repeat ourselves — who have criticized Swift for continuing her incredibly successful career instead of settling down and popping out tons of white babies to help save Western civilization.
Was it the Nazi Trump fans who actually booed Swift’s appearance at the game on Sunday? No idea. But they have probably made enemies for life with the Swifties.
Then there was Harrison Butker. Normally if a kicker makes headlines, it’s because he either made or missed an important field goal. That’s the only reason anyone should ever hear about a kicker, ever.
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Unless you are Butker, who last year made headlines for a commencement speech where he revealed himself to be a neanderthal with some very retrograde views about gay people, abortion, and especially the role of women in society. According to Butker, a woman’s place is in the home shooting young ‘uns out of her womb like an ovarian Pez dispenser, and any woman who thinks otherwise has been told “diabolic lies” by society.
Butker even criticized Joe Biden for “COVID lockdowns,” in case anyone still had a shred of doubt that he has pickled his brain reading Gateway Pundit posts.
Naturally, this all brought Butker to the attention of some of the right’s most execrable assholes, like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley:
Signs and portents! Signs and portents! Hawley, whose wife is a working woman with a successful career as a lawyer — well, “successful” in that she is a rider on the wingnut gravy train — has not as of Monday morning had anything to say about the game. Harrison Butker, meanwhile, only got on the field for a couple of kickoffs.
And we have not even gotten to Clark Hunt, the billionaire Chiefs owner, who has publicly supported Butker and last fall helped fund a campaign against Missouri’s Amendment 3, a measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution. The measure passed, even while Trump easily won the state. Loser.
That the Chiefs got their asses whooped by a team that shares a name with America’s national bird only made it funnier.
As for the Eagles, their owner, Jeff Lurie, was a supporter of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who has supposedly trash-talked Trump to other NFL owners in meetings. The last time the team won a Super Bowl, in 2018, most of the players refused to make the traditional winners’ trip to the White House to meet the president. That led an aggrieved Trump to performatively cancel the visit that no one was planning on making anyway.
Will the Eagles go to the White House this time? If they want to repeat as champions next year, we would advise against it.
Congrats, Eagles. It pains us to say it as a Steelers fan, but you are for the moment America’s Team.
[ESPN]
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