The Biden campaign has been putting out some amazing ads in the last month to remind voters of just how awful Donald Trump was in the White House and would be again. He was terrible on COVID, one ad points out. He’s dreadful on abortion, another reminds us.
And then there’s this new digital ad on what is surely Trump’s greatest offense to American tradition: He thinks football is “boring as hell” and “nobody cares about” it.
According to a statement from the Biden campaign, the ad will target NFL fans during the 2024 NFL draft and points out that unlike Trump, President Joe Biden “is a proud football fan, cheering alongside the over 120 million Americans who watched this year’s Super Bowl.”
Is this really the most important issue keeping American voters up at night? Nah. Is it even the 10th or 20th? A Gallup poll in March showed the top concerns for Americans, and how the presidential candidates feel about football is not on the list.
But who cares? The ad is funny, and it’s bound to get under Trump’s notoriously thin skin. After all, Trump spent a lot of time when he was in the White House railing about the sanctity of football—at least when it came to athletes who kneeled during the national anthem to protest police violence and systemic racism. But then, that was really just about an opportunity to unleash his ugliness on Black athletes who didn’t deserve the “fortune” they made unless they engaged in performative acts of jingoism that met with Trump’s approval.
As the great self-appointed protector of the sport, the new ad is likely to annoy Trump, which is all part of the Biden campaign’s strategy.
“There’s just something about Joe Biden that gets under Donald Trump’s skin more than anybody, and I think Joe Biden knows that,” a Biden aide said in March. Getting under Trump’s skin to throw him off his own message by calling him a “loser” and pointing out that he’s “broke” is all part of the fun for Biden and the campaign.
Whether Trump will take the bait on football is unknown, but reminding regular Americans who love the sport that Trump is not actually one of them certainly can’t help him.
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