Deadspin
What Weird New Behavior Will Donald Trump Display At The National Championship Game?
By David Roth
Jan 9, 2018
A year and change into his first term in office, it’s still honestly kind of hard to tell why Donald Trump ran for president. At this point, we know enough about him to assume both 1) that it had nothing to do with any of the reasons he offered on the campaign trail and 2) that it’s probably something exponentially dumber than the most stupid possible guess. There is, knowing what we know about our big wet-boy-in-chief, every reason to assume that he ran for president because he wanted to put Bette Midler in a Supermax prison because she criticized him in Page Six back in 1991. But there is also every reason to assume it’s something even dumber, pettier, and more tragically dated than that.
Ever since he found out that he can’t just up and do that—the deep state is a huge fan of the performer they call “the divine Miss M”—Trump has been in a very bad mood. His workday has apparently shrunk down to about six hours of television and three brief meetings, and no one is even trying to stop him from retweeting @WeedHimmler or actively tweeting non sequiturs about how he “absolutely can tie his own shoelaces” or whatever, but he’s still clearly upset a lot of the time. Everyone makes fun of him, the hornier cousin of the fish guy from The Shape Of Water just wrote a book that depicts him as a testy imbecile, and somehow people still don’t believe that he can really tie his own shoelaces. On Monday night, though, Donald Trump will get to experience one of the perks of the most powerful office on earth—a luxury box of his own at the College Football Playoff National Championship Game!
In some ways this is obviously great for him: two excellent football teams in the biggest game of the college football season, access to what we can only presume are unlimited snacks of the beige/flap-shaped kind that Trump most enjoys to eat, and of course the chance to be on television wearing a suit and a baseball cap at the same time. But it’s not without its negatives. For one thing, the game is on ESPN, and Trump doesn’t like ESPN for reasons he has certainly forgotten about. For another, when Barack Obama attended past games he typically made a brief appearance in the broadcast booth; Trump will not be doing this, both because of his strenuous aversion to doing anything that his predecessor did and because his evident cognitive decline makes him kind of a wild card after say 6 p.m. He’d bring up Bette Midler for sure and probably the shoelaces thing again. It’s a chance that his handlers are unwilling to take.
Just because we won’t be getting the full Donald J. Trump Platinum Experience—the one where he says a bunch of large numbers, then spends 30 seconds blinking and saying “very very and so much” about whatever is directly in front of him, and then abruptly pivots to discussing how rude Suzanne Somers was to him in 1987 or whatever—doesn’t mean that he won’t give Americans something to enjoy during the broadcast. Besides what promises to be a very good football game, we will get the pure and terrifying entertainment of watching this great sticky man and his oatmeal mind doing all kinds of presidential things on television. Is he going to fall asleep in a baseball hat with his name on it like a big ol’ toddler? Is he going to appear on camera just absolutely demolishing a huge piece of chocolate cake that he got from who knows where? Will he do the thing where he takes a two-handed sip from a can of soda as if it were the dang Stanley Cup? Invite the University of Central Florida to the White House because he misread a tweet?
These are not rhetorical questions. Trump is slated to arrive at 6:45, and I will absolutely bet you a Coke that he leaves at halftime if not before; the game itself doesn’t kick off until about 8:17. Still, that should give this glistening soggy doof plenty of time to work the magic that he works. Below, you will find the official Deadspin Donald Trump Bingo Board for the College Football Championship National Championship Game. Feel free to play along at home.
