The Rams won’t be the only no-shows at the Super Bowl. President Trump will be conspicuous in his absence from the biggest annual, single-day sporting event in the United States.
“It’s just too far away,” Trump told the New York Post. “I would go if, you know, it was a little bit shorter.”
Or perhaps not so far to his left?
Super Bowl LX will be played Feb. 8 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, part of the San Francisco Bay Area that Trump has so often reviled.
The teams — the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks — hail from deeply entrenched blue states. Massachusetts and Washington have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 1988.
Trump also has expressed disgust over the musical performers at this year’s game: Bad Bunny and Green Day, both unabashed critics of the current administration. Bad Bunny will play the halftime show while Green Day will perform ahead of the kickoff.
“I’m anti-them,” Trump said. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible.”
Ahead of a tour last fall to promote his most recent album, Bad Bunny (whose real name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio) announced he would skip the United States because he was afraid of ICE raids at his concerts. The Puerto Rican superstar — who has nearly 84 million monthly listeners on Spotify — explained why he made an exception for the Super Bowl.
“What I’m feeling goes beyond myself,” he said in a statement. “It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown. This is for my people, my culture and our history.”
Green Day, an American pop-punk band of almost 40 years, has since Trump’s first term swapped a line in the lyrics of the 2004 hit “American Idiot” from “I’m not part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.”
Turning Point USA, the conservative non-profit founded by the late Charlie Kirk, announced in October that it would stage its own counterprogramming to the Super Bowl and stream it on conservative outlets. The “All American Halftime Show” is billed as “Celebrating Faith, Family, & Freedom.” As of Monday, musical artists had not been announced.
Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl a year ago when he received a muted, mixed reaction of cheers and boos in New Orleans. But this year, the 5½-hour flight from Washington D.C. to the Bay Area apparently is too long for the president, who in January alone has flown to Switzerland, Detroit and Palm Beach.
The NFL has resisted pressure to replace Bad Bunny with a performer more politically palatable to Trump.
“There’s a lot of people right now who don’t like Bad Bunny being in the Super Bowl halftime show,” NFL chief marketing officer Tim Ellis said at a conference in October. “Well, not everyone has to like everything we do. Bad Bunny is f—ing awesome.”
Not everyone has to like the teams that earned Super Bowl berths and the states they call home, either. And not everyone has to approve of the venue. That includes the President, who made it clear that if he decides to watch, he’ll do so from a distance.
As federal immigration tactics face mounting legal and political scrutiny after a U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot a Minneapolis man over the weekend, Donald Trump announced Monday he was dispatching his border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota.
Until now, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino has overseen the federal government’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. But as the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security faces widespread criticism for its aggressive tactics since it launched Operation Metro Surge in December, Trump signaled Monday that he could be shifting strategy as he deploys Homan to the region.
“He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there,” Trump said of Homan on TruthSocial. “Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me.”
Trump’s deployment of Homan comes as a federal judge hears arguments Monday on whether to temporarily halt the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement in Minnesota. Meanwhile, Democratic senators plan to oppose a funding bill for DHS, raising the possibility of a partial government shutdown, and a small but growing number of Republicans have joined Democratic calls for a thorough investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti
The Department of Homeland Security said Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse, approached federal officers on the street Saturday morning with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun and “violently resisted” when officers tried to disarm him. But cellphone videos recorded by eye witnesses contradict that account.
According to videos taken on the scene, Pretti was holding a phone, not a handgun, when he stepped in front of a federal agent who was targeting a woman with pepper spray. Federal agents pulled him to the ground and shot him.
Pretti is the second U.S. citizen in Minneapolis to be killed by immigration officers this month. On Jan. 7, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother, was shot in the head by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem raised criticism this weekend when she said that her agency would lead the investigation into Pretti’s killing.
After federal officials denied Minnesota state investigators access to the shooting scene in South Minneapolis, local and state officials in Minnesota accused DHS of mishandling evidence. Late Saturday, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension asked a federal court to block Homeland Security and Justice Department officials from destroying or concealing evidence.
It is not immediately clear how Bovino’s role could change as Homan arrives in Minneapolis.
Noem, who has backed Bovino’s aggressive tactics, said Monday it was “good news” that Homan was going to Minneapolis.
“I have worked closely with Tom over the last year and he has been a major asset to our team,” Noem wrote on X. Homan’s “experience and insight,” she said, would “help us to remove even more public safety threats and violent criminal illegal aliens” off Minneapolis streets.
But some Democrats in Minnesota oppose sending Homan to Minnesota. Minneapolis City Council member Soren Stevenson said the move would only aggravate tension.
“They are losing the battle in people’s minds,” Stevenson told CNN, noting that people could see video evidence contradict federal accounts of border patrol agents’ actions.
“They’re losing this narrative battle, and so he’s sending in his top guard,” Stevenson added. “And really, it’s escalating, because we just want to be left alone. The chaos in our community is coming from ICE. It’s coming from this invasion that we’re under … and it’s got to stop.”
In a short interview with The Wall Street Journal Sunday, Trump criticized Pretti for carrying a gun during protest activity.
“I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it,” Trump said. “But I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn’t play good either.”
The President declined to comment on whether the agent who shot Pretti had done the right thing. “We’re looking,” Trump said when pressed. “We’re reviewing everything and will come out with a determination.”
Democratic officials, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, have called on federal immigration officers to leave Minneapolis. On Sunday, Trump suggested they could withdraw, but he did not give a timeline.
“At some point we will leave,” the president said. “They’ve done a phenomenal job.”
President Trump has an army of bootlickers that seems to stretch to the sunset. Many of them creep around on social media and almost certainly legions of them come from bot accounts on X.
Then there’s Bill Essayli. When it comes to saying anything to please a president with autocratic dreams, the former Assembly member is a bootlicking All-Star.
Att. Gen. Pam Bondi appointed him as the top prosecutor for the Central District of California in April with the explicit mandate to do Donald J. Trump’s will. His record so far has been unsurprisingly embarrassing and outlandish.
The guy can’t even call himself acting U.S. attorney anymore after a judge ruled in October he was “not lawfully serving” in the position since he was never formally appointed in the first place. So you’d think Essayli would hear the music and go back to being an inconsequential California legislator, but no! If there’s one thing Trumpworld has shown, it’s that once you’ve knelt to offer the Dear Leader a lick-and-shine, you better keep it up until your tongue’s as dry as Death Valley.
Which leads us to this weekend. And Essayli’s bootlicking-gone-wrong.
On Saturday morning, Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti after they gang-tackled him. He had tried to help a woman shoved to the ground by a federal immigration officer; an officer maced him and he soon collapsed — and shortly after, was dead. A Department of Homeland Security social media post justified what happened by saying Pretti seemed intent on “want[ing] to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” because he was in possession of a legally registered handgun. He never brandished it though. In fact, multiple videos showed Pretti clearly holding what looked like a phone as agents swarmed him.
Even though the incident was thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, Essayli had to flick his tongue — it’s the bootlicker way, after all.
“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” he snickered on social media hours after Pretti died. “Don’t do it!” He also reshared the posts of right-wing social media influencers Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo who claimed Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, was following “antifa” tactics.
A sign is raised in support of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at a candlelight vigil during a peaceful protest at the federal building in Los Angeles on Saturday.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
It blasted his rant as “dangerous and wrong” on social media, adding that “responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”
The Gun Owners of America, a group that’s even more conservative than the NRA, called Essayli’s comments “untoward,” leading to the first assistant U.S. attorney — because bootlickers love their titles — to whine about the nonprofit “adding words to mischaracterize my statement” even though they directly quoted him.
When history looks back at all the cowards, sycophants, apologists, enablers, henchmen and other miscreants that made Trump possible, the bootlickers will have a starring role. The “I voted for this” tribe — even when this is cruelty and actions that are more those of a Macbeth than an American president.
The bootlicker is a universally reviled archetype. Their bread-and-butter is comforting the most comfortable by afflicting the most afflicted. They try to top fellow bootlickers with even more obsequious acts of flattery, hellbent on making the most damning line of Orwell’s “1984” come to life: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
The bootlicker’s moral compass is malleable. Wherever the Big Boss has moved the goal posts, that’s where he or she will kick the ball. If all goes to hell and America devolves into a rank dictatorship, beware the bootlicker.
The Trump regime currently has a lineup of them that’s like the bootlicking version of the 1927 Yankees.
In addition to Essayli, you have Stephen Miller, who kept calling Pretti an “assassin” and “domestic terrorist” on social media as if repeating the slurs would make them true. Vice President JD Vance, who described Renee Good, a woman shot and killed on Jan. 7 by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis after she tried to drive away from him, as a “deranged leftist.”
Repeating what the big bootlickers say is a character trait. Call it the bootlicking trickle-down-effect.
There’s Border Patrol chief at large Gregory Bovino, a migra man a federal judge accused of “outright lying” during depositions over the actions of his team in Chicago this fall. During a news conference about the death of Pretti, Bovino claimed that the victim looked like he “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” — the exact same language used in the original Department of Homeland Security social media post on the killing. Hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also impersonated a macaw, parroting Miller by accusing Pretti of “domestic terrorism.”
On Fox News on Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel — the agency that in ye olden days would be leading an impartial investigation into what happened to Good, Pretti and other victims of la migra — told host Maria Bartiromo that “No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm. That led a skeptical-looking Bartiromo, who’s about as liberal as the Spanish Inquisition, to ask, “And how was he using that handgun in terms of threatening Border Patrol?”
A wide-eyed Patel could only say he trusted Noem’s version of the events.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a news conference on Saturday to address an incident where federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti during operations in Minneapolis.
(Al Drago / Getty Images)
These are just some of the most prominent, powerful bootlickers stumbling right now on their own deceit and desperation.
Space prohibits me from quoting all the Republicans who last week were stalwart 2nd Amendment fans now saying Pretti had no right to carry his legally registered firearm to a protest even though they cheered on Kyle Rittenhouse when the Wisconsin teen showed up at one very openly carrying an AR-15, which he ended up using to fatally shoot two people who tried to assault him. There’s no evidence Pretti ever handled his firearm during the protest, let alone threatened federal agents with it.
Then there’s the bootlickers who cheered on the Jan. 6 rioters for rising up against what they saw as government tyranny, who insist the dozens of law enforcement officers injured that day were just deep-state agents. Today, those bootlickers are telling folks pushing back against Trump’s police state to respect it.
Obey or die.
The Roman philosopher Plutarch described flatterers in his immortal essay on the subject as “the plague in kings’ chambers, and the ruin of their kingdoms” that “prey upon a noble quarry.” So to Essayli, Patel, Noem and all the other bootlickers in Trump’s orbit, and to the relatively anonymous legions beyond, I’ll leave you with the warning that I saw in a meme that I’m sure Plutarch would endorse:
No matter how hard you lick it, the boot will never love you.
WASHINGTON — The crisis touched off by President Trump’s demand to take ownership of Greenland appears over, at least for now. But the United States and its European allies still face a larger long-term challenge: Can their shaky marriage be saved?
At 75 years old, NATO has survived storms before, from squabbles over trade to estrangement over wars in Vietnam and Iraq. France, jealous of its independence, even pulled its armed forces out of NATO for 43 years.
But diplomats and foreign policy scholars warn that the current division in the alliance may be worse, because Trump’s threats on Greenland convinced many Europeans that the United States has become an unreliable and perhaps even dangerous ally.
The roots of the crisis lie in the president’s frequently expressed disdain for alliances in general and NATO in particular.
Long before Trump arrived in the White House, presidents from both parties complained that many NATO countries weren’t pulling their weight in military spending.
But earlier presidents still considered the alliance an essential asset to U.S. foreign policy and the cornerstone of a system that prevented war in Europe for most of a century.
Trump has never seemed to share that view. Even after he succeeded in persuading NATO members to increase their defense spending, he continued to deride most allies as freeloaders.
Until last year, he refused to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to help defend other NATO countries, the core principle of the alliance. And he reserved the right to walk away from any agreement, military or commercial, whenever it suited his purpose.
In the two-week standoff over Greenland, he threatened to seize the island from NATO member Denmark by force, an action that would have violated the NATO treaty.
When Britain, Germany and other countries sent troops to Greenland, he threatened to hit them with new tariffs, which would have violated a trade deal Trump made only last year.
Both threats touched off fury in Europe, where governments had spent most of the past year making concessions to Trump on both military spending and tariffs. When Trump backed down, the lesson some leaders drew was that pushing back worked better than playing nice.
“We do prefer respect to bullies,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.
“Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said.
The long-term danger for the United States, scholars said, is that Europeans might choose to look elsewhere for military and economic partners.
“They just don’t trust us,” said Richard N. Haass, a former top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration.
“A post-American world is fast emerging, one brought about in large part by the United States taking the lead in dismantling the international order that this country built,” he wrote last week.
Some European leaders, including Macron, have argued that they need to disentangle from the United States, build military forces that can defend against Russia, and seek more reliable trade partners, potentially including India and China.
But decoupling from the United States would not be easy, fast or cheap. Europe and Canada still depend on the United States for many of their defense needs and as a major market for exports.
Almost all NATO countries have pledged to increase defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product, but they aren’t scheduled to reach that goal until 2035.
Meanwhile, they face the current danger of an expansionist Russia on their eastern frontier.
Not surprisingly for a group of 30 countries, Europe’s NATO members aren’t united on the question. Macron has argued for more autonomy, but others have called for caution.
“Despite all the frustration and anger of recent months, let us not be too quick to write off the transatlantic partnership,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at Davos.
“I think we are actually in the process of creating a stronger NATO,” said Finnish President Alexander Stubb. “As long as we keep doing that, slowly and surely we’ll be just fine.”
They argue, in effect, that the best strategy is to muddle through — which is what NATO and Europe have done in most earlier crises.
The strongest argument for that course may be the uncertainty and disorder that would follow a rapid erosion — or worse, dissolution — of an alliance that has helped keep its members safe for most of a century.
The costs of that outcome, historian Robert Kagan warned recently, would be borne by Americans as well as Europeans.
If the United States continues to weaken its commitments to NATO and other alliances, he wrote in the Atlantic, “The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies, and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less. … If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.”
