Cheering for the Eagles and hating on Trump went hand in hand last night

Remember when the Patriots won last year and it felt like a nauseating continuation of the 2016 election?
 By 
Peter Allen Clark
 on 
Cheering for the Eagles and hating on Trump went hand in hand last night
Credit: Rob Carr/Getty Images

People had a hard time last night separating the Eagles' win and their disdain for President Trump.

Remember when the Patriots won last year and it felt like a nauseating continuation of the 2016 election? For many, Super Bowl LII felt like a breath of fresh air. To them, the Philadelphia Eagles' first ever Super Bowl win served as yet another signal that the country might be moving on from the Donald Trump moment we've been in for the past year.

Whether or not it's fair to Patriots fans, the New England team and their five recent Super Bowl wins are mostly loathed by everyone else. And hating Tom Brady is very en vogue.

It's well known that Trump has had a long association with the Patriots. The team's owner Robert Kraft donated $1 million to Trump's campaign, and Coach Bill Belichick wrote a letter endorsing the reality TV star.

And, Trump's basically had a man crush on Brady for years.

It's understandable that the two would be conflated and that the majority of the country, who did not vote for Donald Trump, would take this football victory as a win against him.

Obviously, this is just a sports game and indicative of basically nothing.

However, the Eagles underdog win felt to many like yet another example of the growing 2018 Trump backlash. As of right now, three Republican senators and 34 House representatives have decided not to run for reelection. On top of that, there are a record numbers of women and people of color running for office. Meanwhile, the Mueller investigation seems to be gathering more and more damaging evidence that could implicate Trump's campaign and maybe the president himself.

While his approval rating can't get out of the 30s, and he continues to attack everyone around him, this symbolic blow to the team that he has openly loved, and the team that has openly loved him, felt like justice to many, many people.

All the same, the sentiment makes no rational sense. Why would a team losing the Super Bowl spell doom for Trump? The correlation isn't actually there. But that didn't stop anyone on the internet from getting a lot of satisfaction from the whole thing.

The entire sentiment only goes to show how partisanship has shaped the country's allegiances and spun it off into weird corners.

But, either way, it's probably safe to say that a majority of the country had a good night last night.

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Peter Allen Clark

I have done neat stuff all over these United States from sailing lessons on the Puget Sound to motorcycle maintenance on the backroads of upstate New York. My professional experience extends from newspaper reporting in the mountains of Eastern Oregon to fixing espresso machines throughout Kentucky. I also have kept a cat alive for 10 years.

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