Middleboro Review 2: POLITICO Nightly: The NFL team Trump loves to hate

Saturday, February 8, 2025

POLITICO Nightly: The NFL team Trump loves to hate

President Donald Trump waves during the second quarter of the game between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs at Bryant-Denny Stadium on September 28, 2024 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images) | Getty Images

CHIEFS EXECUTIVE — A record audience is expected to watch the Super Bowl this weekend, including Donald Trump, who will be the first sitting president to attend the game in person.

While polls suggest a majority of Americans will be rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles to defeat the dynastic Kansas City Chiefs, Trump won’t be one of them. He hasn’t explicitly expressed his preference, but he’s left a bread crumb trail suggesting nothing would make him happier than to see the Eagles get slaughtered in the biggest event in American sports.

Trump’s disdain for the NFL team traces back to 2018, the first and only time the Eagles have ever won a Super Bowl. The game took place against the backdrop of an unusually politicized season, marked by the polarizing issue of players refusing to stand for the national anthem in symbolic protest of racism. In his first year as president, Trump objected to the practice, harshly criticizing players who took a knee.

At the time, the Eagles were recognized as an especially socially conscious franchise, from owner Jeffrey Lurie — a Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama donor who was reported by the New York Times to have disparaged Trump in a private meeting with other NFL owners — all the way down to the team’s key players. After winning Super Bowl LIX, most of those players said they would boycott the traditional White House event held for championship squads. The clearly peeved president disinvited the team in response.

“The Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow,” Trump said in a statement at the time. “They disagree with their president because he insists that they proudly stand for the national anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country.”

In the years since then, the wound festered. Trump made clear that his low regard for the Eagles also applied to the city of Philadelphia itself. In his first 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he made a false claim about poll watchers being blocked from observing the first day of in-person early voting in the city. “Bad things happen in Philadelphia, bad things,” Trump said.

Then came the election itself.

In the contentious aftermath, Trump singled out the City of Brotherly Love as a hive of election fraud and villainy , along with Detroit.

To accentuate the point, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani leaned on Philadelphia’s reputation for bad fan behavior. Election fraud in Philly, he said, is “about as frequent as getting beaten up at a Philadelphia Eagles football game .”

After days of painstaking vote-counting, the overwhelmingly Democratic city indeed delivered the margin that gave the key swing state of Pennsylvania to Biden. Outside the convention center where rival camps of Trump supporters and opponents had gathered, a lone protester stood on Arch Street with a handmade cardboard sign that nodded to the Eagles’ Super Bowl victory several years earlier.

“LIST OF ASSHOLES DEFEATED BY PHILADELPHIA,” the sign, written in black Sharpie and all caps, said. “KING GEORGE. TOM BRADY. DONALD TRUMP.”

Trump’s defeat, it turned out, proved the beginning of a pro-Eagles interregnum. Incoming first lady Jill Biden, a Philadelphia area native, was revealed to be a diehard Birds fan. Her husband, a more casual supporter, was once spotted wearing an Eagles t-shirt while on vacation.

In early 2023, before a speech to the Democratic National Committee in Philadelphia that occurred on the eve of another Eagles’ appearance in the Super Bowl, Joe Biden used the occasion to rally the crowd .

“Fly, Eagles, fly!” he said, before referring to gleefully unhinged, long-suffering Philadelphia fans as “the most informed, obnoxious fans in the world.”

Even after Biden announced he would not seek reelection, the Eagles continued to occupy an oversized political role. In advance of the first debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris last September — which took place in Philadelphia — mysterious counterfeit ads appeared on city bus shelters claiming that Harris had been endorsed by the Eagles. The ensuing flap forced the team to publicly disavow the ads and clarify that they were not sanctioned by the franchise.

If you think a seven-year-old White House snub, the Biden family’s support of the Eagles or any of the rest of it has been forgotten, then you haven’t been reading Trump’s Truth Social feed in the run-up to the Super Bowl.

Two weeks ago, when both the Chiefs and the Eagles dispatched their conference rivals to win a berth in the Super Bowl, just one of those two teams received Trump’s congratulations. The other squad was pointedly ignored.

“Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs. What a GREAT Team, Coach, Quarterback, and virtually everything else, including those fantastic FANS, that voted for me (MAGA!) in record numbers. Likewise, congratulations to the Buffalo Bills on a tremendous season. They will do a lot of winning long into the future!!!” the president wrote .

Trump’s warm feelings toward the Chiefs weren’t exactly a surprise. In September, after Brittany Mahomes, wife of star K.C. quarterback Patrick Mahomes, was reported to have liked an Instagram post by Trump (and was attacked for it), Trump responded enthusiastically to her.

“I want to thank beautiful Brittany Mahomes for so strongly defending me, and the fact that MAGA is the greatest and most powerful Political Movement in the History of our now Failing Country,” he wrote on Truth Social .

This week, sandwiched between his historic purge of the federal government bureaucracy and today’s White House visit from Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Trump found time Thursday to reach out to the Mahomes family once again .

“Congratulations to the Chiefs GREAT Quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, and his very beautiful and BRILLIANT wife, Brittany, on the birth of their new baby daughter, Golden Raye. This is what I call a baby with great genes, both mother and father. It’s happy times in the wonderful Mahomes family. See you all on Sunday!” he wrote.

Officially, of course, the president isn’t rooting for one team or another. It’s the smart political play given Pennsylvania’s role as a key swing state, and Trump’s undeniably improved performance across the state’s most populous city in 2024 .

But when asked this week in the Oval Office who he wanted to win the Super Bowl, Trump might have given it away. “I don't wanna say,” he responded, “but there’s a certain quarterback that seems to be a pretty good winner.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at cmahtesian@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @PoliticoCharlie . Go Birds.

We’ve re-imagined and expanded our Inside Congress newsletter to give you unmatched reporting on Capitol Hill politics and policy -- and we'll get it to your inbox even earlier. Subscribe today .

What'd I Miss?

****TRUMP TARIFFS******

— ‘Reciprocal’ tariffs on every country to be announced next week, Trump says : President Donald Trump said today he would be announcing tariffs next week that match the duties imposed by other countries , in an apparent shift from his previous threat to impose an across-the-board tariff on all imports from across the world. “I’ll be announcing that next week, reciprocal trade, so that we’re treated evenly with other countries,” he told reporters at a press briefing with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. “We don’t want any more, any less.” Trump, who said the tariffs would apply to every country, added that the announcement would likely come “Monday or Tuesday.”

****TRUMP PURGES*****

— Trump continues federal purge, gutting cyber workers who combat disinformation: The Trump administration has moved to push out a swathe of federal workers previously involved in combating election-related disinformation , according to three people familiar with the matter, amid allegations from congressional Republicans that their work unfairly targeted conservative speech online. Roughly half a dozen employees from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who once worked in its Election Security and Resilience division were notified Thursday night they were being put on administrative leave, said the three people, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

*****USAID CARRIES OUT IMPORTANT FUNCTIONS FOR A PITTANCE THAT THESE FREAKS IGNORE - FUNDED BY CONGRESS, VIOLATES IMPOUNDMENT ACT *****

— Judge to block Trump administration plan to put 2,200 USAID workers on leave : A federal judge will order an immediate halt to key aspects of President Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, blocking Secretary of State Marco Rubio from placing 2,200 employees of the agency on leave in a matter of hours. “They should not put those 2,200 people on administrative leave,” U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, told Trump administration attorneys at an emergency hearing today. The judge indicated he would formalize his decision later in the evening.

— Hakeem Jeffries met privately with Silicon Valley donors in bid to ‘mend fences’: Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries quietly met with more than 150 Silicon Valley-based donors last week in California — an early step in Democrats’ efforts to repair relationships with a once-deep blue constituency. The meet-and-greet, in tony Los Altos Hills, came at a precarious moment for Democrats in the tech world, which has lurched rightward in the second Donald Trump era. The world’s wealthiest tech mogul is upending Washington, and Democratic leaders are facing criticism from their own base for their halting response. Jeffries, meanwhile, was on the West Coast seemingly trying to avoid the next Elon Musk.

THE NEW ADMINISTRATION

THE NEW GUY — The Trump administration has installed an associate of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency group to oversee the Treasury Department’s massive financial operations, including running the federal payments system and managing the cash and debt that finances the government.

Tom Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group who has been leading DOGE’s review of federal payments, is now performing the duties of Treasury’s fiscal assistant secretary, according to the agency’s website.

Krause is taking on the responsibilities that until last week were held by David Lebryk, the longtime fiscal assistant secretary who resigned after a dispute with Trump administration officials over Krause’s access to the payments systems and requests to halt foreign aid payments.

ADDED:

… WaPo reports that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is appointing a third Musk DOGE member, Tom Krause, to a senior position in the department overseeing the nation’s payment systems. Once again, this was not announced to the public and was told to WaPo by inside sources in the Treasury. They are trying to hide everything they do. Even their identities.

… Krause was previously instructed by Musk to order career non-partisan Acting Secretary David Lebryk to cut off payments to USAID. When Lebryk refused because there was no legal authority, he was then forced to resign. Now Krause has Lebryk’s former position. Krause, and by proxy Musk, will now have control over the Treasury system responsible for disbursing more than $5 trillion in annual payments, including for Social Security, Medicare, tax refunds and thousands of other things.

***CFPB HAS STOPPED ABUSIVE CORPORATE PRACTICES & PROTECTED CONSUMERS - OF COURSE REPUBLICANS HATE IT! ****

IN THE CROSSHAIRS — Elon Musk’s team today entered the headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau , an agency that the billionaire Trump adviser has personally targeted, according to three people familiar with their actions. Three Musk allies, some of whom are tied to his Department of Government Efficiency, have also embedded with the consumer bureau, according to the CFPB’s employees union, NTEU 335, in a sign that cuts could be coming to the agency, which Republicans have long opposed.

****DRAINING THE SWAMP!*****

BIG HOUSE TO BELGRADE — President Donald Trump is considering nominating former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who served eight years in prison on corruption charges, to be U.S. ambassador to Serbia , according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Blagojevich, whose sentence was commuted by Trump in 2020, is also a former Democratic member of Congress. He was the co-chair of the group Serbians for Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign and has morphed into a strong political supporter of Trump. Blagojevich’s father is from Serbia.

AROUND THE WORLD

An election poster showing Friedrich Merz in Burgholzhausen near Frankfurt, Germany, on Feb. 5, 2025. | Michael Probst/AP

UNLEASH THE BOTS — Russian bots have driven a dramatic surge of disinformation on the social media platform X — days before Germany’s election — according to a government report seen by POLITICO.

At the center of the effort to influence German voters is Doppelgänger, a Kremlin-backed operation, according to the German Office of Foreign Affairs. The campaign uses fake news sites, sleeper accounts, and AI-generated content to spread false narratives and erode trust in Western institutions.

Intelligence agencies across the EU and U.S. have previously tracked Doppelgänger’s highly coordinated tactics, which have sought to undermine support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and amplify Kremlin-friendly messaging. Now, the operation has shifted its focus to Germany’s Feb. 23 election.

German officials identified more than 100 pseudo-news websites quietly accumulating content for months, according to officials.

****THE U.S. HAS A LONG HISTORY OF BETRAYING IRAN - THEY KNOW WHAT THE U.S. HAS DONE EVEN IF AMERICANS DON'T! WE CAN'T TRUST TRUMP TO NEGOTIATE, BUT THERE HAVE BEEN LOST OPPORTUNITIES! ****

ON ICE — Iran’s supreme leader said today that negotiations with America “are not intelligent, wise or honorable ” after President Donald Trump floated nuclear talks with Tehran, reports The Associated Press.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also suggested that “there should be no negotiations with such a government,” but stopped short of issuing a direct order not to engage with Washington. Khamenei’s remarks upend months of signals from Tehran to the United States that it wanted to negotiate over its rapidly advancing nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of crushing economic sanctions worth billions of dollars. Following Khamenei’s comments, the Iranian rial sunk to a record low of 872,000 rials to $1 in aftermarket trading.

Nightly Number

600

The number of people that the Trump administration now plans to keep on at USAID , after previously saying they would cut the department to 300. The agency previously had more than 10,000 staff.

RADAR SWEEP

BATTERY WOES — Almost any electronic device you can think of is powered by lithium-ion batteries — phones, laptops, cameras, watches and even cars. But as these devices age, so do their batteries — sometimes to the point where they become unusable. There are an array of tricks for efficient and rapid charging, but battery-powering devices still naturally deteriorate overtime. Enter Pure Lithium, a startup in Boston which just announced a lithium metal battery it’s describing as “the holy grail of energy storage.” While lithium-ion batteries degrade after a few hundred cycles of charging and discharging, their pure lithium batteries can last over 2,000 cycles without significant damage degradation, an ongoing test shows. You can’t purchase a phone with pure lithium just yet, but there’s still hope for a future in which your devices don’t all rapidly deteriorate. For Vox, Adam Clark Estes , debunks the myth that there’s a correct way to charge a phone when batteries have limitations that aren’t avoidable.

Parting Image

On this date in 1994: President Bill Clinton talks with the crew aboard space shuttle Discovery during a visit to mission control at NASA in Houston. | AP

A new era in Washington calls for sharper insights. Get faster policy scoops, more congressional coverage, and a re-imagined newsletter under the leadership of Jack Blanchard. Subscribe to our Playbook Newsletter today .