President Donald Trump, America’s 80-year-old president, has faced repeated scrutiny over his perceived cognitive decline and potential mental health issues. Yet after he rambled about professional football during the Patriot Games on Tuesday, ESPN reporter Laura Rutledge offered fulsome praise.
“Tell us which NFL team you’re keeping your eyes on,” Rutledge asked Trump during the games, which involved teenage student-athletes competing for scholarship money. The event on Tuesday was held in the Ohio town of Geneva.
“Well, I mean, maybe I’ll pick a few,” Trump replied. “I think New England looks good. I think the Giants, I like their quarterback a lot,” he added, referring to Jaxson Dart after the latter controversially introduced Trump at a rally. “I think that they say the LA Rams are looking very strong. But I better not get into this too much. I’m gonna get myself in trouble if I do. But I think we have a lot of good teams, a lot of great teams. And we’ll see how it turns out. I’ll be watching.”
Gushing, Rutledge replied, “That was a great analysis by you, Mr. President!”
Later in the same interview, Trump used the Patriot Games to continue claiming that America is experiencing unprecedented greatness during his second term.
“You see the spirit and the love of the country and our great country and our country’s never done better,” Trump told Rutledge. “So good to be with you.”
Rutledge was not the only ESPN personality to try to get on the president’s good side during the Patriot Games. Pat McAfee, a former NFL punter who now hosts a popular ESPN show, walked on stage next to Trump and then sat next to him throughout the Patriot Games on Tuesday night.
In contrast to sports figures like Rutledge, Dart and McAfee being pro-Trump without adverse consequences, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was widely attacked by both Trump and conservatives for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice.
Despite taking the 49ers to a Super Bowl earlier in his career, Kaepernick was unable to sign to another team after becoming a free agent and was widely believed to have been blacklisted for expressing his political opinions.This stark contrast highlights a clear double standard in how the sports world treats political expression.
While Kaepernick was effectively banished for peaceful activism, figures like Rutledge, McAfee, and Dart face no professional backlash for openly embracing a sitting president. Instead, their sycophancy is rewarded with prime-time access, turning a student-athlete scholarship event into a sanitized, soft-focus campaign stop. By transforming a non-partisan youth competition into a platform for unchecked political grandstanding, these sports personalities demonstrate that political speech in modern athletics is only deemed acceptable when it flatters and aligns with those in power.
