Bulwark Takes - Super Bowl MVP SNUBS Trump

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Not everyone showed up when Trump welcomed the Eagles to the White House. Tim Miller and Pablo Torre talk about Jalen Hurts, Saquon Barkley, and the deeper political drama behind the scenes.

America's energy future begins now. More American oil and natural gas means more jobs, more security, and more innovation. America's moment is now. Learn more at LightsOnEnergy.org. Paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. Hey everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark here with Pablo Torre in a cardigan of Pablo Torre Finds Out. If you're not on Pablo Torre Finds out podcast by now what do you got you're really missing the real deal and we'll put a link here in the show notes uh he is our unofficial sport uh correspondent our unofficial correspondent when donald trump engages in the crucible of sports one way or another and today at the philadelphia eagles we're at the white house not all of them jaylen hurts the quarterback the the MVP snubbed Trump, did not attend.

And the only other, I guess, notable news is J.D. Vance also was not there. So there was no harming of any trophies. Pablo, thanks for coming on to chat. Do you have any any big picture thoughts on the Jalen snub? Yeah, he wasn't alone. You know, this was a lot of I'm looking at this photo from the White House. This is a lot of backups, man. Like no Jalen Hurts, no A.J. Brown, no Devante Smith. You know, a lot of the members of the defense, by the way, a lot of the current experience of being an American did they not want to co-sign here? But it's pretty remarkable that they, in large quantities, the starters, the guys who actually won the Super Bowl, were like, yeah, we're not going to be used as a prop by this administration and this guy. Yeah, it's interesting because I, so, you know, not being, like football is a funny sport. Like I watched East Mountain football more college, but since they all have helmets on, you know, and since it's not my job like yours, like I don't know what A.J. Brown looks like.

I don't think of A.J. Brown showed up to, you know, that dog down the street for me here. I'm not sure I would know that it's A.J. Brown. And so it's hard for me to tell. It was easy for anyone watching to tell that Trump had a favorite, though, which was Saquon Barkley, who went golfing with Trump, who Trump wouldn't shut up about. And and so I think the fact that Trump kept mentioning Saquon, Saquon, Saquon, and then there ends up being an MVP chant for Saquon, who notably did not win the MVP, I think is pretty, pretty telling. But what do you make of that? Is Saquon like, is he a MAGA guy or or you know what what are you know what what's happening there do we think i think it's remarkable that saquon didn't just show up to this day of festivities he showed up a day early and played golf with them um look as

with all of this right the question is going to be how intentional was your participation? And when it comes to the bonus day of, I went and hung out at the club, at the golf club with Trump and a bunch of guys. So I'm still trying to identify, by the way, a bunch of white dudes. We'll throw up this picture for people on YouTube. Just like the hangout here,

the hang, a real nightmare blunt rotation scenario for my, you know, personal preferences. I mean, I don't, again, I also don't know any of these guys in the picture. It doesn't seem like a political, A real nightmare blunt rotation scenario for my, you know, personal. I mean, I don't again, I also don't know any of these guys in the picture. It doesn't seem like it feels like it's like Mar-a-Lago club guys. You know, it feels like it feels like it's like we're at a, you know, Deutsche Bank, you know, kind of tournament, you know, just sort of average, you know, average median white guys about our age feels like. But in that explanation, I think, is the most generous interpretation, which is that this was something that was financially useful to say, Kwan Barkley. Maybe he's simply a capitalist in the way that Mark Andreessen is.

You know, I'm trying to spin this right as his as his unasked for defense attorney. Maybe he just thought that there was a transaction to be had here. And maybe that's exactly what it was and not anything ideological or political. But when it comes to him being established, Tim, as like a guy known right now, he is known as the dude who showed up a day early to golf with Donald Trump, while the rest of these offensive starters were like, we don't want to be within any distance of this entire pageant that Saquon signed up for,

you know, the bonus stuff. Then he gets praise lavished on him just over and over again by Trump. There's one thing i don't know if you caught this trump snuck it kind of under his breath a little bit uh but he did he did a classic sir story related to saquon where um well there were two actually one where saquon said to trump sir i'd love to come on the plane so there was that one sir story and then there was another where trump claims that he was

having dinner with the giants coach a couple years ago i guess brian daybald yeah and that he was telling daybald you can't trade saquon you can't trade saquon so trump has two stories who knows whether either of them are apocryphal or true related to Saquon. Um, and, and Brian Dable, like catches a couple of strays. Yeah. I would look. So one thing about this, sir,

story, I find it more plausible than the story, the sir story about how every nation is sending representatives to him amid all the tariffs and kissing his ass. I find this sir story to be far more plausible than that one, but it's, it's of a piece to him with the grand unifying theory of our sports talk, which is that these guys, Trump and Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who, by the way, famously was like, I like both the Steelers and the Eagles, as if that's a thing that anybody does, which Vivek also did recently, talking about Deion Sanders' son, Shadur Sanders, by saying, I'm a Bengals fan, but, quote,

mad respect for the good choice by the Browns, which is a thing that people definitely have said ever before who like sports. As Bengals fans, yeah. But the point being here— I often give mad respect to the Alabama Crimson Tide as an LSU Tigers fan. I'm always like mad respect. Yes. Saving on your championship.

If we can establish anything here, Tim, it's that people that deserve bad respect, the Cleveland Browns and Screech is famously deserving of mad respect. But the through line is that the unifying theory is these guys don't know sports. Right. And so when Trump is out here saying whatever about whoever happens to be, you know, pliable enough to be used as a prop, it reminds me of this Deion Sanders, Shadur Sanders story to bring another story from the weekend into it in which he is taking credit. You know, his press secretary today was taking credit for the fact that Shadur Sanders got drafted because of Donald Trump's tweet.

Yeah, let's watch this actually. Yeah, let's watch this really quick. It's something. All I will say is the president put out a statement and a few rounds later he was drafted. So I think the facts speak for themselves on that one, Peter. Just to fill in like the Cliff Notes version, if this was effective it

took four fucking rounds to be effective like it's the least effective you know executive order in history it's like you got to draft him and no one does until the fifth round and it's the browns like this is again a lack of demonstrated knowledge about how any of this stuff meaning sports actually works i mean maybe mel kuyper should have gotten the shout out since you know he was spending hours and hours on TV telling people to draft Shador. I think, you know, maybe a little bit more. If anyone deserves a mad respect from the Sanders family, it would be Mel Kuyper. Mel Kuyper, number one QB pick.

It's a tough analysis there. That'd be kind of like having predict that Kamala Harris was going to win 48 states, you know, as a political analyst. It was a pretty big whiff for old Mel. Nothing personal. With a light whiff of phrenology, by the way. Like in the tweet, it was like, he has great genes. He's streetwise.

You know, it's just like, okay. At a certain point, you got to get this right. Keep the calipers at home, all right? Look, we're just measuring some skulls, Tim. Very standard combine measurement is skull shape. Yes. Man, there's so much more stuff to talk about. For some reason, that made me think of Belichick picking his spouse.

I don't know if we're going to have time to get to Belichick. Wearing a navel sweater full of holes. Again, just like clearly not allied with maybe. I mean, look, Belichick, by the way, a guy who has received a share of Sir stories from Donald Trump himself, by the way, as a buddy. So maybe I'm not saying that Jordan, I call her Jordan. I refuse to call her Jordan because it's J-O-R-D-O-N. But Jordan Hudson, his momager and girlfriend, who's 24. I just presume that she's working some angle. Maybe she'll wind up a White House press secretary at some point. Who's to say?

I wouldn't lose any money being on the anti-MAGA side of that bet. I don't know anything about Jordan, but I think it's probably a, you know, I think the smart money's on your side, I guess, put it that way. I don't want to just pick on Saquon because the person I was actually most interested in showing up to the White House today was Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie. Because the Eagles did not go in 2018. It's just worth mentioning. It was one of those situations where like Trump keeps being like, come on a date with me, come on a date with me. And they kept being like, no, no.

And then Trump's like, never mind. I don't want to date you. You know, and tried to like do a leak to fox news i was like they're not invited you know after begging them to come to the party uh but anyway they didn't show up and uh lori said at the time i said you don't want to see be seen as support this was actually related to some other uh trump stuff not the white house visit but he didn't want to be seen as supporting what many of us perceive as you know one disastrous presidency so that's where he was in 2018. And it's interesting, like there's this whole kind of discussion two months ago about how there's this vibe shift.

And like the rich guys are going to start sucking up now. And Zuckerberg's got a new haircut and he's going to be at the White House. And Bezos is right. And that Lurie, you know, is is you could you could see this as being a piece of that right that he is caught up in this but man we're three months in and shit is pretty ugly now and so it's like not to give a pass to any of the guys that showed up january 20th but april 28th it's a different picture it's pretty interesting to me that hit that uh the owner uh who had such harsh words in 2018 is like feeling better about things now like what's better now than 2018 like a lot of worse stuff has happened since that yeah

look when it comes to like the moral fortitude of any of these sports team owners it's a real like in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king kind of a scenario where it's like on a relative basis jeffrey lurie is basically bernie sanders like sure like on a relative basis, Jeffrey Lurie is basically Bernie Sanders. Like, sure. Right. On a relative basis, like Woody Johnson, he's a radical leftist compared to Woody and Brick Johnson. What I would say, though, about where we are in terms of this larger trend line, like it's worth remembering for as much as it feels like there has been this shift. If you look at certainly like CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, like look at look at who in the world of business dares actually criticize this man. And you will find a list with basically no one on it, you know. And so is this, again, simply part of that transactionality that Saquon Barkley I'm imputing to him, which is to say he's like, look, I don't want to get audited by Trump's IRS.

I don't want Kash Patel to bug my phone. I don't want my business interests to be jeopardized. Maybe it's defense as opposed to principle. But I would argue, Tim, as I think we both do here, that for our mileage, you know, playing any sort of game with this guy is in fact a reflection of a lack of principle at this point, even if it's self-defense. Yeah, it's a losing game. And it's just a losing game. Like, what did Zuckerberg get out of this guy?

I mean, like, there's the J.D. Vance is still going after him in antitrust. All these rich guys have lost huge amounts in their net worth, except for Warren Buffett, who took a lot out of a lot of his money and put it in cash. People say that wasn't related to Trump, but I don't know. Maybe one of the richest guys in the world just keeps getting lucky. I don't know. You can decide for yourself why Warren Buffett had an unprecedented amount of money in cash at the beginning of this year. But I don't know, man. I just don't see it. If you're Jeffrey Lurie, if things looked bad in 2018, since then, we've had an insurrection. He's been indictedicted a couple of times we've been sending people to a

foreign concentration camp and he's crushed the economy like we've had multiple like like things have gotten significantly worse than 2018 by the way every time i'm doing all this cable news now and every time there's like a montage of just like stuff that's happened i always just want to i always want to pipe up and say the aristocrats it says like we have just watched uh a shit storm and by the way in this shit storm today right like just imagine you're the eagles okay and what you are passing by on the way into the white house is the lawn full of these signs of these alleged gang member terrorists with the accused crimes that the white house is accusing them of without any actual clear evidence or criminal record and so just like the whole even by the way if they were all rapists

it's pretty gauche like why are we putting like what you know so so part of me part of look if i'm appealing to the rich guy demographic which is what this segment has become now, it's like, really, this is the bet you're making. Doesn't this all feel cheap? Right. Like, doesn't it all feel like you're kind of living in your own version of a bizarro, dystopian third world country in which we are, in fact, manufacture products as if American workers are better served being sweatshop labor as opposed to the knowledge workers that our country has incentivized them otherwise to become. As if, in fact, you're playing, you know, in any number of sporting events overseen by a dictator who you cannot criticize. Right. Like, it's just it all feels so on the nose and cheap and and foreign, frankly, if we're going to play to just that, it feels un-American. Yeah. So if that's the White House that you want to frame this photo in, big Dom, you know, like and whoeverene, I wonder how that ages. I wonder how your strategy of being aware of threats on a football field applies to being aware of threats to actually the building that you're standing on. Yeah, I think pretty poorly, but it's a good observation. Maybe some people will take that and reflect upon it because we'll have other chances.

NBA, we're going to have other times to get together. Hopefully people will do better as the year goes on. OK, final sport related topic. Trump did make an endorsement of the tush push during the press conference. He said, I like it. It's sort of exciting and different. I would like Donald Trump to just explain in less than five sentences what the tush push even is. I think he might have been thinking about something different. I mean, when it comes to the rules stopping his ability to push tushes, I feel like there's been no president more in violation of such a premise in the first place. That's a good point. You know, so yeah. I question the football strategy, and I question, frankly, the principle underneath his view of tushes and pushes. If you're a star, they let you do it with the tush push or with the genital grab.

Either way. That's right. Pablo, actually, we're going to leave our viewers here. I want to leave you with some good press conference answers, in case you had any doubt that it was a principled choice today by Jalen Hurts, MVP Jalen Hurts, who I do have to say, I do have

to hand it to a guy from Alabama. I'm already contradicting myself from earlier. Look at the coalition you're building. I do have to hand it to a guy from Alabama. I'm going to leave everybody with this video of him at the pre-Super Bowl press conference responding with disdain when asked what he thinks about Donald Trump attending.

So you guys stick around and watch that. Subscribe to this feed. Go watch Pablo Torre on Pablo Finds Out. We'll see you all again soon. It's a good play, this one. He's welcome to do what he wants.