The Daily Show shredded Donald Trump over his long-running hate campaign against the NFL, exposing the genesis of his gripes with one of the nation’s biggest sporting organizations.
“Donald Trump approaches conflict like a professional athlete—with focus, dedication, and a team of neurologists willing to lie for him,” co-host Desi Lydic joked on Thursday’s broadcast of the show. “So it’s no wonder that one of his greatest beefs is with the National Football League, and he can’t shut up about it.”
The president’s historically rage-filled relationship with one of the nation’s biggest sporting organizations is back in the limelight ahead of this month’s Super Bowl. Latin music star Bad Bunny, a tested Trump critic, is the headliner for the event’s halftime show.
Trump and his allies have blasted the NFL over its choice of entertainment, which also includes anti-MAGA punk rock act Green Day, given the artists’ collective criticism of his administration at large and in particular its ongoing deportation drive.
“I’m anti-them,” the president has said. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” he added, clarifying he won’t be attending the event because it is, ostensibly, “just too far away.”
Lydic pointed out in Thursday’s segment that “Trump didn’t always hate the NFL.”
“As with most of his enemies, he’s angry because it rejected his advances,” she quipped, noting that the president did, during the 1980s, make several attempts to purchase a number of league teams, “but never quite sealed the deal.”
“So he did the next best thing. He bought a knockoff from the United States Football League,” she went on. “The USFL was like the NFL’s dumb cousin, but not like a hot cousin, more like a weird cousin who’s desperate to kiss you because you’re the hot cousin.”
She also reminded viewers of just how deep Trump’s criticism of the organization has run, playing a series of clips in which the MAGA leader has previously lamented how “football’s become soft.”
“Got a little ding on the head? No, no, you can’t play for the rest of the season,” the president says in one snippet. “What used to be considered a great tackle, a violent, head-on, violent… it’s become… and you know what, it’s boring!”
In recent years, concern has intensified over what many medical experts describe as a growing and increasingly visible pattern of brain damage among NFL players.
These cases are largely driven by repeated head impacts that accumulate over time, rather than obvious individual concussions, resulting in strikingly high rates of a condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
Symptoms include memory loss, depression, impulse control problems, and early cognitive decline. In more extreme instances, the condition has been linked to acts of intense violence and aggression—even murder, as highlighted by the cases of late New England Patriot tight end Aaron Hernandez and Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher.
Lydic’s initial dig about Trump having “a team of neurologists willing to lie for him” refers to mounting concerns over the president’s first year back in office that the president may be suffering from an acute mental health crisis, possibly signalling the early stages of dementia.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
