'Hilarious decline' as Trump retreats from public view: analysis

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a dinner with the leaders of the C5+1Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, in the East Room of the White House (REUTERS)

New Republic Senior Editor Alex Shephard says President Donald Trump regularly flies across the world “on a taxpayer-funded plane that solely exists to take him wherever he wants, whenever he wants.” But now he’s claiming the Super Bowl is just “too far away,” to attend.

Of course it’s not about inconvenience, said Shephard, who penned the “Hilarious Decline of MAGA’s Brief Cultural Relevance. It’s about fear of what was once Trump’s beloved public.

“Trump isn’t going to the Super Bowl because he is, one year into his term, more unpopular than he’s been since the January 6 insurrection,” said Shephard. “He knows that when the cameras inevitably found him in his box, he would be mercilessly and loudly booed. Staying home and stewing — and posting incessant (and most likely racist) drivel on Truth Social — is preferable. It’s still humiliating, just less so.”

Shepard said Trump’s absence at Super Bowl LX, combined with TPUSA’s substitution attempt featuring Kid Rock and a host of unknown country singers, “tells us where his second term is headed.”

“A year ago, Trump had real cultural power, particularly in the sports world. He attended Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans and was applauded,” said Shepard. “Pro athletes celebrated goals and touchdowns by breaking out the ‘Trump dance.’ There was wide concern that the right had achieved massive cultural power through influencers, popular YouTube shows, and comics.”

But now Trump is a pariah hiding at home, Shephard said, and the best "counterprogramming his allies can come up with" is a performance “by one of the most talentless performers American culture has produced in the last quarter-century.”

It’s a long fall for the guy who invented the Trump dance, “seen everywhere from college football stadiums to international soccer,” said Shephard, who added that the dance itself was a sign of Trump’s cultural normalization and Democrat’s “utter failure to make him societally radioactive.”

“[The dance] also pointed to one of the more disturbing trends revealed by the 2024 election: Trump had gained ground with a lot of people who, not so long ago, didn’t like him at all. Young men, in particular—not just white men without college degrees, but from a wide array of social, racial, and economic backgrounds — had warmed to the president. They thought he was funny, someone worth imitating — and saw no social cost for embracing him. And Trump was winning over these people in part because American culture — particularly online culture, but sports as well — had gotten more right-wing and reactionary.”

But now the fist-jerking icon is catching the bad end of a “fierce backlash” across the nation, said Shepard. There are anti-ICE protests at the Winter Olympics in Milan. Athletes and sports teams in Minnesota are slamming federal agents’ presence in the state. And even fans of All Elite Wrestling chanted “F—— ICE” at a match in Las Vegas.

“Trump is widely loathed. Supporting him, even by doing a silly dance, is reputationally suicidal,” said Shephard.

Trump has, within the span of a single year, “squandered most of his political capital by running a belligerent, unlawful, and fascist regime,” said Shephard. But the right has also managed to blow all of the cultural capital his election brought them.

“A year ago, it seemed like the right was on the verge of total dominance throughout American society. Now they’re back to pretending to like Kid Rock, while everyone in the country gets to enjoy the real Super Bowl halftime show,” Shephard said.

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