Donald Trump said he will not attend next month\u2019s Super Bowl in northern California, citing the distance to the game, amid an ongoing culture-war backlash over the NFL\u2019s choice of half-time and pre-game performers.<\/p>\n
Trump told the New York Post he plans to skip the 8 February championship game at Levi\u2019s Stadium in Santa Clara because the trip is \u201cjust too far away\u201d, adding that he would have considered attending if it were a shorter flight. The decision means Trump will not repeat his appearance at last year\u2019s Super Bowl in New Orleans, where he became the first sitting US president to attend the NFL\u2019s showcase event.<\/p>\n
The president has made high-profile appearances at sporting events a regular feature of his second term<\/a>, including last year\u2019s Daytona 500, the recent college football national championship and September\u2019s Ryder Cup at Bethpage, New York<\/a>. Many of those events were held near Florida or the US east coast, within short travel distance of the White House or Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago compound.<\/p>\n Trump also criticized the NFL\u2019s entertainment lineup for the Super Bowl, which includes Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny as the half-time headliner and punk rock band Green Day<\/a> as a pregame act.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m anti-them,\u201d Trump said. \u201cI think it\u2019s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n In interviews, Trump had previously called the selection of Bad Bunny<\/a> \u201cabsolutely ridiculous\u201d and said he was unfamiliar with the artist. Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Mart\u00ednez Ocasio, has been a vocal critic of Trump and last year performed a month-long concert residency in Puerto Rico rather than touring the mainland United States.<\/p>\n NFL commissioner Roger Goodell<\/a> said in October the league would not reconsider its decision. Speaking after the league\u2019s owners meetings, Goodell said Bad Bunny was chosen because of his global popularity and dismissed the backlash as typical for Super Bowl entertainment. \u201cWe\u2019re confident it\u2019s going to be a great show,\u201d Goodell said.<\/p>\n Trump said the presence of Bad Bunny and Green Day had nothing to do with his decision not to attend the game. Green Day has a long history of politically charged lyrics, and lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong has publicly criticized Trump and voiced support for protests against the administration\u2019s immigration policies.<\/p>\n The Super Bowl is the most-watched annual television event in the United States. Last year\u2019s game averaged nearly 130m US viewers, according to NFL figures, with an additional 62.5m watching internationally. The teams competing will be determined after Sunday\u2019s conference championship games<\/a> between the New England Patriots and Denver Broncos, followed by the Los Angeles Rams and Seattle Seahawks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump said he will not attend next month\u2019s Super Bowl in northern California, citing the distance to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-435741","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nfl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}