♫Happy Birthday, Mr. President...♫ Photo by Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Against all odds, it was not Dan Quinn. It was (ENORMOUS CAVEAT INCOMING), if Donald Trump is to be believed, Bill Belichick who smooched the eventual President of the United States and further told him he was "the greatest." Mark Leibovich has an interesting little story in the New York Times on the unlikely Super Bowl subplot—the New England Patriots' overt love for Donald Trump—and it has quite a collection of amazing anecdotes. As Leibovich tells it, he had access to Trump in 2015 for a profile he was writing for the Times Magazine, and Trump was already dropping names like Brady, Belichick, and Kraft.Some of the quotes barely feel real, like if someone were doing a too-on-the-nose impression of Donald Trump. In another example of the self-obsession that led him to turn words honoring Martin Luther King Jr. into a gripe about press coverage of his first days in office, Trump gets sidetracked telling a story about a conversation he supposedly had with Brady about the way the league treated him in the Deflategate case: "He said: 'Mr. Trump' — he calls me Mr. Trump, which he shouldn't, because we play golf all the time. Anyway, he says: 'Mr. Trump — Donald,' he doesn't even know what the [expletive] to call me. It's the craziest thing. He's a friend of mine."Haha what?Anyway, it gets much, much better. While talking about what great friends he is with Bill Belichick, Trump uncorks an all-timer of a story. I hope it's true."So I go to the Patriots game last year," Trump said. "I'm on the sidelines with Kraft. He's got Les Moonves right here. He's got a lot of different people. And Belichick comes over in his Patriots sweatshirt and the hoodie and the whole thing. He hugs me, and he kisses me, and he said: 'I love you. You're the greatest.'" Trump sat at his cluttered desk and seemed almost dreamy at the memory, as if the reception from Belichick genuinely moved him. "He just feels warmly toward me, Belichick does," Trump said. "Isn't that the craziest thing?"It is the craziest thing!Along with these somewhat tall-sounding tales, the story, which you should check out here, also includes possibly the only defensible thing Donald Trump has ever said: "The commissioner is a dope. He's a stupid guy."[New York Times]
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