Was anyone fooled by Donald Trump’s Super Bowl advert?

Between 15-second bursts of play, Holly Baxter watched transfixed as the president and Michael Bloomberg aired the most expensive commercials in the world

Head coach Andy Reid of the Kansas City Chiefs gets an ice bath (Getty)

I’ve never been an avid sports fan – I was the kid at school who ran away from the ball and considered myself the only rational person on the pitch for doing so – although during my adult life, as PE-induced trauma slowly recedes, I have become more amenable to watching people kick around a ball on TV every so often (I appreciate your thoughts and prayers at this difficult time.) I might even say that on some (extremely rare) occasions, I enjoy being a spectator at such events. An NBA game, for instance, is always fun by the final quarter. Similarly, supporting England during the World Cup at the right pub in London can be electrifying.

What I never imagined I’d be able to get into was American football, the mysteriously named game that never employs anybody’s feet and, as far as I can tell, is essentially rugby in costume. The rules are obscure, even to Americans, the head injuries are well-documented, the fans seem slightly scary and you can never really tell where on earth on the field the ball actually is. Add to that the fact that each game can drag on for about six hours, with each 15-second burst of play immediately followed by two or three minutes of adverts, and you can see why I haven’t become a superfan during my short time in the US. But there’s one thing even I wouldn’t miss out on – the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl falls on a Sunday night each year, with the following Monday morning notorious for being the most popular sick day in the States. It’s a big deal, even if your team isn’t playing or you don’t follow football at all. Pizzas are ordered by the dozen, snacks and beers sell out from bodegas and people take bets not just on the players’ performances but also on what’s going to happen during the half-time show. How will the mascots behave? What colour will the Gatorade which is ritualistically dumped over the coach of the winning team at the end be?

I gave in to peer pressure this year and agreed to go along to a Super Bowl party in Brooklyn, mainly populated by expats who had no idea what was going on (one of the two Americans left in disgust at our ignorance before we even reached half-time.) You can’t protest too hard against free beers and junk food at the weekend, after all. I knew very little about what was going to happen bar a few salient facts: the Kansas City Chiefs were from Kansas City in Missouri, not Kansas (a fact that went over Donald Trump’s head), the San Francisco 49ers were playing with the first openly gay – and one of the few female – assistant coaches at the helm, and the commercials that ran during the game were the most expensive in the world.

Those commercials were the part of the entire thing I was most excited to see. Because alongside OTT celebrity endorsements and controversies about the death of Mr Peanut were two audacious examples of US politics gone money-mad. Both President Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg paid $10 million for a 60-second spot on the air during the Chiefs’ successful efforts to triumph over the 49ers.

The moments when the ads appeared on the big screen we’d set up in a friend’s apartment were the only times during the Super Bowl party that we all fell silent. Trump’s, which featured claims that “thousands of families are being reunited” under his presidency alongside pictures of mainly African-American people at rallies, was seen by many as explicitly targeting the black vote. Interestingly, at the end of the ad Trump said: “President Trump got it done” rather than his usual call to “keep America great.” It seemed like a reference to Mr Bloomberg’s campaign slogan: “Mike will get it done”.

Bloomberg’s ad seemed similarly weighted towards an attempt to convince African-Americans to vote for him. It featured the parents of a school shooting victim and spoke about his commitment to gun policy reform. The ex-mayor of New York once presided over a controversial “stop and frisk” policy that critics said disproportionately affected young black men, so he has more work to do to gain black voters’ trust – though many saw his attempts as cynical. Analytics firms found that neither Mr Trump’s nor Mr Bloomberg’s ads got as much of a positive reception as they might have wanted.

I have a feeling African Americans won’t be so easily fooled

The day after the Super Bowl, Fox News hosts asked one of the Democratic candidates, Pete Buttigieg, how he could “say Donald Trump is racist” after the president’s Super Bowl ad, in a moment that seemed to reveal Team Trump’s thinking behind airing it in the first place. Buttigieg smiled diplomatically and said he agreed with the First Step Act, a law Trump signed which aims to end excessively long sentences disproportionately affecting black people in the US today.

Like the claim at the end of the Super Bowl that the victorious team are “world champions”, Trump’s ad – which spotlights one very specific case, of a black woman released from prison after pressure put on the president by Kim Kardashian-West – tells a very selective truth.

Being a world champion when only one country gets to compete isn’t quite the same thing as being a world champion in a tournament in which every country is invited to play. Likewise, being the person who helped one unfairly incarcerated black woman isn’t quite the same as having the best interests of black people in the United States at heart. I have a feeling African-Americans won’t be so easily fooled.