What did Donald Trump do today?

He showed that he knows as much about football as he does anything else.

In 2024, the NFL introduced a new set of rules for kickoffs, placing defenders on the kicking team closer to the spot where the ball was fielded, while penalizing the kicking team more for unreturnable kicks by spotting touchbacks on the 30-yard line (later the 35). One reason for the change was player safety: the league hoped that by putting defenders and returners in closer proximity, there would be fewer injuries from collisions between players running at top speed. But the NFL also hoped that it would make the kickoff a more interesting play to watch, since it would reduce the number of times the kicking team simply launched the ball through the end zone for no return.

Today, at a hastily rescheduled rally in Iowa, Trump interrupted himself to rant about this rule change:

TRUMP: Who the hell wants to watch football? It's boring as hell, and I hate— I hate— that new kickoff rule where you hit the ball, the people are standing there like a bunch of idi— Please don't ever let Iowa, Iowa State, any of your coll— the NFL should go back to a thing where you kick the ball, people get the ball, everybody's running. It is so unglamorous what they've done, the kickoff rule. And it doesn't help people. It doesn't help. Hopefully college will never go. What a shame. I can't watch. You know what I do? I start the game about two minutes in. I don't want to watch the kickoff. I think it's so disparaging [sic]. They have no right to ruin football by doing shit like that, I tell you.

To be clear: Trump is fully entitled to his opinions about football. In fact, bickering about rule changes might be as close as Trump ever gets to real sports fandom. 

That said, as actual fans were quick to point out, he got the facts completely wrong. Before the 2025 rule change, most kickoffs went into the end zone for a touchback. By forcing kickers to try to put the ball close to the end zone but not through it, the new "dynamic" kickoff has dramatically increased the returns that Trump said he wanted to see.

The reality is that football is very, very popular with Americans. It's not clear what Trump was hoping to accomplish by trashing it during what was supposed to be a political rally for endangered Republican candidates. As one commentator put it, "It's like he's trying to lose."

The political wisdom of telling Iowans that football sucks aside, Trump may simply be trying to settle an old score. The NFL is the target of one of Trump's oldest and bitterest grudges: after trying and failing to buy three different NFL teams in the 1980s with his inherited fortune, Trump bought a team in an upstart rival football league, the USFL. The new league had been profitable and making inroads against the NFL, but within a few years, thanks in large part to Trump's disastrous decision to sue the NFL, it folded.

Why does this matter?

• This isn't the first time Trump has told Americans that everything they love sucks and demanded to be praised for it. 

• A president who had the cognitive capacity to stop himself from this kind of embarrassing, rambling rant at a rally where he desperately needed to win people over… probably would have.