This week starts the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, our beloved March Madness. For two weeks (not so much the last one due to their being fewer games) legions of employees ignore work to find a TV or check the scores on the internet. And of course, about six hours into the tourney, 99% of us will have busted brackets.
Even those who don’t follow college basketball fill out a bracket and join in the fun. Office pools abound. People pick based on mascots, on locations, on coin flips. It’s a time when we enjoy sport and can’t help but get sucked into the stories of young athletes living their dreams.
For the last eight years, Barack Obama has filled out a bracket on ESPN, showing a little bit of his personality and love for sports to the country. He was usually not-that-great at picking, but he made informed decisions as a basketball fan (hint: experts are rarely right because the tourney is single-elimination and crazy things happen).
But this year our President can’t be troubled to participate in a public bracket. This is likely because he’s so busy Tweeting he can’t take 15 minutes to do something that would illustrate that he’s like the rest of us.
Of course that might be the real message here. There will be people who make snarky comments about not following the tourney, not “getting” the whole March Madness thing. And that’s fine. Really, it is. I don’t get the movie Titanic or any show about wives from a specific city. But I don’t lord that over the people who like those things.
For the President to dismiss ESPN’s offer to fill out a bracket on-air is sort of like him ignoring the Press Correspondent’s Dinner. He simply doesn’t care about the little things that would allow him to connect to the populace.
Meanwhile, we’ve spent more money on Trump’s family in a month than we did on the previous President in a year.
Trump doesn’t feel like he’s one of us. He never has. And this week, when so many of us enjoy bonding over basketball, who knows what the President will be doing. He can’t be bothered with our paltry interests.
Also, go MSU, bubble team supreme.