Antonio Brown’s Appearance At a Rally Is An Apt, If Not Depressing, Metaphor for the Trump Campaign.
I’m about the same age as former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown. The major differences between the two of us include that I’ve never been paid tens of millions of dollars, I’ve never declared bankruptcy after being paid obscene sums of money, and I’ve never endorsed a fascist candidate. Another notable difference? I’ve never been accused of sexual assault— least of all not multiple times- and blamed it on the media not giving me a break for suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). It seems like as good a metaphor as any for a campaign that feels increasingly chaotic, increasingly unhinged, and increasingly detached from, well, any semblance of reality. I’d say, “how have the mighty fallen.” But I don’t glorify folks like this to begin with, for one. For two, it’s just straight up tragic.
Brown’s spiraling toward doom seems to not only be tragically emblematic of the same phenomenon in the NFL itself, but also in Donald Trump’s campaign. Sure, we could blame the chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE– a disease that is in many ways poorly understood, but well understood to be a catastrophic problem- has been identified in as much as 99% of the brains of former NFL players that have been studied. Absolutely bonkers. The problem is that, while it’s easy to identify in autopsies, it’s harder to definitively figure out ante mortem, if you will– that is, while the person is still living. Certainly, the former president himself shows plenty of signs of cognitive decline himself, slurring words, mixing up names, and displaying increasingly paranoid behavior.
Both men get on stage and brag about how great they are, and how their critics are unfairly demonizing them for things they didn’t actually do wrong. Or, they did something wrong, but it’s not their fault. The parallel of two men who have made a lot of money, lost it all, and been accused of sexual assault on a number of occasions– it’s equal parts absurd, troubling, and completely tragic.
