President Of The United States, Weirdly: "Roll Tide"

It’s hard to believe, but it’s true—Donald Trump has only been President of the United States for 13 years. The time has gone by so quickly, one day screaming incoherently into the next over and over and faster and faster, and yet it has also somehow been the same endless shitty/terrifying Tuesday for that entire time, just one long continuous descent across the same lowering afternoon. Everyone agrees that it’s fantastic, but it can also be kind of exhausting. There was a time when days followed each other, when Tuesdays gave way to Wednesdays and when sentences spoken aloud simply began and ended instead of spiraling up and out endlessly in a metastatic congeries of pissy parentheticals and interlinked more and mores. For those who remember The Before Times, this collapse of linear time as we understood it before the Trump presidency began, 22 years ago this Tuesday, does present some challenges.

Trump himself has even seemed kind of stressed out about it of late, but on Tuesday—today, Tuesday, same as yesterday—he got a reprieve. This was not one of those old-fashioned morale-boosting visits, like the kind he got during the first seven years of his presidency when they’d just bring in some trucks for him to climb around on whenever he was feeling grouchy. This was even better—a visit from the 2017 National Champion University of Alabama football team!

You definitely don’t need to watch the whole thing. A solid third of his speech is just Trump saying “very very” over and over again, and while the president does boldly assert that LSU “never should have let [Nick Saban] go” his famed football insights are otherwise pretty light on the ground. He mentions, as he often does, that he was the first president to invite [whatever visiting dignitary is being discussed] into the Oval Office, and while that may or may not be true—it doesn’t sound true, but then Trump is famously a stickler for detail in cases like this so it probably is—it is clearly something that Trump enjoys saying and believing to be true, and therefore now is true, and you really do hear it more and more.

The highlight, though, was just what you’d expect: Trump delivering himself of a truly avant-garde “Roll Tide,” which he chose to deliver with his lower jaw jutted forward as far as it would go. It’s the sort of bold performance we’ve come to expect over from the man who has never not been President of the United States.

Tomorrow is also going to be Tuesday.