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The pandemic continues to spread out of control throughout virtually the entire country, at a scale so vast that it would defy contact-tracing efforts even if such efforts were underway, which they are not. Since that Saturday, Mertz and his backup tested positive for COVID-19, as did an increasing number of their teammates and coaches Wisconsin’s scheduled game against Nebraska was canceled the mandated 21-day recovery and testing protocol that the Big Ten instituted back in September is under scrutiny after a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that the risk of myocarditis appears lower than initially feared on Tuesday, a second Badgers game, this Saturday against Purdue, was canceled as the number of cases in the program rose to 27, including head coach Paul Chryst.
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Things change very quickly without ever somehow managing to change at all. At the end of the long chain of little collapses that made Trump president and brought us to this moment, this is the national pandemic response in microcosm. All that was left was for other people to put his whim into action, wait to see how it all would fail and who it would hurt, and then find ways to lay blame for it. There stopped being anything to care about once he’d made his point, whatever it was. As far as he was concerned, the story was over. In this little blobule of anti-rhetoric, you can see the Big Ten’s return reach the end of its transition from an ostensibly crowd-pleasing campaign gambit targeted at voters in the midwest into something smaller and more identifiably Trumpy-something done more or less out of spite, to prove an opaque point to some rival or other, and for which he would now permit himself to be thanked. Me! And I said, ‘What the hell do I have to do with it?'”Īnd that’s the whole story, at least as it exists on YouTube, where Trump’s campaign put it. But they put out an ad, or something, that I was responsible for canceling Big Ten football. “Right? Sleepy Joe Biden, when he heard they canceled the season, the Big Ten, I was working on China and other things so if you don’t mind I didn’t know too much about it. And you know how that happened,” he continues, silencing cheers with a flutter of his leather-gloved hands. “I wouldn’t want to come to one of these places if you lost the game,” Trump said, to ruffles of the strained laughter he draws from his fans at moments when he seems to be drifting towards wrestling heel-style trash talk about whatever electorally significant but objectively podunk burg in which he’s found himself.īut Trump recovered, doing the gesture in which he appears to be imitating a cat catching a large nerf ball and honking, “By the way just so you know I got the Big Ten back. “Congratulations.” A day earlier, the Badgers had thumped the University of Illinois behind a brilliant performance from redshirt freshman Graham Mertz, who completed all but one of the 21 passes he threw and accounted for five touchdowns. “By the way, we got you your football,” Trump said again the Saturday before last, this time at a rally in Wisconsin. In time, every story Trump tells becomes this story. It is one in which he personally triumphs because of how brave he was, despite everyone telling him he was crazy and then not giving him any credit afterwards it’s about him. The balance of every story changes, tilting away from what might or might not have actually happened-the Big Ten has repeatedly said that it never sought, and at any rate never received, any federal assistance related to starting its football season, and the White House has mostly characterized Trump’s effort as Making Lots Of Phone Calls-and more in the direction of the type of story that Trump most likes to tell. This is the way it usually works with Trump over a sufficiently long timeframe. The people of Ohio are very proud of me.” As with everything else the president has ever said, he just kept on saying it, amping up his own foresight and heroism along the way as the spirit moved him.
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“I’m the one that brought back football, by the way,” Donald Trump said during the first presidential debate, as part of an answer that initially appeared to be headed someplace else.
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