President Donald Trump grumbled that college football’s national title game was trying to steal his time in the headlines ahead of his inauguration last year, according to a scene from the documentary “Melania.”
The scene, that sports site Awful Annuncing marked after a clip from the film circulated on social media this month, it appears that Trump and the first lady discuss plans for the inauguration when he stops commenting on the College Football Playoff National Championship, which was scheduled for January 20, 2025.
“We’re competing in the championship game. How did that happen?” asked Trump, who recently claimed in the same interview that he has “a lot of good friends” in college football he asked questions on sports.
The title game, which usually takes place on a Monday evening in early to mid-January, happened to fall on the same day the president was scheduled to take the oath of office.
The date of the game was announced in May 2023, a time when Trump was leading a crowded field of Republican candidates and was more than a year away from the Republican Party selecting him as its candidate for president.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
In the “Melania” scene, Trump continued to claim that presidents “have always had” an Inauguration Day for “hundreds of years,” when an aide, who turned out to be his event producer Justin Caporale, told him off-camera that he wasn’t sure why the game was scheduled that night.
(Note: Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to take the oath of office in January in 1937, following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. 20th Amendment. Previously, inaugurations were regularly held in March, with the notable exception of George Washington’s swearing-in in 1789.)
“So they’re having a game…” Trump told the aide as he and the first lady went over the day’s schedule.
“We work extremely closely with the networks,” the assistant replied.
“I know, but why did they have to put the national championship on the agenda at the same time?” Trump asked.
“Unclear,” the assistant replied.
“They probably did it on purpose,” he concluded.
