TRUMP IS GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL — AND USA TODAY’S “RACE AND INEQUALITY EDITOR” IS BIG MAD: Donald Trump is going to the Super Bowl — and ruining one of America’s best days.

Ahhh, the Super Bowl. Where families gather to watch the big game. Eat lots of food. Drink some. Party a little. Get together with friends to laugh, chill, hang out. It’s one of the few moments, the extremely few, few moments, where Americans genuinely come together.

We put aside politics. We put aside our differences. We take part in a great American tradition. It’s actually pretty cool. Well, it was. Because now President Donald Trump is attending the game.

Punchbowl News was the first to report that Trump will attend Super Bowl 59 between Philadelphia and Kansas City in New Orleans. So the most divisive president of our lifetime is attending a game that often serves as a genuine moment of unity. Trump soils everything. Now, he’s doing the same to the biggest game of the year.

The fact Trump will be at the same game as someone as thoughtful as Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts is playing in, is a remarkable contradiction. This week, Hurts spoke about the evolution of the Black quarterback, and how he doesn’t take this moment lightly, where two Black quarterbacks are again playing in the Super Bowl. It’s the kind of thoughtfulness we’ve come to expect from him; that kind of depth Trump doesn’t possess.

Yeah, it’s not like the guy ever owned a professional football team himself. Oh wait:

A year ago, NBC ran the following bit of gaslighting about Biden: Biden is skipping a Super Bowl interview. His advisers say it’s part of the plan.

For the second year in a row, President Joe Biden is passing on the opportunity to sit down for a Super Bowl interview that could reach millions of Americans on Sunday — a move his advisers say is part of their larger communication strategy.

So Biden couldn’t even do a TV interview before the game his last two years in office, let alone appear there in person. In contrast, according to CBS, Trump will be the “first sitting president to attend NFL’s biggest game.”

Related: “NFL to remove ‘End Racism’ messaging in end zone ahead of Super Bowl: Sources,” and the New York Times is almost as angry at that prospect as USA Today is about Trump appearing at the game:

At his annual Super Bowl news conference Monday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell strongly supported the league’s policies designed to promote diversity at the club-employment level and said they would continue.

But during Super Bowl LIX, and with President Donald Trump apparently planning to attend on Sunday, the NFL might be making another kind of statement on the Caesars Superdome field itself. According to two league sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions, league officials recently changed one of the slogans expected to be stenciled in the back of an end zone from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.”

The game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles will mark the first time since February 2021 that “End Racism” is not included as a message in the back of a Super Bowl end zone.

The switch, conveyed internally to high-level employees earlier this week, could be perceived as a nod to the current political climate. Following the lead of Trump, who was inaugurated last month, many corporations and institutions are abandoning their diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Goodell did not follow suit when asked about the league’s policies on Monday, saying he was “proud” of the league’s diversity efforts.

“We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League,” Goodell said. “And we’re going to continue those efforts, because we’ve not only convinced ourselves we’ve proven it to ourselves — it does make the NFL better.”

Regarding that last paragraph, Roger Goodell morphed into Howell Raines so slowly, I hardly even noticed. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2003:

Diversity is another of those words we imbue with all nobility and goodness without question or reservation. And that’s nonsense. If diversity were always and everywhere good we would be clamoring for more midgets in the NBA. We would demand that mobsters get jobs at the FBI and we would consider it a grave problem that not enough blind men — and women! — were applying to be crossing guards, snipers, and surgeons.

I think the FBI may have taken that comment a bit too literally, based on their actions of the last eight or nine years…