Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine, has a smart piece on the Super Bowl and how it’s trying to keep the outside world outside and how the Super Bowl itself is an escape from the outside world.

The Super Bowl is the most American of unifying traditions. But it’s happening with the country in a nearly unprecedented state of confusion — not even the people in charge seem to know who’s in charge — when nothing is unifying and tradition lasts as long as you can rip the copper wiring out of the walls. What does a country do when it is transmogrifying itself into something more unrecognizable by the second? Well, it does the one thing it has always done together: It watches the Super Bowl and pretends that everything is just fine.

That is to say, it handles it the New Orleans way. The New Year’s terrorist attack was only 38 days ago, yet it seemingly happened several decades in the past, or in a different universe. But it didn’t. It happened in the same area where I had dinner last night and saw countless colleagues, like I do every year at the Super Bowl, which is as close to a national sportswriter convention as anything in the business. It happened in New Orleans, and in America. But so much has shifted since then, so much will continue to shift, that lingering too long on one incident, one more speck of random violence in an ever-elevating spate of them, can’t help but leave you in the past. It all morphs together anyway. The terrorist truck driver, the plane crash, the January 6 pardons, the California fires, the Luka Dončić trade, some techie teenager bro with your Social Security number — it’s just one thing after another.

Combined, they just give more impetus to escape, to turn your mind off, to watch football, to pretend, for three hours, like none of this is happening. It can only work for so long. The illusion can never last. But that’s the promise of the Super Bowl, and of the city that is hosting this year’s game. This is what sports has always done. I’m not sure it’s ever tried to do it harder than it has this week in New Orleans. I suspect it will still not be enough. But New Orleans, and the Super Bowl, will do its best regardless. If you keep the party going and make sure not to look too far in any direction, you can almost convince yourself everything is fine.

I would not cut to Trump in his suite at the Super Bowl at any point in the game. Then again, I wouldn’t cut to Taylor Swift, either.