Palm Beach (US): President Donald Trump used a Super Bowl pregame interview to rail against Democrats, accusing them of hatred and offering schoolyard insults about his potential 2020 rivals.
"I see the hatred. ... They don't care about fairness, they don't care about lying," Trump said in a taped interview with Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity, which aired on Fox hours before sports' biggest night of the year.
But Trump's Super Bowl night may best be remembered by an errant -- now deleted tweet -- congratulating the state of Kansas and not mentioning Missouri, where the game was played at Missouri-based Arrowhead Stadium, for the Kansas City Chiefs' win.
Trump spent his weekend in Florida as most of the political world has been focused on Iowa, where Democrats on Monday will cast their first votes to choose the party's nominee. Prompted by Hannity, Trump went through most of the major candidates one by one, deriding "Sleepy Joe" Biden, the former vice president, accusing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren of telling "fairy tales", and labelling Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, as "a communist", even though he's not.
But Trump seemed most preoccupied by the candidates who has chosen to skip the early-voting sates: Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who has been blanketing the airwaves with anti-Trump ads.
The president's campaign and Bloomberg's ran dueling, multimillion-dollar ads during Sunday night's game, with both spending an estimated USD 10 million for 60 seconds of air time, which Trump used to purchase two 30-second spots.
Trump's first featured the story of Alice Marie Johnson, a nonviolent drug offender whose life sentence Trump commuted after reality TV star Kim Kardashian West championed her case.
The ad showed footage of the emotional moment when Johnson was released from prison and reunited with her family. "My heart is just bursting with gratitude," she tells the camera. "I want to thank President Donald John Trump. Hallelujah!" "Thanks to President Trump, people like Alice are getting a second chance," the ad's text reads, adding: "Politicians talk about criminal justice reform. President Trump got it done."
A second Trump ad which ran after the game had ended, instead of during the game as his campaign had said argued that, "Under President Trump, America is stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before." Bloomberg, whose spot was scheduled to air during the second half of the game, also chose an emotional subject, featuring a grieving mother who lost her son to gun violence. George Kemp Jr, who dreamed of one day playing in the NFL, was only 20 when he was fatally shot in 2013.
Bloomberg is a longtime backer of what he calls commonsense gun legislation and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars since his tenure as New York mayor to combat gun violence.
In the Fox interview, Trump mocked Bloomberg's height and accused him of making a special request for a box to stand on if he qualifies for future presidential debates. Bloomberg's campaign denies that is the case.