VERY CONVINCING

No One Is Buying Super Bowl MVP’s Excuse for Snubbing Trump

Jalen Hurts appeared to be taking a page out of Michelle Obama’s playbook.

Jalen Hurts, the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback who went viral for snubbing a reporter’s question about his team’s White House visit, has finally offered up an excuse for his now-confirmed absence—and the internet is having a field day with it.

According to NBC News, Hurts and “other players who can’t attend” the White House visit cited “scheduling conflicts” on Monday. The vague excuse comes just after Hurts only replied “Umm…” and looked away when he was asked whether he’d be meeting up with Donald Trump to celebrate the Eagles’ Super Bowl win.

The customary visit is a longstanding tradition, only interrupted since 1980 by the same team in 2018, when several players vowed to boycott the visit before Trump rescinded the offer.

Hurts, who joined the team in 2020 didn’t endorse a candidate for president in 2024, but he sang the praises of Barack Obama in October just as the former president was campaigning for Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris.

Without trying to endear himself to both sides of the political spectrum, like his Super Bowl opponents Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes did before the big game, Hurts has become an internet darling for seeming to say plenty without saying anything at all when it comes to his politics.

His “scheduling conflicts” excuse after his viral Time100 moment last week only fueled the admiration among fans.

One person suggested Hurts had “Don’t go to meeting with racist and fascist” on his calendar during the Eagles’ visit. Another likened his so-called “conflict” to Michelle Obama’s decision not to attend Trump’s inauguration, writing, “Both Jalen Hurts and Michelle Obama had ‘scheduling conflicts’ and I love that about them.”

Others opined that if Hurts wasn’t attending out of protest, that he wasn’t “able” to say so publicly: “If it’s scheduling conflicts, totally fine. If it’s not, [players] should be afforded that same right of disagreement or based off their own morality,” wrote journalist Jemele Hill on X.

Hurts’ perceived objection to chatting it up with Trump comes just as his Eagles teammate Saquon Barkley tries to fend off backlash to his chumming up with the president Sunday ahead of the team’s official visit. Barkley posted to X Monday that he decided to visit the White House because he “respects the office” and pointed out that he just “golfed with Obama not too long ago.”

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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