The president’s obsession with television is well-documented. Having himself come from a career in the public eye that’s included stints as a reality television host, Trump has brought his obsession with television into the White House, for better or for worse. He often live-tweets Fox & Friends broadcasts, among other examples.
Now, one concerned interest is trying to use the president’s television obsession to enact possibly constructive change.
The president — in line with his long documented hatred of the media — declined to be interviewed ahead of the upcoming Super Bowl by NBC.
He was, notably, interviewed ahead of the Super Bowl last year — just by the now disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. That interview, like so many other public appearances of the president, yielded an array of incendiary sound bites, including the president’s comment that the U.S. is little better than Russia when it comes to issues of human rights. (He’s wrong.)
That is certainly not the only time that the president has equivocated on the issue of the Kremlin, with him routinely dismissing the idea that they meddled in our most recent presidential election — even though there is evidence — and also refusing to implement sanctions against the regime mandated by Congress.
This time around when it comes time for the Super Bowl, the president may be spending time at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he’s spent so much of his presidency already — at least, one Tennessee father is hoping that such is where the president has decided to spend his weekend.
That father, Steve Eimers, lost his then 17-year-old daughter in a fatal car crash in 2016 when a guardrail pierced her car door, killing her. Now, he wants to bring the president’s attention to the issue of faulty guardrails in the hope of getting the president to include fixing such a problem in his often mentioned infrastructure plan.
Trump mentioned this plan as recently as his State of the Union address last Tuesday evening to Congress.
Indeed, although the culmination of the plan remains to be seen, it’s one of the few issues that the president has been able to achieve a measure of bipartisan support on. Whether Trump is actually competent enough to turn that support into a productive plan remains to be seen.
In the ad, Eimers states:
‘President Trump, your concerns about guardrail spearing are legitimate. My daughter Hannah Eimers was fatally impaled by a defective Lindsay X-Lite guardrail end in Tennessee. I would love to talk to you about infrastructure investment, highway safety, and my concerns with the federal highway administration of the United States.’
Check out the video below. It includes apparent footage of the wreck that killed his daughter.
The ad is only slated to air on the Palm Beach area affiliate of NBC, costing Eimers $1,000 ahead of the game.
Whether or not the president is responsive to the message if he sees it remains to be seen. At his recent State of the Union address, he did tout the identities of numerous private individuals who he’d apparently personally gotten in touch with and brought as his guests, although there was an exploitative air at times, such as when he used the murder of two young girls to claim that immigrants pose some kind of broad threat.
Featured Image via NICHOLAS KAMM/ AFP/Getty Images
