Bill Belichick and Donald Trump now are on good terms, but that apparently wasn’t the case a year ago.
Following the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the United States Capitol, the New England Patriots head coach declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump, who was in his final days as the United States President. A new book from New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns offers insight into the fallout from Belichick’s decision.
Martin and Burns interviewed Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in April of 2021. An excerpt from the book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” was published by Yahoo! Sports on Sunday.
Take a look:
Trump bragged that it was not only Republican politicians who had crawled back to his side after briefly rejecting him after January 6.
One of the rejections that had bothered him the most had come from Bill Belichick, the legendary coach of the New England Patriots who had declined Trump’s attempt to grant him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the immediate aftermath of the riot, it was just not possible for him to appear with Trump. Back then, Trump said, Belichick had “chickened out.” But get this, Trump confided: The coach had just a week earlier been playing golf at Trump’s nearby course. Trump had run into him there on the second-to-last hole. “He came up to me on the seventeenth,” the former commander-in-chief recounted with relish.
Stretching credulity for anyone familiar with Belichick’s gruff persona, Trump claimed: “He hugged me and kissed me.”
To clarify: Belichick was golfing at Mar-a-Lago in March of 2021 — not the week after the Jan. 6 attack.
Belichick’s relationship with Trump is well-documented. He supported then-candidate Trump before the 2016 United States presidential election, something that reportedly angered some of his players.
The 69-year-old Belichick was spotted at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday ahead of Super Bowl LVI and even posed for a photo with former Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer. It’s unclear whether Trump was at his lavish Palm Beach, Fla., resort at the time of Belichick’s visit.
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