Donald Trump became the first sitting US president to attend the Super Bowl, though he didn’t hang around for the whole show.
He left the game early and headed for the airport, by the time he was boarding Air Force One there was still an hour to go on the game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs – even though the result wasn’t much in doubt by then.
Speaking to LADbible, security expert Will Geddes explained why this is the sort of event Trump would leave early, saying it ‘didn’t come as a huge surprise’ that the US president wasn’t sticking around until the end.
Geddes explained that Trump attending the Super Bowl would require ‘massive secret service and additional security support to make sure that it could happen’ and he’d need to be gone ‘before the vast masses of people exiting the stadium would leave’.
At pretty much any stadium, some people are going to leave early to beat the traffic, but in a major security operation it’s pretty much a requirement.
“He’d have a clear exit to get out, the roads wouldn’t be so congested,” the security expert said of the reason why leaving early on is the safe choice.
“They would have planned for a variety of different extraction plans, not only by road, but potentially also by air. That’s not uncommon.
“One of the biggest problems you have with security is holding someone in an environment like that for any extended period, and if at the end of the game when the final whistle blows they would have to be held because you couldn’t take them out in the mass.”
Geddes said that security wise it would have been a choice between leaving the Super Bowl early, at which point Trump could still stream the game and keep up with it from a vehicle, or sticking around for the whole thing meaning he’d ‘probably stay there for a good few hours’ after it was over.
Caesars Superdome in New Orleans is surely a nice place to hold a sporting event, but the arena risks losing its appeal if you’d have to wait there for hours after everyone else has left.
He said: “The whole stadium has been evacuated, all the spectators have gone, you can move then or you leave early and those are really your only two options.”
Geddes compared the situation to famous actors arriving for their movie premieres, walking the red carpet and taking their seats in the cinema before walking out early through a prepared exit.
It’s no snub of the event, it’s the demands of security.
Getting Trump into the Super Bowl will have taken a lot of work, with Geddes telling LADbible ‘the planning would have been huge’ to pull it off.
He said: “They would have had snipers, no doubt in position in a variety of different areas, and you’ll have spotters.
“They would no doubt have people in in the crowd as well. You’d have human behavioural detectorists who would be basically watching people’s behaviour.
“They would have received it for a long time, worked with the stadium security for a long time to plan their visit.”
Having worked with stadiums for big sporting events before, the security expert said that they’d ‘know the entry points we’re bringing our principal in by.’
The ‘principal’, by the way, refers to the person you’re trying to protect, and everyone involved in looking after them would ‘have a pretty good idea where we’ll be and what time we’re going to be arriving’.
“We want to plan that journey management, but for someone as big as the president you would have people you know actually in the crowd watching to see if there’s any unusual behaviour,” he said.
At events like these where the security is so carefully planned, the principal might be told certain things were off the table, as the security expert said they’d ‘do our utmost to try and meet with their wishes’ but would sometimes have to make a call on what was safe to do and what wasn’t.
He said: “If the principal’s trying to leave or say, ‘You know what, I want to go down into the crowd’, or ‘I want to go and stand in the middle of the pitch’, we might be saying, ‘No, you can’t do that boss, that puts you into a line of sight of a bazillion different angles for a potential threat to materialise.'”
Geddes described the Super Bowl as an ‘absolute nightmare’ because of how big an event it was and how many people would be watching.
It all went off without a hitch at the Super Bowl, Trump was in, out and then heading back home while complaining about Taylor Swift on social media.
There was one seeming security blunder at the event, as one of Kendrick Lamar’s dancers pulled out flags of Sudan and Palestine and was on the pitch for quite a while before they were apprehended.
