On Wednesday, this time because someone asked him to, Donald Trump weighed in once more on the Deflategate scandal, calling the N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell's decision to reject an appeal and uphold the league's four-game suspension of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady "shocking" and "a disgrace." Back in May, after the report from a multi-million-dollar investigation commissioned by the league stated that it was "more probable than not" that Brady was "at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities ... involving the release of air from Patriots game balls," Trump offered his full support of Brady, and suggested that he should "sue the hell out of the NFL." This week, Trump was still backing the quarterback—"I know him so well, he's such a high-quality guy"—even in light of news, highlighted by the commissioner in his rejection of the appeal, that Brady had asked an assistant to destroy a cell phone that may have contained text messages pertinent to the investigation. (Brady has said that destroying old phones is simply part of his normal upgrade m.o., in this instance from a Samsung to an iPhone 6, not evidence of some kind of cover-up scheme.) Trump also took a moment to endorse himself, perhaps forgetting that he is ostensibly campaigning for a higher office: "If Trump were commissioner it would have been wrapped up in a week."
It seems safe to say that, as with many of the issues he addresses, Trump has no idea what he is talking about—that he has no special information about the specifics of the investigation, nor any unique insight into the mind or moral nature of Tom Brady. But whereas a similar lack of knowledge disqualifies him from being taken seriously on subjects like immigration or taxation, on Deflategate, his passionately intense ignorance is a perfect fit. When it comes to this six-month pseudo-event, in which the basic facts of the case remain as murky today as they were in January, we are all Donald Trump—free to speculate, bloviate, defend, opine, scold, presume, or scorn depending on whatever whims, innate prejudices, or gut feelings might persuade us. Deflategate is less a conventional scandal—with a narrative leading from crime to cover-up to revelation—than a swirling, interminable, self-sustaining opinion storm in which the actual truth, not revealing itself in a timely manner, becomes largely beside the point. The most honest position at this point for nearly every person in America, from writers with bylines to commenters with usernames, would be, when asked what they think happened to those footballs in January, to say that most un-Trumpian thing: I don't know.
The N.F.L. doesn't know. The report of that months-long investigation, conducted by the attorney Ted Wells, concluded that it was more probable than not that a pair of Patriots employees, John Jastremski and Jim McNally, conspired to let air out of the footballs before the start of the Patriots' playoff game against the Colts, in January; that McNally, who identified himself in a text message with Jastremski as "the deflator," had likely done the deflating in a private bathroom before taking the balls to the field; and that it was likely that Tom Brady, who had a flurry of conversations and text exchanges with Jastremski after news of the scandal broke, at least knew about the plan. The report did not specify exactly how McNally let the air out, nor did it produce any specific instruction from either Jastremski or Brady for him to do it. Did the Patriots tamper with the footballs? Did Brady know about it? The Wells report believed so, and, based on that report, the N.F.L. fined the Patriots, stripped the team of two draft picks, and suspended Brady for the first four games of the 2015 season.
This week, in announcing that he had rejected Brady's appeal, Goodell described Brady's decision to have his assistant destroy the cellphone as "very troubling," and cited this as further evidence that Brady was not coöperating with the investigation. Brady's own testimony, according to Goodell, was not credible, and the missing phone was proof that he had something to hide. Yet this new morsel, as headline-grabbing as it was, didn't get us any closer to knowing the central facts about the footballs, which, in as much as any of this matters at all, is the whole point.
Tom Brady says that he doesn't know anything about the footballs either. In a Facebook post on Wednesday morning, sounding more and more like one of those desperate victims in a government-conspiracy movie, who's been framed for some crime and can't get anyone to listen to him, Brady wrote, "Neither I, nor any equipment person, did anything of which we have been accused." (This was an improvement on his first stab at self-defense, in January, when he said simply that he had "no knowledge of anything.") He explained that he often destroyed old cell phones, and pointed out that he had handed other information about his digital correspondence over to investigators, despite the fact that he was under no legal obligation to so do. The Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, sounded equally frustrated and bewildered by Goodell's decision, saying, at a press conference on Wednesday, "For reasons that I cannot comprehend, there are those in the league office who are more determined to prove that they were right rather than admit any culpability of their own or take any responsibility for the initiation of a process and ensuing investigation that was flawed." Kraft also argued that "the league still has no hard evidence of anybody doing anything to tamper with the P.S.I. levels of footballs."
The N.F.L. doesn't know exactly who did what to a bunch of footballs in January. Tom Brady insists that he doesn't know. The Patriots say that they don't know. Donald Trump definitely doesn't know. I don't know. You don't know. This, half a year from the urgent early days of the scandal, is deeply unsatisfying. In the digital present, we've come to expect that cover-ups don't last, that the truth will out, usually sooner rather than later. The Wells investigation was supposed to have found a so-called "smoking gun." Roger Goodell, in drawing out the punishment process and negotiating with Brady's lawyers for a reduced suspension, was supposed to have leaned on Brady hard enough to get him to confess or issue an apology. Or else Goodell himself was supposed to have capitulated by now, admitting that the league didn't have enough hard evidence to punish Brady. John Jastremski and Jim McNally were supposed to have called in to Boston sports radio and spilled the beans. Instead, Deflategate seems to be dwindling in its last act. Opinions on the case, hitting each other back and forth in every Web venue that hosts them, are expressions more of faith—the Patriots are evil, Roger Goodell is inept, Tom Brady is a hero—than of reason. As it stands, and has stood, Deflategate is a kind of old-fashioned sports argument, devoid of statistics or research or indisputable science—a throwback barroom debate.
Maybe the N.F.L. wants it to stay that way. That six months have passed without firm resolution only makes Deflategate seem more and more like an embarrassing exercise in mass sports hysteria. The language that the central figures have used this week—Goodell finds events "very troubling," Brady is "disappointed," Kraft is "very sad"—is a reminder that we've mostly confused for a national story what is, at its heart, more like a family feud, being fought amongst members of a very rich family.
Now the case is going to court: the N.F.L. filed a suit against the players' union in New York, and the union filed its own case against the league in a historically labor-friendly federal court in Minnesota. (It looks as if the New York case will be the one going forward.) If the legal issues are not resolved before September, perhaps the most fitting next step in Deflategate would be a judge issuing an injunction on the suspension while the legal process plays out, and Brady showing up for the season opener as if, for a while more at least, nothing really happened.
