The Tampa Bay Buccaneers visited the White House Tuesday, their star quarterback made some bad jokes during his comments, and now headlines are screaming: “Tom Brady Pokes at Trump’s False Election Claims in White House Visit.”

Brady’s comments certainly can be taken that way, but there could be another explanation as well.

Tom Brady: “Not a lot of people think that we could have won and in fact, I think 40% of the people still don’t think we won."

Biden: “I understand that” https://t.co/zWVPjevyq4 pic.twitter.com/EO3UcSBnrn

— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) July 20, 2021

Brady said:

It didn’t look great there at one point. We were 7-and-5, struggling a little bit, as the President alluded to, but we found our rhythm. We got on a roll. Not a lot of people think that we could have won. In fact, I think about 40 percent of the people still don’t think we won.

Biden, grinning like a teenage girl whose boy band crush was finally paying attention to her, chimed in, “I understand that!”

Brady continued:

Do you understand that, Mr. President? And personally, it’s nice for me to be back here. We had a game in Chicago where I forgot what down it was. I lost track of one down in 21 years of playing, and they started calling me Sleepy Tom. Why would they do that to me?

Obviously, that was a reference to Trump calling Biden “Sleepy Joe.” And clearly, Brady’s first comment referred to a percentage of people who believe that Trump won the election – a belief that is being bolstered thanks to the ongoing audits in Georgia and Arizona. But is it really throwing shade at Trump, or was Brady testing out his stand-up comedy chops?

As many of us remember, Brady and Trump have been friends for years, going back to the early 2000s. The two played golf together and Brady served as a judge in the Miss Universe Pageant, and the press lost their minds when a MAGA hat was seen in Brady’s locker in 2015.

So did everyone just choose to collectively forget the MAGA hat in Tom Brady’s locker or what pic.twitter.com/bCfgLStRwO

— maybe: clare (@clur19) February 8, 2021

Brady never publicly endorsed Trump’s campaigns but told numerous outlets that he supports Trump as a friend but didn’t always agree with him and that he didn’t want to get into any political discussions:

“I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do. You have a lot of friends in your life. I think there are things that are based in your own dealings with someone that is a personal dealing, not a public dealing. Because you have personal experiences.”

Imagine that. If those are still his feelings, Tom Brady is doing life right, being able to separate political disagreements from friendship.

Are those still his feelings? Despite Brady’s comments today, it’s quite possible that the two are still friends. According to a February 2021 article, Brady hasn’t said they’re not friends, and as recently as August 2020 he told Howard Stern that while they were still friends the “political aspect…was uncomfortable” for him and that he wouldn’t undo the friendship.

Regardless, the children in the Never Trump and the socialist camps (but I repeat myself) are having a field day believing that Trump’s “man crush” is rejecting him and that it’s creating the worst day of Trump’s life. I normally wouldn’t reward such inanity with a link, but from a psychological point of view, this fanfiction/TDS porn at NY Mag Intelligencer is a fascinating read.