“Really successful coach,” Trump said of Tuberville, whom he has strongly backed in the race against his former attorney general Jeff Sessions. “He beat Alabama, like six in a row, but we won’t even mention that. As he said … so, maybe we have Lou Saban … And he’s great, Lou Saban, what a great job he’s done.”
While Trump was correct in pointing out that Tuberville led Auburn to six consecutive victories over Alabama between 2002 and 2007, he may have referred to Lou Saban, the former Buffalo Bills head coach in the 1960s who died in 2009. Lou Saban did have a brief stint at the University of Miami, where he lost to Alabama and Bear Bryant in the 1970s.
In Saban’s sophomore year in Alabama, Crimson Tide beat the Auburn Tigers 36-0 in the 2008 Iron Bowl. Tuberville resigned days later.
Trump hosted Nick Saban and the Alabama football team at the White House in 2018 after he briefly attended the national championship in Atlanta. Last November, he sat in a box inside the Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa for the Alabama-LSU game.
The White House and Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Tuberville did not correct Trump during the call, according to a family source, in a move widely seen as a major misstep in a state that treasures college football.
Trump has met and spoken to Tuberville several times in the past few months, but personally he doesn’t know him well. During Monday night’s call, Trump said Tuberville would have a “hotline” to the Oval Office.
“We had the Jeff Sessions thing. We gave him a chance. He had no idea it could be as bad as it was, but he had no idea and just let it slip away,” Trump said.
Trump has backed his former attorney general’s opponent in the race, but Sessions has repeatedly highlighted that Trump backed two different candidates in the last special Senate election in Alabama. Both candidates lost, and a Democrat took the seat for the first time in nearly 30 years.
“As you know, Alabama is not taking orders from Washington,” Sessions said.
The mistake also comes days after Trump boasted that he had “passed” a cognitive test that “very recently” was taken at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The president has repeatedly cast doubt on former Vice President Joe Biden’s mental fitness in the run-up to the November election, but did not reveal when or why he took the test. The White House declined to provide additional details.
“In fact, I took one when, very recently, when, when it was, the radical left said: is it all there? Is it all there? And I proved it was there, because I got it to scare me. I passed the test,” Trump said. to Sean Hannity of Fox News.
Trump’s last confirmed cognitive evaluation was part of his 2018 physical exam, when the White House doctor said Trump requested to be tested. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment is a direct test of 30 questions that involves correctly drawing a clock and identifying animals like a camel.
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