By Joseph Ax
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – Donald Trump on Sunday will become the first sitting U.S. president to attend a Super Bowl – but the former reality television star has a long and complicated history with the sport of football.
During his first term as president, Trump feuded with the National Football League after Black players began kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.
Perhaps most infamously, Trump bought into the upstart United States Football League in the 1980s and sought to compete directly with the NFL, a move widely seen as helping to doom the nascent league.
Trump, then a New York real estate developer, purchased the USFL’s New Jersey Generals in 1983.
The USFL had launched the year before as a rollicking alternative to the more staid NFL, with games played in the spring and touchdown celebrations encouraged. The league had scored an enormous coup when Herschel Walker, who had won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player, signed with the Generals rather than pursue an NFL career.
Soon after buying the team, Trump began advocating to move the league’s schedule to the fall and go head-to-head with the NFL, according to author Jeff Pearlman’s book about the league, “Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL.”
Trump’s ultimate goal, Pearlman said in an interview on Friday, was to own an NFL franchise in New York City, and he viewed the USFL as the fastest path there, either by beating the NFL or forcing a merger.
Trump eventually led a USFL antitrust lawsuit against the NFL. The USFL won the case at trial, but it was a Pyrrhic victory – the jury awarded a single dollar in damages.
The USFL canceled its 1986 season days later, effectively ending its operations forever.
“He spearheaded the demise of that league,” Pearlman said.
In a 2009 documentary, Trump claimed the USFL would have failed even sooner without him.
Trump backed Walker in his unsuccessful run for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia in 2022. In December, Trump nominated him to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas.
KNEELING CONTROVERSY
Trump has expressed interest in buying an NFL team on numerous occasions, including in 2014, when he unsuccessfully offered $1 billion for the Buffalo Bills.
His former fixer, Michael Cohen, testified to Congress that Trump inflated his net worth on financial statements as part of that bid, an episode the New York attorney general’s case investigated in its sprawling alleged fraud case against Trump’s company.
A New York judge found him liable in 2023 for manipulating his net worth and ordered him to pay $454 million in damages. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and is appealing the judgment.
In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who is Black, began kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before games to call attention to police brutality and racial inequality, a practice that spread to dozens of other players.
In September 2017, Trump, then in his first year in office, told a crowd that any player who knelt was a “son of a bitch” and should be “fired.”
Trump spent weeks attacking the NFL and its commissioner, Roger Goodell, claiming that kneeling players were disrespecting the U.S. flag and the military.
In 2018, NFL team owners approved a new rule that required players to stand if on the sideline or stay in the locker room during the anthem.
Two years later, after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police set off nationwide protests, Goodell issued an apology, saying the league was wrong not to listen to players sooner.
The league faced criticism this week over its decision to emblazon the slogan “Choose Love” behind one end zone for Sunday’s game instead of the “End Racism” message chosen for recent Super Bowls.
Critics speculated the decision was a nod to Trump, who has moved to end diversity programs across the federal government and private sector. An NFL spokesperson denied any link, saying instead it was in response to recent tragedies, including the California wildfires, the Washington plane crash and the New Year’s Day truck attack in New Orleans just a mile from the Superdome, where the game will take place.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Additional reporting by Amy Tennery; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Diane Craft)
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