Donald Trump plans to be back at Madison Square Garden in New York to watch Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs.
Bexar County to pay $300K to detention applicant whose job offer was pulled over wife’s La Santa Muerte altarFILE - Actor Elliott Gould, left, joins Donald Trump , center, and Marla Maples at courtside during an NBA basketball game between the Phoenix Suns and the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, in New York, March 6, 1991.
FILE - Donald Trump, right, talks to an unidentified man from the stands at Madison Square Garden during the New York Knicks game against the Dallas Mavericks on Jan. 11, 2006, in New York. FILE - President Donald Trump watches Derrick Lewis fight Blagoy Ivanov, right, at UFC 244 at Madison Square Garden, Nov. 2, 2019, in New York.
FILE - Actor Elliott Gould, left, joins Donald Trump, center, and Marla Maples at courtside during an NBA basketball game between the Phoenix Suns and the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, in New York, March 6, 1991. was just another celebrity sitting courtside at New York Knicks games.
He was famous, but not yet flanked by Secret Service agents or defined by the politics that have left him deeply unpopular in his hometown.as president to cheer for them in Game 3 of the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night. Invited by Knicks owner James Dolan, he will be the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.
The Knicks are seeking their first championship since 1973, when Trump was 26 and a relative newcomer to the family real estate business that vaulted him to wealth and fame. Two years after that triumph, the team’s owners at the time hired him as a consultant as they looked to sell the arena. , he will host a UFC fight on White House grounds.
Trump also has expressed interest in attending soccer's World Cup, which kicks off this week across the United States, Mexico and Canada. Trump is an avid sports fan, but the affinity he professes for the Knicks is different. It speaks to the Republican president’s identity as a New Yorker and harkens to a bygone era where a front-row seat at a Knicks game was a chance for him and other boldface names to see and be seen.
In a city whose wealthy gatekeepers largely turned their noses at Trump's brash personality and playboy image in the 1990s and 2000s, the Garden’s Celebrity Row was one club where he felt at home.
“I’ve been a Knick fan for a long time,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week, a day after New York rallied to win Game 1. “I watched that end of the game and they were dominant — really amazing. ” After another win Friday in San Antonio, the Knicks head home with a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series.
They have won a remarkable 13 straight playoff games and last lost on April 23, uniting the city in a way unseen since the Knicks went to the NBA Finals twice in the 1990s. Enter Trump. He returns to the Knicks zeitgeist not as the tabloid curiosity who once sat shoulder to shoulder with the late John F. Kennedy Jr. at a game in 1999, but as a president who is disliked by a majority of the city's Democratic voters.
Trump, who gave up his lifelong New York residency for Florida in 2019, is making his first trip to New York City since he spoke at the United Nations in September. In 2024, he went on trial in the city and wasKnicks fans, though, do not seem to be concerned so much with his politics, but that his attendance — and the hoopla accompanying it — could mess up the team’s momentum.
The Knicks said people going to the game “Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing? ” U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, an avid Knicks fan and the House Democratic leader, told CNN.
“Like, literally, the Knicks haven’t been in the NBA finals for 27 years. The city is trying to celebrate this. We’ve embraced this team, and this guy has to inject himself. ” Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who struck up a cordial relationship with Trump after the two met in November, was more inviting.
“We’re excited to welcome anyone and everyone who’s rooting for the Knicks in this moment," said Mamdani, who will also be at the game — albeit, not with Trump. Last week, as Trump began floating the idea of attending a game, New York magazine published an article, “Is Trump Really a Knicks Fan? An Investigation.
” The story, filled with pictures of Trump at Knicks games from 1991 to 2014, described him as a “textbook example of a celebrity bandwagon fan.
"“Before he ever ran for office, he was a big Knicks fan,” Silver told reporters last week. “I’ve been with the league for a long time. I was there at many Knicks games with him in the old days.
”His affiliation with the team — at least in the public record — dates to 1975 when he acted as a real estate adviser to the then-owners of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, who were looking to sell the building known in a bit of Trump-style branding as “The World’s Most Famous Arena.
" Trump claimed to reporters at the time that two groups of “Arab oil interests” were interested in paying $50 million to $75 million. But the arena’s leadership passed on the idea, saying it was “not conceivable” to make such a deal during the Middle East oil crisis raging at the time.
By the time they rebounded in the 1990s, Trump was front and center, taking his then-wife Marla Maples to Game 3 of the NBA Finals in 1994 and his current wife, first lady Melania Trump, to Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1999. In between, he added to his Knicks fan bona fides with a cameo in the Knicks-themed Whoopi Goldberg film “Eddie” in 1996.
Back then, Trump was a more of a mythic figure than a consequential one, known as much for the women he dated and married as the buildings he built. But just as those Knicks came up short in the NBA Finals against Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets and David Robinson and the Spurs, Trump was running into problems of his own.
His business empire was in disarray after his casinos fell into financial trouble and his airline, Trump Shuttle, went out of business. Like the Knicks, Trump went into rebuilding mode and charted a new course: reality TV with NBC's “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice,” and then, politics. On a Knicks TV broadcast in 2010, he hinted at a possible presidential run.
That same year, as the Knicks struggled to recapture the magic of the 1990s, Trump recorded a video trying to persuade LeBron James to join the team. Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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