The NFL season officially kicks off today 🏈 From our archives, here's a look back at how President Trump has turned a decadeslong grudge against the league into a centerpiece of his campaign’s culture war strategy.
In a kind of reprise from the ‘80s, Trump plus football equaled many, many headlines and inches of copy—not just in Buffalo, not just in New York, but all over the country. The tone, though, felt at times kind of ha-ha-very-funny.
“Just imagine the pregame speeches. ‘Win or you’re fired!’ a local sports columnist wrote—a reference to what had become his shockingly popular reality show catch phrase. “It might be just another Trump publicity ploy, like running for president or offering $5 million for proof Barack Obama was born on Mars,” offered one from Orlando—a reference to the racist conspiracy about the country’s first Black president that Trump had started to use to fuel his own political ascent. “Maybe,” added another one, from Arizona, “he’ll build the Bills a new stadium with a retractable comb-over top, assemble a team of cheerleaders called ‘Trump’s Exes’ and hire Rosie O’Donnell as an apprentice”—a reference to … his much-discussed hair, his record of marital failures and his penchant for petty celebrity feuds.“NFL ownership is the most exclusive club in the world. You have to be very rich, and you have to be someone that the other owners want to welcome into the club, and Donald Trump didn’t have a chance, ever,” Lockhart, the former NFL and Clinton administration spokesman, told me this month. Three-quarters of the owners, after all, have to approve any newcomer to their ranks—and with 32 teams, that’s 24 owners. “And the owners,” Lockhart continued, “want people who are like them, but they also want people who they think they can trust, and they think will bring value, so that the league will make more money. And they sort of looked at Trump as a joke.” I talked this week to a former NFL exec who talked to Trump that spring—“when he was, I say this word purposefully,trying to buy the Bills,” said this exec. “I very quickly felt like it was bullshit,” he told me. For starters, Trump didn’t seem to know he was going to need to put up 30 percent of the purchase price, which was expected to be $1 billion or up. “And he goes, ‘Oh, and you have to have that in cash?’” the exec recalled. “It was just obvious that he’d done nothing about it, he really didn’t know a thing, he hadn’t really thought anything through—and I was talking to him at a stage where that just made absolutely no sense.” His takeaway: “The fact that he didn’t have the resources and wasn’t a serious bidder is my conclusion from my direct conversation with him.” The American Flag is displayed on the field during the Nation Anthem before the start of a game between the Buffalo Bills and the Denver Broncos at New Era Field on November 24, 2019 in Orchard Park, New York. | Timothy T Ludwig/Getty ImagesNew York Daily News
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