How football foreshadowed Trump's assault on democracy

How football foreshadowed Trump’s

Donald Trump has shown time and again that he’s a human toxic waste dump, sabotaging everything he touches. His six bankruptcies are proof of that.

But one of his biggest failures foreshadowed his current attempted takedown of the Republican Party — and the nation — almost perfectly. Unfortunately, it happened 35 years ago, so a lot of people have forgotten it, and a lot more weren’t even paying attention at the time. Even those of us who were (myself included) likely failed to foresee how closely Trump’s actions then would mirror his destructive behavior now.

He hasn’t changed. Not one bit.

US(e)F(u)L comparison

Trump wasn’t always a Republican, and he wasn’t a founding member of the United States Football League, either. In fact, it far predated him. Founder David Dixon had first proposed the spring football league way back in 1966, but had shelved the idea when the NFL granted him and partner John Mecom a franchise in New Orleans (the Saints), which started playing the following year.

Dixon later sold his share of the Saints, and revived the spring football concept in 1980, and the USFL kicked off in 1983. But several team owners didn’t share Dixon’s vision of maintaining cost controls that would ensure the league’s financial stability, deciding instead to spend big bucks for “name” players. It was the same strategy that had helped sink the World Football League a decade earlier, but the new owners had short memories — just as the American public has a short memory concerning Trump.

Trump was one of those big-spenders. He was supposed to be one of the league’s 12 founding owners, but he pulled out at the last minute to pursue a failed attempt to buy the NFL’s Baltimore Colts. That was always his ultimate goal: an NFL franchise. Trump, the developer, had never been satisfied working on properties in Brooklyn. Manhattan was the big time, and that’s where Trump wanted to be. Brooklyn was a means to an end for him, and so was the USFL.

Unfortunately for Trump, he wasn’t able to buy the Colts. The NFL didn’t want him, and he would hold a grudge for decades, exacting revenge as president by slamming the league for some players’ refusal to stand for the national anthem.

But when his drive to purchase the Colts fell short, he decided to revisit his decision to spurn the USFL. The team he’d been tabbed to run, the New Jersey Generals, had been taken over by Oklahoma oilman J. Walter Duncan, who made a splash by signing Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker, a running back from the University of Georgia.

Walker led the league in rushing, but the team went 6-12, and Duncan decided to sell.

Trump was right there waiting to pick up the ball — and take over the league.

Trump wasn’t the most successful owner in the USFL. He followed in Duncan’s footsteps and signed a second Heisman Trophy winner, Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie. But although the Generals posted winning records over the next two years, they failed to even win their division and lost in the first round of the playoffs the first year.

In terms of attendance, they ranked third in the league behind Jacksonville and Tampa Bay, which was by most accounts the USFL’s most successful franchise: The Bandits matched their strength at the gate with success on the field, where they posted winning records in each of their three seasons (although, like the Generals, they failed to win a playoff game).

The man who stood up to Trump

The Bandits were owned by Canadian businessman John F. Bassett, who — unlike Trump — wasn’t a novice when it came to pro sports. His father had owned the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts for years, and Bassett himself had owned the Birmingham Bulls of the World Hockey Association and the WFL’s Memphis Southmen.

Bassett was the USFL’s version of Mitt Romney. He didn’t like Trump and recognized the New York developer’s intentions weren’t consistent with the USFL’s mission statement. Trump wanted to move the league to the fall and compete directly with the NFL.

This was a fool’s errand. There was no way the USFL was equipped to compete with the NFL, either financially or on the field, and Bassett knew it. The only explanation was that Trump was using the league as leverage in his own efforts to force the NFL to accept the Generals as a new member, using a lawsuit as ammunition.

Irate, Bassett fired off a letter to Trump that contained the following rejoinder:

“While others may be able to let your insensitive and denigrating comments pass, I no longer will. You are bigger, younger, and stronger than I, which means I’ll have no regrets whatsoever punching you right in the mouth the next time an instance occurs where you personally scorn me, or anyone else, who does not happen to salute and dance to your tune.

“I really hope you don’t know that you are doing it, but you are not only damaging yourself with your associates, but alienating them as well. Think before you shoot and when you do fire, stick to the message without killing the messenger.”  

Bassett was the messenger then. Now, there are many: the media, Romney, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Bob Corker, Anthony Scaramucci, George Conway, James Mattis, John Kelly… The list is far too long to enumerate them all.

This letter could have been written three decades later by any number of Never Trumpers concerned that the then-president was driving the Republican Party and the nation of a cliff: killing messengers (on Twitter) who didn’t salute and dance to his tune.

But Trump cares as much about the GOP (and the United States) as he did about the USFL, which is to say, not at all. They were both, equally vehicles in his Machiavellian schemes to secure personal power. Nothing more. And he’d gladly burn both to the ground in his effort to maintain that power, which is exactly what he did with the USFL.

Different decade, same stupid strategy

Over Bassett’s objections, he persuaded other owners to follow him in his suicide mission to go head-to-head with the NFL and play in the fall, just as he would persuade Republican leaders to pursue a hopeless course and sacrifice their reputations by challenging the results of a free and fair elections.

He’d use the courts as leverage, once again futilely to the point of the absurd.

As of Jan. 6, Trump and his allies had filed 62 lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election, losing 61 of them. But his lawsuit against the NFL was, if possible, and even bigger debacle. He actually won his antitrust case against the league, which carried with it treble (triple) damages. But the jury awarded the USFL just $1, which became $3.

At that point, the USFL became one of many alternative pro sports leagues to call it quits: It collapsed immediately and didn’t play another season, and Trump’s Generals never became an NFL franchise: They vanished in a puff of smoke when the court case ended.

We can only hope that Trump’s political ambitions will do the same, but that’s probably wishful thinking. He kept trying to get into the NFL long after the USFL became a distant memory. He tried to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014, but the league approved the team’s sale to Terry and Kim Pegula instead.

Trump burned down the USFL on his way out, and he’s trying to do the same thing to American democracy.

He’s done a lot of damage, but so far, he hasn’t succeeded.

Let’s hope it stays that way.