Trump and the fall of the USFL

[Jersey in OKC]

NYT best sell author Jeff Pearlman interviews about Trump, the USFL, and the prescient parallel approach to politics today.

[kimbutgar]

1. He ruined the USFL like he did his casinos, real estate holdings and now sadly our country

I knew way back in 2015 he was a disaster in the making. Anyone with half a brain could see he was a bad businessman but Fox, Right Wing media and Russia was able to propagandize enough people to steal the election.

He is a bad bad man who is evil. We might have had a better response to the cornavirus if he haven’t decimated the health agencies. I put some of the blame on him for another disaster he screwed up.

[Jersey in OKC]

2. True

Mr. Pearlman correctly wrote about how Trump conned others into thinking his way was the correct way. Hubris and greed.

[maxrandb]

7. He's not just a bad and evil asspickle

he has torn the mask off the fraud that is America.

Like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, he didn't create the evil and dispicable...he exposed what has always been there.

For my entire life, I've been told about the inherent goodness and fairness of America.

I've seen terrible examples of racism, hatred, evil and cruelty. In each instance, I was told "that's not the 'real' America". I was told that "the evil you've seen is not America". I've been told "that's just a small minority of bad apples, but they are not what our country stands for".

Donnie Shit for Brains proves that what I've been told is all bullshit.

It won't be long until murder of political opponents will be mainstream.

All this fuckstick has done is show America as it truly is.

It's not a pretty picture.

[musette_sf]

3. I did temp work for Dave Dixon long ago

and I typed a bunch of letters to potential USFL team owners. One of them being You Know Who.

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

4. His ace lawyer Roy Cohen did get him (actually the entire USFL) $1

It was treble damages so the total verdict was $3.00 , tag on pre-trial interest and it came out to $3.57. That's the kind of financial genius that is making America Great Again!

If you ever get the chance watch the ESPN 30 for 30 Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL. You just watch it and say what a horse's ass Trump is.

[Marcuse]

5. Remember the old debate about whether character matters?

In 1981, Trump tried to buy the Baltimore Colts, an NFL franchise. He backed a group that offered owner Robert Irsay $50 million for the team; the offer was rejected. Trump denied making the offer, but Irsay confirmed publicly that he turned the offer down.

In 1983, Trump instead settled for buying a USFL team, the New Jersey Generals. As Pearlman reports in one of the most fascinating insider anecdotes of his book, after committing to buy the USFL team Trump arranged a private meeting with then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. He made clear to Rozelle that the USFL did not matter to him and that what he really wanted was an NFL team. According to a colleague of the USFL marketing man who was in the room for the meeting, Rozelle told Trump at the end of the meeting, “As long as I or my heirs are involved in the NFL, you will never be a franchise owner in the league.”

It was then that Trump approached the other USFL owners and said that the USFL, a league that played its games in the spring, needed to move to fall and get a big TV deal to challenge the NFL. He convinced USFL owners to sue the NFL for $567 million over its monopoly of fall television rights. The 1986 trial, USFL vs. NFL, lasted 48 days.

Pearlman calls it “the craziest lawsuit of all time.” As he describes the trial to Yahoo Finance, “Donald Trump is the star witness for the USFL. And he’s the worst witness in the history of mankind. And what the NFL did is they made him the enemy.” Pearlman even interviewed one of the jurors from the trial, who recalls Trump “staring her down” during his testimony.

[link:https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trumps-crusade-nfl-usfl-history-repeating-165618037.html|

[Jersey in OKC]

6. Ha, yeah.

I suppose enough of the old guard died off, that the present NFL cowed to him with regard to Kapernick[sp.], and the BS flag narrative he made.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

8. It's hard to think of someone fucking up the Baltimore Colts any worse than Robert Irsay

But Donald Trump would have found a way.

He probably would have given Indy the Orioles, too.