StarLife Documented
You need to hear the crazy story about how Donald Trump basically destroyed an entire football league because he was desperate to get into the NFL's exclusive club. In September 1983, when Trump was 37 years old, he bought the New Jersey Generals of the brand new United States Football League for a few million bucks after the team's original owner from Oklahoma got tired of flying back and forth to New York every week. The USFL was designed to play spring football to avoid competing with the NFL, and honestly it was working pretty well with decent TV ratings and growing enthusiasm after its first season. But Trump immediately started pushing his fellow owners to move the entire league's season to the fall so they'd go head to head against the NFL, famously saying if God wanted football in the spring he wouldn't have created baseball. Trump's real plan wasn't to build a successful spring league, it was to force the NFL to merge with the USFL so he could finally own an NFL franchise, something he'd been trying to do for years but kept getting rejected. He convinced the other owners to file a massive 1.7 billion dollar antitrust lawsuit against the NFL in 1984, claiming the NFL had monopolized television contracts and blocked competition. The trial happened in 1986 and Trump testified personally, but the NFL's lawyers were brilliant because they made the whole case about Trump instead of monopoly issues, painting him as an arrogant real estate developer who just wanted to bully his way into their club. The jury actually agreed the NFL was technically a monopoly, but then awarded the USFL exactly one dollar in damages, which got tripled to three bucks under antitrust laws. That's it, three dollars total for a lawsuit that was supposed to save an entire football league. The USFL collapsed immediately after that verdict and never played another game, with Trump's push for fall football and his disastrous lawsuit widely blamed for killing the whole thing. One juror later said Trump was extremely arrogant and obviously just trying to play a game to get an NFL franchise, and she didn't believe anything he said on the witness stand. The league ended up 160 million dollars in debt, and hundreds of players and employees lost their
jobs because Trump convinced everyone to bet it all on a lawsuit that won them literally three dollars.
#USFLHistory #TrumpFootball #ThreeDollarVictory