Posted Friday night, December 7, 2018.
All-around amazing guy at absolutely everything: the new owner of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League circa 1984. Photo by Ray Howard of the Associated Press.
Donald had a habit of saying things that were “without a sliver of truthfulness?” Really? Even back then? How about that?
“The first time I met Donald Trump was on a flight to a league meeting,” said Vince Lombardi Jr., son of the the legendary Packer coach and president/general manager of the Michigan Panthers. “I didn’t know who he was, just he was a busy young guy. He started asking me all these football questions, then he told me I had no idea what I was talking about. I thought, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ Later on, I noted one very unique thing about the people who worked for him. They only knew two words--- ‘Yes, Donald.’”
People paying a visit to Trump’s office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower didn’t merely sit in a bland reception area, waiting to meet the big man. No, they first had to endure an eight-minute film that chronicled the greatness of Donald J. Trump, New York icon and all-around amazing guy at absolutely everything. The video lavished plaudits upon “the visionary builder.” Read a deep-voiced narrator over shots of Trump Tower: This is Manhattan through a golden eye, and only for the select few...Any wish, no matter how opulent or unusual, may come true…
“It was ridiculous,” said Barry Stanton, who covered the Generals for the Journal-News, a
Westchester, New York-based paper. “Part of the the film was actually a sales pitch for condos at Trump Tower. And it wasn’t optional. If you wanted to speak with the Donald, you had to hear how amazing he was…”
Though [league commissioner Chet Simmons’] wasn’t one for eccentric millionaires and their annoying excesses, the USFL needed stable ownership. So he could overlook the warning signs, like the NFL having ignored Trump in approximately 2.7 seconds when he made overtures to buy the Baltimore Colts in 1981. Or when Trump---boasted without a sliver of truthfulness---that “I was offered NFL teams. I could have bought NFL teams in the course of the last three or four years…”
...at the league meeting in New Orleans…Trump told his peers that the league had been “heading very rapidly downhill”...until his arrival. According to the the book Trump Revealed, Trump alone, “by his own account, had orchestrated a complete flip in the perception of the USFL among fans, reporters, and the people who controlled the purse strings at major television networks.”
...
“He understood nothing about football,” said Mike Tolin, who produced the league’s weekly highlight show. “Far less than your average fan.”
...
“He was great entertainment,” said Charley Steiner, the Generals’ announcer. “But he was also poisonous. He didn’t care about the league, about the players. He cared about one person, and only one person only.
:”He cared about Donald J.Trump.”
---from “Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL” by Jeff Pearlman.
I know I sound like a broken record about this, but...anyone and everyone who 1) lived anywhere between Boston and D.C. between 1972 and 1990 and 2) had a television or radio knew that The Donald was a serial-lying (typically in the form of the ridiculous boasting described above) buffoon. Remember "short-fingered vulgarian"? That was Spy magazine, who made an industry of mocking him.
The thing is, I missed "The Apprentice", so I missed the reinvention of this idiot as a Titan of Industry. So when he was presented to the voters as a "successful businessman" I was gobsmacked. The Donald? Successful? The guy went broke running casinos - a business where people GIVE YOU THEIR MONEY!!!
Apparently, despite what Barnum believed, it IS possible to fool all the Republicans all the time. We are SO hosed...
Posted by: FDChief | Saturday, December 08, 2018 at 11:39 AM