If there’s one thing that can be said about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s a sports fan.
From his earliest days on the campaign trail in 2015, Trump and his aides spun yarns about how he’d been scouted as a potential professional baseball draft pick while a high school student at the now-defunct New York Military Academy.
During his heyday as a New York tabloid fixture, he made multiple unsuccessful attempts to purchase several National Football League franchises before settling for Herschel Walker-led NJ Generals team in the fleeting USFL, which he pushed to switch from spring games to compete directly with the NFL, leading to its ultimate demise.
He’s also been a longtime fan of combat sports, first boxing, then professional wrestling, then Ultimate Fighting. And as president, he’s often reveled in the chance to host professional and collegiate sports champions at the White House — and to attend various sporting events himself, be they NASCAR races, Stanley Cup finals, NCAA football championship games or the granddaddy of them all, the Super Bowl.
But if there’s another thing that can be said about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s not exactly a fan of the National Basketball Association.
To be sure, Trump has previously been photographed court-side at NBA games, often in the same section as known Knicks super-fans such as Spike Lee, Ben Stiller and Timothée Chalamet.
That was back when he was just a brash, celebrity real estate guy who would go on to bankrupt multiple Atlantic City casinos while cycling through three wives (who occasionally attended games with him in various stages of courtship and marriage).
And when he announced plans to attend tonight’s NBA Finals matchup between the New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs, he told reporters in the Oval Office that he’d been a fan of his (former) hometown franchise “for a long time.”
But was he? Really?
It’s impossible to say whether the Leader of the Free World still truly carries a torch for a basketball team based in a city he abandoned seven years ago in a fit of pique over the multiple civil and criminal investigations into his conduct taking place there — including the one that would see him become a convicted felon just months before voters returned him to the White House.
But what can be gleaned from his years of public statements on Twitter (now X) is that he’s only evidenced sporadic interest in professional basketball — let alone the Knicks — and not usually in a positive way.
His first mention of the NBA came in June 2012, when he declared himself “one of Miami’s largest landowners” and said he was “pulling” for the Lebron James-led Miami Heat in that year’s NBA Finals He congratulated the team in a separate tweet ten days later after they’d won the league championship and praised the team’s owner, Micky Arison.
He similarly congratulated the Knicks’ current opponents — the Spurs — after they’d won a championship two years later, calling their win “well-deserved.”
His pre-politics Twitter output similarly includes only four mentions of the team of which he professes to be a longtime fan. Two came in February 2012 at the height of “Linsanity,” the cultural phenomenon sparked by Taiwanese-American point Guard Jeremy Lin leading the Knicks to an unexpected playoff appearance that year.
But the other two Trump tweets about his (former) hometown team were far less generous.
In one May 2013 post, he commented on the “terrible tattoos” displayed by many of the team’s players.
Seven months later, he opened up his Twitter app to comment on how it was “ amazing how badly the Knicks and [Brooklyn] Nets are playing.”
“Everybody predicted they would be top teams with all of the money spent,” he added.
By the time he was four years into his first term in the White House, the NBA had been forced to conclude that year’s season in a bio-secure Covid-era “bubble” at Walt Disney World, a Black man named George Floyd had been murdered in Minneapolis by a white police officer, and Trump was not happy about prominent players’ political statements.
In September 2020, he opined that “people” were “tired of watching the highly political NBA” and declared ratings “way down.”
“I hope football and baseball are watching and learning because the same thing will be happening to them. Stand tall for our Country and our Flag!!!” he added.
A month later, he bragged about how that year’s NBA Finals had fallen by “nearly 70 percent” on account of a conflict with a Sunday NFL game.
So why, six years after he last felt the need to comment publicly about the NBA, is he forcing Knicks fans to endure a presidential security bubble and all the other inconveniences that come with his presence at a large sporting event?
It’s not because New Yorkers want him there — especially since his presence has caused the team to cancel the outdoor watch party, leading one current celebrity, rapper Azealia Banks, to ask on X if “somebody” could somehow keep him from going.
“You dont get to cancel americas birthday party then come to the Knicks game and get booed and ruin the fun. We will lose if he comes… PLEASE BAN HIM,” she added.
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