Devil's Bargain by Joshua Green - 2017

“That’s why it didn’t register as particularly significant when Trump, in the same speech, deployed a curious line of attack against Obama, one previously confined mostly to the fever swamps of far-right websites. ‘Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere,’ Trump said, shaking his head. ‘In fact, I’ll go a step further: the people that went to school with him, they never saw him; they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy!’ In the weeks that followed, Trump traveled the talk-show circuit making explicit what he’d merely hinted at in his CPAC speech: his contention that Obama hadn’t been born in the United States, had somehow forged his birth certificate, and therefore was an illegitimate president. ‘I want him to show his birth certificate,’ Trump said, in March, on ABC’s The View. ‘There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.’ A week later on Fox News he went further: ‘People have birth certificates. He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that - maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that. Or he may not have one. But I will tell you this: if he wasn’t born in this country, it’s one of the great scams of all time.’ Trump was plumbing the depths of latent racist hostility toward the president and discovering that there were a lot of it there. Everybody in politics knew this sentiment existed, but the long-standing consensus had been that it should be kept out of the public arena. In the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain had quickly upbraided a woman at his rally who prefaced a question to him about Obama by stating, ‘He’s an Arab.’ The crowd booed McCain for correcting her.”

“Bannon, who wild gambits in the campaign had invariably paid off, seemed to run out of magic tricks once Hillary Clinton was no longer a target. The government wasn’t as malleable to Trump and Bannon’s aggressions as the Republican party and cable news channels had been, and they found themselves quickly thwarted and undermined - by the courts, by right-wing hardliners in Congress, by their own experience and Trump’s errant tweets, and the bureaucracy they were now overseeing. The crises these failures precipitated in the White House cost Bannon much of his influence and soon threatened Trump’s presidency. . . Trump was equating politics with business and the presidency with the job of being a big-shot CEO, a ‘killer.’ He filled the upper ranks of his administration with people of a similar mindset: Gary Cohn, Wilbur Ross, Steve Bannon - aggressive, domineering men accustomed to getting their way by dint of their position. None had government experience (nor did many others in the West Wing), so none anticipated the problems this approach to governing would cause.”

The Cruelty is the Point by Adam Serwer - 2021

"Trump's nationalist innovation is not taking pride in his country, supporting a principled noninterventionism, or even advocating strict enforcement of immigration laws. The only new thing Trump brings to the American nationalism of recent decades is a restoration of its old ethnic-chauvinist tradition. Conservative intellectuals cannot rescue nationalism away from Trump, any more than they could rescue Goldwater from Jim Crow, because Trump's explicit appeals to racial and religious traditionalism, and his authoritarian approach to enforcing those hierarchies, are the things that have bound conservative voters so closely to him. The failure of the conservative intelligentsia to recognize this is why it was caught so off-guard by Trump's rise to begin with. At a rally last night in North Carolina, Trump was reminding the country of this truth. Last week, the president told four Democratic congresswomen -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar -- to 'go back' to their countries, even though all of them are American citizens. This is literally textbook racism. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offers 'Go back to where you came from' as its example of potentially unlawful harassment on the basis of national origin. Trump's demand is less a factual assertion than a moral one, an affirmation of the president's belief that American citizenship is conditional for people of color, who should be grateful we are even allowed to be here."

"Trump's efforts to overturn the election reached their tragic and absurd conclusion on January 6, 2021, when the president told the rally of supporters in Washington, D.C., that 'when you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules,' and that they needed to 'show strength' because 'if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.' If they did not 'fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.' Trump then urged the crowd to descend on the Capitol, telling them he would join them. Instead the president retired to the safety of the White House and watched on television as his supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to force federal lawmakers to overturn the election results. It was a burlesque parody of Wilmington, an enraged rabble attempting to capture or kill federal lawmakers to force them to overturn an election in the name of democracy, a mob that cheered police repression of Black Lives Matter protestors assaulting cops. Like much of the Trump era, the Capitol riot was a lethal farce, spun out of the darkest forces in American history, by a man entirely indifferent to the consequences for anyone but himself."

Preventable by Andy Slavitt - 2021

"Giuliani and Trump had known each other since the 1980s in New York when the former was a politicially ambitious federal prosecutor. In 1988, Giuliani's office had put the squeeze on a man named Robert Hopkins, who was running a gambling ring with mob connections. Hopkins said Trump was helping to launder the money and offered to wear a wire and give up the flashy young developer. Giuliani sent one of his top prosecutors to visit Trump. Weeks later, Trump announced he planned to raise $2 million for Giuliani's campaign for mayor and the investigation into Trump was over, according to Wayne Barrett, a New York journalist who covered both Giuliani and Trump for decades."

"In Georgia, the campaign had set up a team tasked with finding legal challenges that would improve Trump's margins. There had been barely any litigation filed during the first two weeks after the campaign's legal team gathered research and intelligence on what had happened as the election officials continued to count ballots. But meanwhile, a parallel track was underway from the Oval Office where (former NYC mayor and attorney Rudy) Giuliani and (White House Chief of Staff Mark) Meadows, who were returning to work after being sidelined by Covid, starting bringing in their own people. . . Republicans in Georgia - and Washington - had been giving Trump space to process the loss. Now Trump was tweeting about electronic bugs that were changing counts in voting machines. But Trump's Georgia Legal Team No. 1 had worked the angles in Atlanta to secure recounts that allowed them to trace individual votes to machines. Not a single machine had changed a single vote. But when Trump's Georgia Legal Team No. 1 sent this information along, Trump's Legal Team No. 2 undermined them. Trump was told the first team wasn't working hard. They had been fooled by the Republican governor in Georgia. They cared more about winning the Senate runoffs than the presidential race. (State Senator Dave) Perdue, who had led the charge to bring a Trump rally to the state a few weeks earlier, mounted another attempt to talk sense into the president. Internal Republican data showed that Trump's constant attacks on mail voting ahead of the 2020 election had hurt their turnout efforts in Georgia. Now the president's constant attacks on the integrity of the Georgia election officials was depressing the Republican vote. Perdue's chances of winning rested almost exclusively with Trump. He tried calling Trump. He asked other Republicans in the state to help. When none of them could reason with Trump, they appealed to (his son-in-law) Jared. Jared didn't have good news for them either. 'Once Donald put Rudy in charge, it guaranteed this was going to be a clown show,' Jared said. 'I can't help you.'"

"Trump and others have frequently said we shouldn't 'make the cure worse than the problem itself.' Whenever he mentioned this, the examples he cited most frequently were mental health issues, a slump in the economy, and children missing school. While, as I said earlier, the evidence is that the pandemic, not the response, is the main culprit for the negative effects in those areas, there is a legitimate point here about doing the best job possible addressing those issues. Trump, however, didn't propose an extra dollar in spending for mental health, for retrofitting schools, or for adding broadband, and after a time, he even lost interest in supporting the small businesses hurt by the pandemic. So what was Trump’s priority? The economy? The stock market? Those things were important to him, but when push came to shove, even those goals were less important than one thing - avoiding accountability. . . As I sat having coffee with (wife) Lana one morning in early April, Jared Kushner’s name again flashed on my phone. . . ‘We’re going to put testing back on the states,’ Kushner said. ‘We can’t be responsible.’ . . Trump would announce that the country would be reopening at the end of the month, but states would have to solve the hard problems. This way, if things opened and went badly, Trump could point to the governors. . . If the White House didn’t maintain responsibility, I said, cases would grow and the states would be helpless without the support of the federal government. But Kushner wouldn’t budge. The import was clear to me: they were abdicating responsibility.”

"3M, the largest U.S. manufacturer of masks, claimed it had added manufacturing lines and was now producing 50 million masks a month. Yet none could be found except in one place - the internet. Every day I received emails and texts with offers to sell me up to a million 3M masks, all while doctors and nurses still struggled without protective gear. . . I asked if the company was beginning to manufacture more N95 masks in the crisis. The person I spoke to said that yes, they were, and had already reached capacity. I asked how long it would take to create new capacity. I had done enough homework to know that U.S. companies making respiratory masks had been shutting down capacity for a number of years as prices declined and demand slowed. He said it wouldn't be possible to create more masks in the near term. He wasn't oozing with a sense of urgency. In a crisis, I'd imagined, there were many ways to increase capacity. 'Do you have masks being sent to countries like Korea that don't have shortages?' 'Yes.' 'Do you have masks going to preexisting orders with non-health-care contracts, like construction workers and painters?' 'We sell to 3M distributors and don't track where they sell them.' I got the sense that a large portion of their production could be channeled to U.S. hospitals and nursing homes if they wanted to make the effort. . . If I'd had anything to say about, the (Defense Production Act) would have been invoked with mask manufacturers in January 2020. . . I called Adam Boehler at the White House and told him everything I knew. I explained that I believed 3M could produce way more inventory if pressure was applied, and I gave him the contact at 3M. Naturally, I took to Twitter with what I had learned. 'NOW: Email, text, or call @3M and ask them how many of their masks are going to US medical community or other countries with shortages vs. others? We can't needlessly lose health care workers'. . . A day after my tweet, it was reported that 280 million masks in warehouses around the U.S. were purchased by foreign buyers - in a single day . . . Later we would learn that Trump initiated a trade deal that resulted in U.S. manufacturers sending $17.6 million worth of masks and other PPE to China in January and February, even though we knew the virus was coming to our shores. . . . At the end of February, as cases began to grow in South Korea, the South Korean government . . .purchased 50 percent of all KF94 masks (the Korean equivalent of the N95) produced by South Korean manufacturers and sold them to pharmacies, agricultural cooperatives, and post offices at $1.23 per mask. These venues were allowed to sell them for only pennies higher. In early March, seeing that the demand was still not being met, the government increased its share of KF94 purchases by 80 percent. By the end of March, 3M was still sending masks to Korea that Koreans didn't need, so people there were turning around and selling back to the United States for $4.50 or more."

"Shortly before the Taj opened, alarms were sounded by a securities analyst named Marvin Roffman, who voiced doubts whether the Taj could consistently generate the $1.3 million a day it needed to crawl out from beneath $822 million of debt borrowed to build it. . . Just two months after the Taj opened, a $41 million bond payment came due on one of (Trump’s) other casinos, the Castle - a payment Donald didn’t have the money to make. So Donald’s bankers, starting to recognize they tethered themselves to a borrower who could bring them all down, gave him a $65 million emergency loan to prevent everything he had from sliding into bankruptcy.”

"Frankly, We Did Win This Election" by Michael C. Bender - 2021

TrumpNation by Timothy L. O'Brien - 2016

“Pamela Day, the business maven who met an untimely fate in Season Two (of the Apprentice), recalled an odd encounter with Matt Calamari, the Trump Organization’s chief operating officer. Calamari, a hulking company man with a brush mustache, had worked his way up from being Donald’s personal bodyguard into the executive suite - and had earned Donald’s undying trust by remaining by his side during the dog days of the early 1990s when Donald’s marriage to his first wife, Ivana, was falling apart. Day said that when the Apprentice’s producers told her and other cast members during Season Two that they would get to meet one of Donald’s senior executives, she was excited. Up they went to the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, Manhattan at their feet far below. In walked Calamari. He said, ‘I used to be a security guard and now I’m the COO,’ recalled Day, who underwrote Manhattan real estate deals as an investment banker after graduating Harvard Business School. ‘I thought, ‘What does a real estate company do with a COO?’ ‘So I said, ‘Matt, what do you do here? Is there an org chart?’ ‘What’s an org chart?’ Day said Calamari responded. ‘Who works here?’ she asked. Calamari returned with a phone list. Day added that the roster didn’t list anyone who was a director of acquisitions, anyone who was a CPA, anyone who was an economist. ‘How can a successful company that’s this old not have anyone serious doing the jobs?’ she asked herself. Deep down inside she knew the answer to this question. It was because it was Donald’s company. ‘He’s that guy that believes in his own press and drinks his own Kool-Aid and doubles down and then goes bankrupt,’ she said of Donald. ‘I didn’t associate him with financial prudence, though I did associate him with success.’”

“‘June 30th - The President in no way, form, or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence.” —Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘Knock the crap out of him, would you? I promise you I will pay your legal fees.’ ‘I’d like to punch him in the face.’ ‘Maybe he should have been roughed up.’ ‘The audience hit back. That’s what we need a little more of.’ —Donald Trump”

The Daily Don by Jesse Duquette - 2019

“Anyway, after hearing and meeting Trump’s ‘base’ up close (in the rallies I attended out of deep curiosity), I also could not help but notice that the #MAGA/‘Lock Her Up’ T-shirt wearing folks spoke exactly like Trump. Why? Well now it’s obvious- they had binge-watched thousands of hours of fake Fox News ‘debates.’ Those stadiums were packed with a lot of Foxholes. They also had been preconditioned for Trumpism from forty years of listening to right-wing talk radio in their cars and trucks. They loved all the ‘trumped up’ accusations and half-baked truths he was slinging because he validated and normalized what they already had come to subjectively believe as objective ‘facts’ for decades. . .Trump’s Deplorables were on the same page because they spoke the same language, and he was selling a more intense version of the shows they’d been binge-watching on FNC for twenty years. Wow, I thought in stunned silence, Did I just see what I think I saw? Did Fox News spawn an incarnate version of itself?”

Foxocracy by Tobin Smith - 2019

“When Fox News morphed from the Obama hate porn channel in 2008 into the sycophantic Trump Television network after the 2016 election, it struck me they had technically become a digital enabler for a new kind of twenty-first century ‘digital neo-totalitarianism.’ When you read the experts on the ideology of totalitarianism, the general definition is it’s just another form of tribal mass movement driven by an ideology that rejects the existing society as corrupt, immoral, and beyond reform. It projects the illusion of an alternative society in which these wrongs are to be redressed, provides plans and programs for realizing the alternative order, and is founded under a charismatic leader that promises his flock nirvana but demands and gets unflinching loyalty and leeway from his tribal believers on their way to paradise. Sound like anyone you know?”

"But by early 2019, Trump was routinely retweeting QAnon-promoting accounts, including an account whose avatar was a flaming Q wearing a MAGA hat. It was clear that the movement was getting in front of him more and more - to the point that by the 2020 election, Trump had retweeted hundreds of QAnon-promoting accounts, and was regularly sharing the memes created by members of the movement. And it wasn't just Donald Trump's Twitter that was becoming more receptive to Q and the ideas they were promoting. In the months after the Tampa rally, QAnon saw an explosion in growth across all platforms, with countless new members being pulled into Q's ever-expanding story of a secret and silent war between good and evil. . . By that point, Q had survived a string of failures that included the disaster in the 2018 midterms, the failure of any of the various memos or 'real' investigations by Devin Nunes and other Trump supporters in Congress to hit pay dirt, and Robert Mueller failing to indict any pedophiles. Indeed, there were no indictments of anyone involved in the 'deep state' - only figures connected to Donald Trump."

The Storm is Upon Us by Mike Rothschild - 2021

Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims - 2019

"'I think we did a great job on COVID and it hasn't been recognized,' Trump said, noting other countries saw spikes in COVID-19 infections in the months after he left office. 'The cupboards were bare. We didn't have gowns. We didn't have masks. We didn't have ventilators. We didn't have anything. . . We brought in plane loads. We did a great job.' When we asked Trump why he encouraged people to believe things that weren't true or to distrust science and the media, he delighted in talking about the scientific smarts in his family's genes. 'First of all, I'm a big person,' he said. 'Do you know this? My uncle, Dr. John Trump, I think he was at [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] longer than any other professor. Totally brilliant man. . . He had numerous degrees. So that's in the genes. I always go with that stuff. But it's a little bit in the genes and Dr. John Trump, he was a great guy. My father's brother. No, I'm a big believer in science. If I wasn't, you wouldn't have a vaccine. It depends. Are you talking about disinformation or are you talking about lies? There is a more beautiful word called disinformation.'"

"(Attorney General Bill) Barr opened the discussion with a plea for patience, hoping to short-circuit Trump's standard soliloquy at the start of every meeting. 'Mr. President, I have something very important I want to talk to you about, and I'm hoping you actually listen to what I have to say,' Barr said, according to the account he shared with confidants. 'Okay,' Trump said, a bit taken aback. 'I feel you are going to lose this election,' Barr said. 'I feel you are actually losing touch with your own base.' Barr explained that in his travels around the country, he had talked to a lot of people in law enforcement and other solid Trump supporters who were uncomfortable with the president's focus on skewering his perceived enemies rather than on clear, consistent plans to steer the country safely through the pandemic and shore up the economy. 'I have yet to meet anybody who supports you who hasn't said to me, 'We love the president, but would you please tell him to turn it back a bit?'' Barr said. 'You're going to lose the election because there's going to be enough people who otherwise would vote for you who are just tired of the acrimony, the pettiness, the punching down and picking a fight at every moment, and the apparent chaos, and they're just going to say, 'We're tired of this sh**.' Barr warned Trump that he risked turning off some of his 2016 backers - enough to lose the election, especially with Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. 'You're trying to jack up your base, but you can jack up your base without pissing off this important segment, Barr said. Barr explained that Trump had won the 2016 election narrowly, in large part because he had been scared straight one month before the election by the release of the shocking Access Hollywood recording in which he bragged that his celebrity status gave him the power to sexually assault women."

I Alone Can Fix It by Carol Leonnig - 2021

"On a rainy afternoon several weeks after I'd left the White House, Ulrich Brechbuhl, Pompeo's former West Point classmate turned State Department Counselor, called me with the last bad news I'd ever have to endure in the Trump administration. 'We've been working this from every possible angle,' he explained, 'but at every turn they're putting up roadblocks to you coming in here. There's just nothing else we can do about it. I'm sorry- and the Secretary is very disappointed- but we're just not going to be able to make it happen.' . . (Chief of Staff) John Kelly had told (Trump) I was untrustworthy. But he didn't know whether to believe him because I'd always been so loyal. All he had to do was say, 'Hey, leave Cliff alone, okay? He's going to State, he's out of your hair. But he's my guy. So let him go.' But he chose not to do that. And not just for me. This wasn't personal to him. And in a way I didn't take it personally, either. He hadn't lifted a finger for countless loyal aides before me, and I'm sure he wouldn't for countless loyal aides to come. It was well known that in Trump World, loyalty was mostly a one-way street. But it's one thing to know that, another thing entirely to experience it firsthand- to be unceremoniously abandoned by the President of the United States. I had let my personal relationship with the President blind me to the one unfailing truth that applied to anyone with whom he didn't share a last name: we were all disposable."

"Like Q, Trump singled out mail-in voting, calling it 'a fraud like you've never seen' and making bizarre claims that poll workers were 'selling ballots.' He claimed (Joe) Biden was hiding 'in a basement' while Trump went out to meet the people at rallies (rallies that often ended in explosions of COVID-19 diagnoses for attendees), and slammed (Joe's son) Hunter Biden's business dealings and well-known drug problems. And Trump gleefully retweeted Q-driven claims that Biden's brain 'freezing,' repeated Q-driven claims that Biden was a pedophile, and pumped out countless accusations about voter fraud and rigged voting machines. Likewise, Trump's inner circle and mainline Q believers alike spread breathless conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 lockdowns being designed to hurt Trump, claimed Biden had been wearing a hidden earpiece to feed him answers during his debates with Trump (recall Q's drop that Biden would get 'assistance in the form of a special communication device'), and regurgitated smears about Hunter Biden's drug use and alleged child abuse (which nobody had ever actually alleged.) For a while, Q's insults and Trump's insults moved together on parallel tracks. It was impossible to tell which one inspired which, though it's not like Trump suddenly discovered the power of a crushing-put-down delivered to a rabid rally crowd. This is, after all, a candidate who called the 2016 election rigged and fraudulent after winning it."

Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown by John Lithgow - 2020

"To the public, Trump versus the press was a bitter war. But behind the scenes, it was more like professional wrestling. The reporters needed Trump and his team to leak to them and give them information or they couldn't break news. By contrast, Trump and his team needed them to get information out, or misinformation, or serve as a powerful and effective political foil. They also served two almost completely separate audiences- the press often seemed to be writing stories to get clicks from the Trump haters while the White House used those same stories to rile up the media haters. Wash, rinse, repeat."

"Our Substitute Science Teacher: Mid-hurricane, Dumpty defied disbelief, With another bizarre aberration: While Dorian doled out destruction and grief, Alabama became his fixation. He'd carelessly claimed just a few days before That 'Bama should brace for a hit. Contradicted by experts, he stamped on the floor, Storming out in a furious fit. All week he was testy, defensive, and feral, An angry and petulant harpy. In the end, he provoked barometrical peril, Defacing a map with a Sharpie. At a time when the country was casting about, For a source of relief and reliance, Instead we got a bilious lout, Substituting his Sharpie for science."

"Recipe for Disaster: Try a viral new cuisine, COVID-19, Offer it to each civilian (Three hundred million). It's quick and easy to prepare Microbial fare. First preheat an anxious nation With misinformation. Take what other leaders tried, And set aside. Place the fifty sovereign states, On separate plates. Sow confusion and distrust, Make your crust. Insist on sycophantic praise, Whip the glaze. Stir the pot for all to see, On Live TV. Add DeSantis, simmer low, Cuomo? No. Pound Jay Inslee, call him a snake, Then prebake. Claim it's Gretchen Whitmer's fault, Pinch of salt. If the kitchen is a mess, Slam the press. If the pastry comes unstuck, Pass the buck. Are supplies arriving late? Blame the state. Shuck all science-based advice, Puree twice. If the Stock Exchange careens, Boil your Greens. For a dash of ignorance, Add Mike Pence. Use your clueless son-in-law, For the slaw. Slash the funds for WHO, Knead the dough. Add some spice to this fiasco, With Tabasco. . . Takes no time at all to master, National disaster."

Greed and Glory by Sean Deveney - 2018

“Trumpdome, it had to be called. (Mayor Ed) Koch and Governor Mario Cuomo had insisted that the place would be privately funded, and Trump had come up with a plan for that, and thus wanted it to have his name. Of course, there were some seriously objectionable details within that funding plan, which fit a pattern that helped fuel Trump’s rise as arguably the first celebrity real estate developer: He would use other people’s private money. Trump wanted to follow the model of NFL owner of Joe Robbie, who was building a new stadium outside of Miami for the Dolphins, funded with down payments on the right to buy tickets for arena events. The situations were very different. Robbie had zero help from local political forces, and an already established team with a solid fan base, while Trump was selling licenses for a team that did not exist in a building that was nothing more than a drawing. Trump’s plan would charge an average of $12,000 for presale of some seats, $2,400 for year-to-year leases on other seats, and an average of $60,000 up front for 221 luxury boxes. Fans who bought those licenses would still have to buy tickets. In selling the leases, Trump was asking fans to also foot the bill for the building on which he wanted his name, and from which he would suck all profits. The city and state would pay $75 million each for the acquisition of the land, and would grant Trump a twenty-five year tax abatement. The presale of seats was expected to generate $276 million, meaning the cost to Trump himself to build the stadium would be just $10 million.”

“(Lawyer) Roy Cohn was not around, but that did not mean Donald Trump did not know what to do. When the six jurors shuffled back into the courtroom of Judge Peter Leisure after forty-two days of testimony and deliberation, they had sent a shock through sports by announcing they had found the NFL guilty of running a monopoly in pro-football, and the jury found it injured the USFL in doing so. The pronouncement was a blow to the venerable old league and Pete Rozelle (commissioner), who slipped out of the courtroom and into a limo thinking that his league had been defeated. He had no interest in watching USFL executives celebrate on the courtroom stairs. But then a second report came in: The jury had awarded the USFL damages of just $1. Rozelle perked up and yelled to the driver, ‘Turn this goddamned limo around and let’s go to the courthouse!’ Trump had been standing in the back, arms folded. He had been glad-handing media members throughout the trial, but when the damages were announced, he bolted. He would issue a statement, using the well-worn Cohn techniques: claim victory, even in defeat; take no personal blame; promise more legal action. ‘We won a great moral victory,’ Trump’s statement read. ‘But now with the confusion and what seems to be a hung jury, we expect to win a total victory.’ Trump was right in one respect: There was confusion. But a confused jury is not a hung jury. One juror claimed that the panel did not fully understand their instructions - her expectation, she said, was that Judge Leisure could raise the $1 at his own discretion. Other jurors contradicted her view, expressing an understanding that though the NFL had established a monopoly, the USFL had been responsible for its own demise through poor business practices. ‘We awarded the the $1 as a token amount,’ the juror explained. Another juror labeled it ‘a sort of rap on the knuckles of the NFL.’ So the USFL, after having lost in the neighborhood of $200 million, was later given a check for $3.76 (treble damages, including interest) from the NFL. While Trump declared victory, Memphis Showboats vice president Rudi Schiffer was more realistic. ‘We’re dead,’ he said. ‘How else can you interpret it?’ The USFL had begun four years earlier, with the modest goal of building up popularity for a spring football league. But once Trump got involved, he manipulated the new league into fulfilling his own end - a domed stadium in Queens with an NFL team, owned by Trump, to occupy it. Most of the other owners took serious financial lumps, while Trump escaped with just a small fraction of his personal wealth lost and a well of attention and publicity for his properties that was impossible to price.”