Wait, no one knew anything about Trump before he announced his candidacy? What new piece of fiction is this?
Hope you don't mind roadkill but I'm gonna springboard off your quote. Stealthycat, many-including myself-were well aware Trump was a disaster of a human being well before he decided to run for Prez. In fact his entrance down the escalator was so on brand I laughed my #### off with glee when he announced he was running as a Republican as I wanted to watch that clown show car wreck as it played out. Turns out Trump had a willing audience for his buffoonery and he actually won the election. How you didnt know of him more is beyond me.
I knew of Trump from the 80's forward and an early memory is of the USFL lawsuit against the NFL. Trump being Trump he never got over being denied entry into the big boy club and he showed his true colors way back when. Read this piece which was published in 2018 but with actual testimony and quotes from 1987 and you see the Trump pattern writ large. It's comical the way his immature narcissism plays out.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/sep/11/the-day-donald-trumps-narcissism-killed-the-usfl
Early in the proceedings, the USFL called Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner, to testify as the trial’s first witness. Over the course of five interminable days, Myerson hammered Rozelle, pounded Rozelle, grilled Rozelle. In particular, he focused on Trump’s claim that the NFL commissioner promised him a franchise should he abandon/damage the USFL. There was, both sides agreed, a meeting held between Trump and Rozelle at the Pierre Hotel in March 1984. What happened, however, was of dispute.
“Didn’t you tell Mr Trump you wish he had been able to buy the Baltimore Colts and hadn’t gone into the USFL?” Myerson asked.
“No,” Rozelle replied.
“Did you tell him that if he hadn’t gone to the USFL, the USFL would have died?” Myerson asked.
“No,” Rozelle said. “Never.”
Trump’s testimony was decidedly different. He said the hotel rendezvous was Rozelle’s idea, and recalled the commissioner saying, “You will have a good chance of an NFL franchise and, in fact, you will have an NFL franchise.” The tradeoff , according to Trump, was that the USFL remain in the spring and “not bringing a lawsuit.”
Trump insisted he and Rozelle were friends. Rozelle insisted he and Trump were certainly not friends. Trump insisted Rozelle wanted him in the NFL. Rozelle insisted he would rather have maggot-infected fungus overtaking his cranial lobe. “Rozelle told me I should be in the NFL, not the USFL,” Trump said. “At some point, he said, I would be in the NFL. Then he would reiterate that the USFL was not going to make it.”
Rozelle couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He made clear that it was Trump who reserved and paid for the Pierre suite. He told Rothman: “[Trump] said, ‘I want an NFL expansion team in New York.’ And he said, and I’m quoting him exactly, ‘I would get some stiff to buy the New York Generals, my team in the USFL.’” Unlike Trump, Rozelle was a meticulous note-taker, and he presented his documented recollections from the meeting.