{"id":850630,"date":"2026-06-07T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/850630\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T12:00:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T12:00:06","slug":"donald-trump-knicks-fan-heads-back-to-new-york-to-root-on-his-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/850630\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump, Knicks fan, heads back to New York to root on his team"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK<\/strong> \u2013 There was a time when Donald Trump<\/a> was just another celebrity sitting courtside at New York Knicks games. He was famous, but not yet flanked by Secret Service agents or defined by the politics that have left him deeply unpopular in his hometown.<\/p>\n

Now, more than a decade after attending his last Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, Trump is making a rare trip back to New York City<\/a> as president to cheer for them in Game 3 of the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night. Invited by Knicks owner James Dolan, he will be the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.<\/p>\n

The Knicks are seeking their first championship since 1973, when Trump was 26 and a relative newcomer to the family real estate business that vaulted him to wealth and fame. Two years after that triumph, the team\u2019s owners at the time hired him as a consultant as they looked to sell the arena.<\/p>\n

Trump has been to more major sporting events than any of his predecessors, including the Super Bowl<\/a> and Daytona 500<\/a>, golf’s Ryder Cup<\/a> in the New York City suburbs, where he was cheered, and last year’s U.S. Open men\u2019s tennis championship<\/a> in Queens, where he was booed and blamed for long security lines.<\/p>\n

On June 14, when he turns 80 while wrestling with myriad crises including the war with Iran<\/a>, economic unease<\/a> and court rulings<\/a>blunting his agenda<\/a>, he will host a UFC fight on White House grounds. Trump also has expressed interest in attending soccer’s World Cup, which kicks off this week across the United States, Mexico and Canada.<\/p>\n

New Yorkers love the Knicks more than they love Trump<\/p>\n

Trump is an avid sports fan, but the affinity he professes for the Knicks is different.<\/p>\n

It speaks to the Republican president\u2019s identity as a New Yorker and harkens to a bygone era where a front-row seat at a Knicks game was a chance for him and other boldface names to see and be seen.<\/p>\n

In a city whose wealthy gatekeepers largely turned their noses at Trump’s brash personality and playboy image in the 1990s and 2000s, the Garden\u2019s Celebrity Row was one club where he felt at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been a Knick fan for a long time,\u201d Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week, a day after New York rallied to win Game 1. \u201cI watched that end of the game and they were dominant \u2014 really amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

After another win Friday in San Antonio, the Knicks head home with a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series. They have won a remarkable 13 straight playoff games and last lost on April 23, uniting the city in a way unseen since the Knicks went to the NBA Finals twice in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Enter Trump. He returns to the Knicks zeitgeist not as the tabloid curiosity who once sat shoulder to shoulder with the late John F. Kennedy Jr. at a game in 1999, but as a president who is disliked by a majority of the city’s Democratic voters.<\/p>\n

Trump, who gave up his lifelong New York residency for Florida in 2019, is making his first trip to New York City since he spoke at the United Nations in September.<\/p>\n

Knicks fans, though, do not seem to be concerned so much with his politics, but that his attendance \u2014 and the hoopla accompanying it \u2014 could mess up the team\u2019s momentum.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing?\u201d U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, an avid Knicks fan and the House Democratic leader, told CNN. \u201cLike, literally, the Knicks haven\u2019t been in the NBA finals for 27 years. The city is trying to celebrate this. We\u2019ve embraced this team, and this guy has to inject himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who struck up a cordial relationship with Trump after the two met in November, was more inviting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re excited to welcome anyone and everyone who\u2019s rooting for the Knicks in this moment,” said Mamdani, who will also be at the game \u2014 albeit, not with Trump.<\/p>\n

Last week, as Trump began floating the idea of attending a game, New York magazine published an article, \u201cIs Trump Really a Knicks Fan? An Investigation.\u201d The story, filled with pictures of Trump at Knicks games from 1991 to 2014, described him as a \u201ctextbook example of a celebrity bandwagon fan.”<\/p>\n

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver disagrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore he ever ran for office, he was a big Knicks fan,\u201d Silver told reporters last week. \u201cI\u2019ve been with the league for a long time. I was there at many Knicks games with him in the old days.\u201d<\/p>\n

A courtside regular in the 1990s<\/p>\n

Trump and the Knicks came into existence the same year, 1946.<\/p>\n

His affiliation with the team \u2014 at least in the public record \u2014 dates to 1975 when he acted as a real estate adviser to the then-owners of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, who were looking to sell the building known in a bit of Trump-style branding as \u201cThe World\u2019s Most Famous Arena.”<\/p>\n

Trump claimed to reporters at the time that two groups of \u201cArab oil interests\u201d were interested in paying $50 million to $75 million. But the arena\u2019s leadership passed on the idea, saying it was \u201cnot conceivable\u201d to make such a deal during the Middle East oil crisis raging at the time.<\/p>\n

Trump was not much of a known entity when the Knicks won their only championships in 1970 and 1973. <\/p>\n

By the time they rebounded in the 1990s, Trump was front and center, taking his then-wife Marla Maples to Game 3 of the NBA Finals in 1994 and his current wife, first lady Melania Trump, to Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1999. In between, he added to his Knicks fan bona fides with a cameo in the Knicks-themed Whoopi Goldberg film \u201cEddie\u201d in 1996.<\/p>\n

Back then, Trump was a more of a mythic figure than a consequential one, known as much for the women he dated and married as the buildings he built.<\/p>\n

But just as those Knicks came up short in the NBA Finals against Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets and David Robinson and the Spurs, Trump was running into problems of his own. His business empire was in disarray after his casinos fell into financial trouble and his airline, Trump Shuttle, went out of business.<\/p>\n

Like the Knicks, Trump went into rebuilding mode and charted a new course: reality TV with NBC’s \u201cThe Apprentice\u201d and \u201cCelebrity Apprentice,\u201d and then, politics. On a Knicks TV broadcast in 2010, he hinted at a possible presidential run.<\/p>\n

That same year, as the Knicks struggled to recapture the magic of the 1990s, Trump recorded a video trying to persuade LeBron James to join the team.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real winners of the world want to be here,” Trump told him.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2013 There was a time when Donald Trump was just another celebrity sitting courtside at New…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":850631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[8952,5229,347606,69,8123,61408,28456,12790,3363,347605,13754,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,80,62,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,93,5301],"class_list":["post-850630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-adam-silver","tag-america","tag-dave-robinson","tag-donald-trump","tag-hakeem-jeffries","tag-hakeem-olajuwon","tag-james-dolan","tag-john-f-kennedy","tag-lebron-james","tag-marla-maples","tag-melania-trump","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-politics","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-washington-news","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/850631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}