By Marlow Stern, Karla Cote
2026 Getty Images / 2025 Getty Images When Jaxson Dart, the New York Giants’ hot young quarterback, went down in Week 2 with a brutal, season-ending knee injury on the team’s opening drive against the Rams, the NFL world let out a collective gasp — and then began pointing fingers. Many of them, it seems, were aimed at President Trump.
You see, Trump has a brutal history when it comes to the NFL. In the ‘80s, the billionaire real estate heir owned the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League (USFL), hoping to have the league compete with the NFL. He even backed the USFL’s $1.32 billion antitrust suit against the NFL with the hope of merging the two leagues (or maybe even owning an NFL team), but they were awarded a mere $3 in damages by the court and the USFL subsequently collapsed. Decades later, in 2014, Trump offered $1 billion to buy the Buffalo Bills, only to lose out to a $1.4 billion bid by Terry and Kim Pegula. If that weren’t enough, in 2017, he called for a boycott of the NFL in response to kneeling during the National Anthem (needless to say, it didn’t take).
But Trump’s bad luck extends well beyond the NFL into other sports leagues. It’s gotten so bad that people commonly refer to the “Trump Curse” — that whenever Trump endorses an athlete and/or team, they are doomed to fail (with one notable exception).
Let’s look at the evidence.
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Jaxson Dart
Image Credit: AP NFL pundits were thoroughly convinced that this would be the year the baby Giants, led by sophomore QB Jaxson Dart, would make a serious name for themselves. That all changed during the second game of the season, when Dart was sandwiched between two Rams defenders, his knee destroyed in a season-ending injury. A few months earlier, on May 22, Dart infamously introduced Trump at a rally for Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, which led to plenty of backlash and a public beef with teammate Abdul Carter. Trump then took it upon himself to defend Dart and praise his looks, as he is wont to do, calling him “handsome.” Well, he’ll now spend the rest of the season on the sidelines while Jameis Winston, who has his own ugly past, is leading the G-Men.
