Inside the NBA Finals: How the Very Important President’s Favorite Sport Reveals a Hidden Power Play

Monday’s trip to the NBA finals came amid a stacked sports calendar for the president during his second term that has seen him appear at everything from the Super Bowl to college wrestling championships. This weekend he will even turn the White House South Lawn into the staging ground for a UFC card on his 80th birthday. There’s no doubt Trump is a sports fan – the zero-sum contests, the dominant athletes, the spectacle of it all. But that’s not the real pull for him.

The point is social hierarchy. Sports makes that legible. The farther you are from the action, the lower you are in status – unless, of course, you’re watching from a suite, where you either have connections or are the connection. When Trump went to Knicks games in his pre-presidential days, he sat courtside between his second wife, Marla Maples, and the actor Elliott Gould. The Garden’s celebrity row was a glitzy club where he fit relatively comfortably – unlike the US Open, where New York’s old-money gatekeepers still treated him as a headline-chasing arriviste.

Becoming president changed the geometry. He was no longer just another celebrity; he was the axis around which the event now had to revolve. When Barack Obama attended basketball games during his time in office, he picked his spots, stayed out of marquee moments and tried to avoid turning the night into a logistical nightmare. He sat courtside, posed for selfies and dapped up players and coaches. The intention was always the same: don’t upstage the game.

Trump does the opposite. Sporting events are not so much something he attends as something he encroaches upon, reshapes, and absorbs into his own image – more of a black hole than a true-blue fan. He makes them fodder for political memes. Game 3 wasn’t just a high school revenge moment, his night to tell the hometown haters who counted him out after his federal conviction on 34 felony counts in May 2024: “Look at me now, bigger than ever.” It was also meant to double as a PR victory over a league that has long functioned as one of his most visible cultural antagonists.