How a Little-Known Movie About Trump’s Football Fiasco Explains His Tariff Tantrums

A national money-generating enterprise filled with energy and ideas that had defied the naysayers.

The arrival of a brash leader who thinks he has all the answers and makes bold and unilateral changes.

A rapid collapse that leaves all the principals in disbelief at how one man ruined everything.

The U.S. economic miracle of the past few years as undermined by Donald Trump? No, the USFL football miracle of the 1980s as undermined by Donald Trump.

Long before tariffs was a word everyday Americans dropped casually, Trump was bulldozing in with another idea that had experts and insiders who never agree on anything shaking their heads. The story is told in 2009’s Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?, an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about an upstart league that had been humming along until Trump arrived as owner and thought he knew better. (He didn’t.) 

After a few years of building a fan base with its brash, innovative style (the USFL featured choreographed touchdown celebrations by players and instant replay both before the NFL did), the league seemed poised for success. But then Trump purchased the New Jersey Generals, who had star running back Herschel Walker. He signed quarterback Doug Flutie and took over as the public face and boardroom force of the league. 

Trump then decided to push the league to move its season from the spring — where over three seasons it had steadily found a niche — to the fall so it could challenge the NFL. The USFL quickly became enmeshed in an antitrust lawsuit with its stronger rival that yielded exactly three dollars in damages. It never played another down.

Directed by sports-minded producer Michael Tollin (The Last Dance), the film has quietly been playing on ESPN+ for years. To watch it now is to come across a kind of secret treasure map — the key to explaining the current tariff incomprehensibility, as Trump has pressed ahead with levying punishing penalties on the country’s biggest (and not-so-big) trading partners, shocking markets and sending businesses across America to new depths of uncertainty.

Though framed as a question, the film’s answer to who killed the USFL is never in doubt. In fact, the title phrase comes from Trump himself, who dismissively referred to the USFL as small potatoes, which is why he self-appointedly stepped in as the only person with sufficient skill to supersize the tuberous vegetable.

Experts weighing in on his misguided USFL plans sound so much like those now weighing in on his tariff plans you almost can’t tell which issue the speaker is addressing.

“It’s totally silly. There’s no other way to say it, it makes no sense.”

“We had something going good … why change it?”

“You are not only damaging yourself with your associates, but alienating them as well.” 

“The idea that this is inherently good…is wrongheaded. It’s untrue.”

(The Harvard economist Dani Rodrik on tariffs, quarterback Jim Kelly on the USFL, Ben Shapiro on tariffs, rival USFL owner John Bassett in a letter to Trump, respectively.)

The most damning comments in the film come from the late Chuck Pitcock, a straight-talking offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Bandits who sunk into an economic and emotional depression after his job was submarined by Trump. Far from the prototypical working-class MAGA supporter, he reserved harsh words for the future president.

“He manipulated ’em,” Pitcock says of some of the weaker owners. “They figured if they rode with Donald, they might end up with something. You ain’t gonna end up with nothing. He’s gonna throw your ass to the street, too,” Pitcock adds, his hard times a potentially chilling harbinger for some of today’s tariff victims.

The parallels speak to Tollin’s prescience; he saw in the humble USFL story a tale of narcissism that would one day play out on a much larger stage. But the film also reveals a remarkable character consistency — Trump’s same bullheaded contrarian approach unfolds in an ’80s sports venture as it does in a 2020s economic arena. The setting and times change. The person stays the same.

In an interview with Trump in the film, Tollin asks if he regrets any of his actions from a quarter-century earlier. Trump doubles down on what he did, giving his critics no quarter. 

THR reached out to Tollin but he said he’d prefer not to comment. Perhaps he is holed up somewhere in sadness; perhaps he is throwing up his hands in an abandoned USFL stadium exclaiming “I tried to warn you.”

One thing the film does not have is a blueprint for the future, a bottle of salve we might dust off and choke down. The league just quietly goes away, with some of its players and workers landing on their feet in the NFL, but many more simply out of a job. Those looking for inspiration in the story will be disappointed. The film diagnoses Trump’s power; it doesn’t offer an antidote for it.

Still, an optimistic note abides. Trump recently postponed tariffs on many trading partners that aren’t China, a hint he might not want to repeat his football folly. As Jim Kelly says in the film about the fall push, “Donald Trump, one of the things I’m sure he looks back on, whether he admits it, he knows that’s one of the mistakes.” With tariffs, Trump may not admit the mistake. But he may be walking it back just the same.

This story first appeared in the April 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.