Trump/Steinbrenner: how the Yankees owner fired a president’s ego

W hen Donald Trump was looking to make his mark in 1980s Manhattan, he found a role model up in the Bronx: the New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Trump was also a professional team owner: his New Jersey Generals competed in the short-lived United States Football League. But though Trump and Steinbrenner would ultimately become good friends, they didn’t get off to the best start.

As Maggie Haberman of the New York Times writes in her bestselling book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, the two men sat on the board of the New York State Sportsplex Corporation, which was looking into building new stadiums. Trump was eyeing one in Queens, where the Generals could play.

“At a press conference following the board’s first meeting, in 1984, Steinbrenner complained that Trump was hogging the microphone. ‘This isn’t going to be a one-man show or I’m not going to stick around,’ he said, raising his arms to obscure Trump so that photographers could not capture them together.

“That show of ego, and willingness to set the terms of debate, did not stop the men from becoming friends, and Trump was a constant presence in the owner’s box at Yankee Stadium.”

Years later, Steinbrenner provided inspiration for Trump on his hit TV show, The Apprentice.

“He ad-libbed the ‘You’re fired’ line used to dispatch each week’s loser as an apparent, and unacknowledged, homage” to Steinbrenner, Haberman writes, describing how the Yankees owner’s “revolving door of managers was one of New York’s great ongoing tragicomedies.

“As he was still trying to figure out how to be a boss of a company, Trump looked upon Steinbrenner – and the ease, even glee, with which he fired people – and other members of