The sheer insanity of Donald Trump staging a photo op last Friday to discuss college sports as his administration launches a deadly war — and berating a reporter for asking about that war — may well have distracted the public from the truly nonsensical claims he made at the event.

But the president also sounded a note of futility that suggests even he knows his proposals are doomed.

Advocates for college athletes were noticeably absent from the event, during which Trump effectively vowed to return college sports to an era when student-athletes were prohibited from collecting money off their name, image and likeness.

“When I look at what a person that’s a judge was able to do to destroy colleges and college sports that were so good, no problems, it’s very, very sad,” Trump said. “In some ways, I’d like to just go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court if we have to. Because I’m not sure you’re ever going to come up with a system that’s comparable to what you had.”

Trump’s track record of ramming things through a court has been quite poor. So if this is his tactic for fixing college sports, it’s not exactly promising.

As Front Office Sports noted, it’s not clear which judge Trump was referring to, but it’s possible he was referring to a settlement approved by a California judge that established some rules around athletes profiting from NIL opportunities and opened the door for universities to directly share revenue with athletes. Trump has previously suggested — without providing evidence — that this system risks bankrupting schools, a claim he repeated at Friday’s event.

Per Front Office Sports:

Several times throughout the event, Trump railed against what he described as a ‘radical left judge from California,’ whom he blamed for the current chaos. It was unclear if he was referring to Northern District of California judge Claudia Wilken and the House v. NCAA settlement she approved or another ruling by a different judge. 

Nonetheless, best as I can tell, these are the clearest remarks yet from Trump showing his desire to return to a system that former college athletes and their advocates have decried. Last year, three Senate Democrats hosted a call to discuss alterations to the current collegiate landscape, during which multiple former student-athletes spoke of how the pre-NIL model exploited them.

Trump’s remarks make clear that he sees the previous system as preferable to the current one, even if it means some athletes are struggling to provide for themselves while earning oodles of money for the typically wealthy colleges and universities they play for.

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