Epilouge: Inside Donald Trump's Shady Scheme to Keep Jon Bon Jovi from Buying the Buffalo Bills
Quote:
GQ.com, 10/2017: As Donald Trump finds new ways to drag out his vicious feud with the National Football League— he tweeted Monday morning that there's "no leadership in the NFL"—a big question looms about where this all began. Could it be, as several reports now suggest, that this whole national trauma can be traced back to Trump's failed attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills back in 2014?
..(P)otential buyers...narrowed to three finalists—Trump, Buffalo Sabres owner (and eventual winner)...Terry Pegula, and a group of Toronto investors led by Jon Bon Jovi...That's when a local fan group sprang up, hoping to turn sentiment in Buffalo against Bon Jovi and his partners...
Trump hired veteran Republican operative and Buffalo resident Michael Caputo -- a close associate of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone...In a stroke of cunning, Caputo recruited...a double amputee cancer survivor, to serve as the group's leader...The group gathered thousands of signatures for a petition demanding the team remain in Buffalo and started a "Ban Bon Jovi" movement to rid upstate New York of the New Jersey rocker's music.
|
The real tragedy of this story is that Trump's efforts were completely unnecessary: If Team Trump had done the most cursory amount of homework on Team Bon Jovi, they would have realized that Team Bon Jovi never had a chance.
Buying major league sports franchises is a game for billionaires like Jon's Toronto partners -- Jon is a mere millionaire who would have had to cash in every cent of his net worth just to come up with his share of the franchise fee. He didn't need any help in ending up being unceremoniously rejected and publicly embarrassed: either he got really bad advice, or really good advice that he didn't (or didn't want to) take.
So simply rack this up as yet another tribute to the Trump bull(shit)-in-a-china-shop management style. And speaking of strokes of cunning, Jon dressed as Donald Trump for Halloween that year: