There is a world where Donald Trump could have owned the Buffalo Bills instead of becoming president, but New York Governor Kathy Hochul doesn’t like that world either.
Hochul and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani joined a brief bonus episode of _Pablo Torre Finds Out_ ahead of Election Day this week. And during the sit down, Torre asked Hochul, a Buffalo native, to imagine a world where Trump purchased the Bills and never became president of the United States.
“I’m just gonna have to deflect on that question,” Hochul admitted as she struggled to decide on the lesser of two evils. “I suspect even if he owned the Bills, he probably still would have had his political ambitions. That would have been an investment for him. And so, I think the team would have just spiraled. He might have moved the Bills somewhere else…I’m gonna say he probably would have done both. What’s happening today is cataclysmic.”
While Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry wouldn’t mind [Trump selecting LSU’s next head football coach](https://awfulannouncing.com/college-football/jeff-landry-lsu-athletic-director-hire-brian-kelly-replacement.html), New York’s governor appears to think the president would have ran a currently thriving NFL team into the ground. But Hochul did go on to claim she believes Trump’s reign as president has still been worse than Scott Norwood’s missed field goal during Super Bowl XXV that sailed wide right.
Although Hochul wasn’t sure whether Trump would have avoided politics if he purchased the Bills, legend has it he only ran for president because he wasn’t an NFL owner. According to Stephen A. Smith, Trump called him in 2014 to claim he was going to seek revenge on the NFL if they didn’t accept his bid for the Bills.
“He said, ‘If they screw me over, I’m gonna show them, I’m gonna get them all back, I’m gonna run for president of the United States.’ That’s what he said to me back in 2014,” [Smith recalled](https://awfulannouncing.com/nfl/stephen-a-smith-donald-trump-nfl.html) during a 2022 episode of _First Take_.
Trump may have attempted to damage the NFL during his first term as president by politicizing Colin Kaepernick’s position on racial inequality and police brutality. But a decade later and now in his second term, the NFL and the Buffalo Bills appear to be doing just fine without Trump.