Nearly 10 years ago to the day, a certain someone took a certain ride down a certain golden escalator and most certainly upended American politics.
As Stephen A. Smith told it on Monday night’s edition of _The Daily Show_, the rise of Donald Trump the politician is tied directly to his inability to buy the Buffalo Bills a year before he threw his hat in the presidential ring.
“In 2014, he wanted to purchase the NFL’s Buffalo Bills,” Smith told Jon Stewart. “The price tag was $1.4 billion. . . . My sources tell me he had $1.1 \[billion\]. . . . He literally called me in 2014 and he said, ‘Stephen, I’m going to tell you this right now’ — and this is a quote — ‘if them mutherfuckers get in my way, I’m gonna get them all back. I’m gonna run for president.’ Those are his exact words.
“And so the NFL often jokes with me, ‘So it’s our fault’ when I tell them that story. And I say, ‘Yeah.’”
This prompted Stewart to make a direct plea to the camera: “People of Buffalo. Give him the fucking team. Save us.”
Smith explained Trump’s viewpoint on the matter.
“He was putting the word out that if this doesn’t happen — he wanted to do it, and this should happen, I’m Donald Trump, I’m very popular and well known, I’m worth over a billion dollars, I should be able to purchase an NFL team if I want it,” Smith said. “And if I can’t get it, it’s because they’re getting in my way. That was his position. Their position was, ‘You didn’t have enough money.’”
And he didn’t. Because at the end of the day that’s all it takes to buy an NFL team: Come up with the best offer. Terry and Kim Pegula came up with a better offer than the twice future president.
But, yes, there’s an alternate universe in which Trump owns the Bills and he isn’t the president and he calls in to _PFT Live_ on a regular basis to complain that the league office is being very unfair.