Donald Trump helped sabotage Toronto’s chances of getting an NFL team

The U.S. presidency is a pretty good consolation prize, but it’s possible that Donald Trump would have preferred to spend his golden years as the owner of a professional football team. According to GQ, Trump was so obsessed with breaking into the the NFL’s owners’ club back in 2014 that he hired Michael Caputo—a Paul Manafort/Roger Stone associate who had worked for Vladimir Putin—to mastermind a fake grassroots campaign aimed at preventing a group of investors, led by Jon Bon Jovi, from buying the Buffalo Bills and possibly moving the team to Toronto. According to GQ, Trump’s hirelings were responsible for those “Bon Jovi–Free Zones” in Buffalo bars that made international news a couple years ago. Trump eventually made a bid on the Bills, but was bested by Terry Pegula, a billionaire who also owns the Buffalo Sabres.