Make the Buffalo Bills Great Again

BUFFALO, NY — Frank Dawidowicz doesn't need Donald Trump to tell him America has fallen from its greatest days. He's reminded of it everyday.

Dawidowicz, 59, lives just a few blocks from where he grew upwards: in the shadow of Buffalo's Grand Central Terminal — an immensely ornate, 17-story art deco train station, congenital in the 1920s for a urban center expected to have a population in the millions. (Information technology'south at present down to about 250,000.)

The terminal has sat substantially unused since the 1970s, a vast husk on Buffalo's east cease that Dawidowicz looks at like a taunting reminder of the city's heyday.

"We live in no-human's land now," Dawidowicz says. "It's absolutely heartbreaking. My parents and grandparents would cry if they were live to see it."

Buffalo'south One thousand Cardinal Concluding, abased since the late 1970s. (Mark Hogan/Flickr's Creative Commons)

We're sitting at the East Side Inn, a bar about 3 blocks from the defunct train station. Information technology'south the only sign of activeness for at to the lowest degree a foursquare mile, and a few patrons occasionally trickle in and out throughout the afternoon.

Dawidowicz can easily tick off a long list of rich people who accept screwed Buffalo — the steel mill owners who left town, the Sabres possessor convicted of a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme, the executives at ATI Metals who he says have forced him to exist locked out of piece of work and on unemployment for most of the past 28 weeks.

But he thinks Donald Trump is a different kind of rich guy. As proof, he points to Trump'southward bid to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2022 — an try that reflected the billionaire'south genuine commitment to assistance build the city, Dawidowicz says.

"Trump would never take moved the team away," he says. "He actually cares about Buffalo."

How Trump'south bid for the Bills previewed his presidential run

Facing prominent rivals in a competitive race, Donald Trump tried to woo Buffalo by promising to start winning over again and preclude jobs from going elsewhere.

It was 2014. Trump's presidential bid was notwithstanding more than a year away, but the billionaire was jockeying for a prize perhaps but as important to Buffalonians: their dear Bills football game franchise.

"If information technology were me, I'd continue the team in Buffalo," Trump told a local radio station at the fourth dimension about his $1 billion offer to buy the team. "I remember it'south something that's really vital to the area — it would exist catastrophic, in my opinion, if Buffalo lost the Buffalo Bills."

(Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Trump ultimately lost his play for the Bills, getting outbid by fracking multibillionaire Terry Pegula. Just Trump'south flirtation with the Bills football squad isn't just another one of his failed business organization dealings, like Trump Steaks or Trump Magazine. Instead, information technology now looks like an early trailer for the feature moving picture of his presidential run — total of fearmongering, k promises, and personal attacks when things went sour.

On Tuesday, voters in New York will head to the ballot box for the Republican primary. More than anywhere else in the land, this Rust Belt slice of western New York is expected to overwhelmingly support Trump — and button him closer to the White Firm than he'southward been at any point earlier.

The several dozen Trump supporters I've spoken to hither don't love everything most him. Only they speak of his button to buy the Bills much equally they speak of his push for the presidency — equally a powerful man of affairs's heartfelt effort to save their team, their city, and their country from all the forces working to tear them autonomously.

Why some Trump supporters in Buffalo are drastic for a successful builder

Judy Pukalo remembers Christmas Eve 1982, when the Bethlehem Steel Visitor announced that its plant in South Buffalo would finish nearly all of its steel production. Well-nigh 10,000 people — including her husband, a foreman — were out of piece of work substantially overnight.

"I'll never forget that," says Pukalo, 72. "All we had was my minimum wage job."

The Buffalo-area boondocks of Lackawanna retained a steel plant into the 2000s, acquired by a company based in Grand duchy of luxembourg. Pukalo's sons got jobs in its the blast furnaces.

Hillary Clinton, then running for senator of New York, stopped past the institute for a campaign event. She promised that she would fight to keep it open up, and Pukalo even so keeps a framed photo of her son with Clinton from the visit. Simply nobody saved the plant, and information technology stopped production for expert in 2009.

"Both of my boys worked there," she says. "I'll never forgive [Clinton] for that."

(Mark Wilson/Getty)

Pukalo feared something similar was afoot when longtime Bills owner Ralph Wilson died in 2022 and the team was put on the market. Rock star Jon Bon Jovi expressed involvement in the team; Bon Jovi had a group of investors in Toronto, and it was widely feared in Buffalo that he'd move the team to that wealthier metropolis.

"Everyone wanted to movement the team out of Buffalo," Pukalo says. "Trump is a Bills fan, and he wouldn't accept let that happen."

This is one of the things that came upward again and once again in interviews of Trump supporters: They've seen a long slide of manufacturing in Buffalo, and they see Trump as evidence that building successful businesses in New York doesn't have to be a thing of the past.

"It'southward been and then sad watching Buffalo dwindling abroad," says Nick Vicaretti, 64. "But Trump's a architect. He wants to let us build again."

Trump has understood the basic draw of that message since his days of making a play for the Bills. "I have a rails tape that's pretty much unparalleled," he told the Buffalo News in pitching his bid for the squad.

In the interview, Trump emphasized that he once bought a team — the New Bailiwick of jersey Generals, of the Us Football League, which directly competed with the NFL. "The NFL owners respected me for it because I took a expressionless league and made it hot," Trump said. (Some subsequently blamed Trump for the ultimate demise of the Generals and the USFL every bit a whole.)

How Trump's failure to "Make the Bills Bang-up Again" explains the problem with his campaign

Many Trump supporters here frame this as the core of his appeal, both as a potential franchise possessor and presidential candidate: He's not but the savviest man of affairs around — he's also the simply 1 personally committed to restoring Buffalo's greatness.

But these concepts aren't the same, and their conflict came out in Trump's characteristic whining after his offer for the team was rejected.

Afterward Trump was outbid, he released a surprising statement congratulating the new possessor and wishing the team the best of luck without him.

Only that graciousness didn't last very long — 10 days, to exist exact. Trump was presently on Twitter again to mock the team's new possessor, Pegula, for wasting his money on the team.

The Wilson family should give thanks me. Pegula overpaid for the @buffalobills considering of me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 19, 2014

About a calendar month later, Trump once more took to Twitter as a sore loser. He said that while he would have "produced a winner," he was okay with losing the squad because he didn't actually want it and the NFL is tiresome anyhow.

The @nfl games are so boring now that actually, I'm glad I didn't get the Bills. Deadening games, too many flags, as well soft!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Oct thirteen, 2014

Trump's fans in Buffalo clearly understand that the team is something of a financial gamble. It'southward why they feared someone would move information technology to Toronto in the outset place: They know there are more rich people in the Canadian city, and they know that someone looking to maximize his profits might move the team there for more money.

While competing for the Bills, Trump sidestepped the distance between his fiscal interests and Buffalo's past arguing that they were actually in line: He promised to both brand the squad thrive for him and keep it in the city.

Trump may take failed to get the Bills, only he all the same has Buffalo

This can aid us empathize Trump's campaign for the presidency, and at least part of his appeal in Buffalo. Like his bid for the team, his presidential run has been buoyed past a host of grandiose and unrealistic promises — to restore manufacturing jobs, to eliminate America's merchandise deficit, to spur wildly unrealistic economic growth — that appear to magically resolve fundamental differences.

Equally with his bid for the Bills, it's impossible to know if any of these really matter to him as long equally he just remains a candidate. But until that moment really comes, Trump's supporters in Buffalo tin keep to project their hopes that a billionaire existent estate magnate really has the little guy's interests at middle.

Trump'southward business smarts would have permit the Bills thrive in Buffalo as possessor, and they would go along jobs in Buffalo if Trump becomes president, says Jerry Rojek, 72, a native of South Buffalo.

"We've been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking because they keep moving the jobs away," Rojek says. "We need a man of affairs who can make the ... money flow to cities similar Buffalo."

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/19/11448328/donald-trump-buffalo-bills

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