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?

That's what some team owners have reportedly said, contending that the president is driven by a personal grudge stemming from his multiple doomed efforts over the decades to become the owner of an NFL franchise. Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan told USA Today that Trump is "jealous" of the league and its owners, having failed to become one. "He's been elected President, where maybe a great goal he had in life—to own an NFL team—is not very likely," Khan said.

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But, come on, how badly did Trump really want to buy the Bills? Badly enough, it seems, to create a dubious grassroots campaign to pressure the team and the league to not sell to a rival group of bidders.

Back in early 2014, with the team for sale and potential buyers in the process of being narrowed to three finalists—Trump, Buffalo Sabres owner Terry Pegula, and a group of Toronto investors led by Jon Bon Jovi—speculation was rampant that the would-be Canadian buyers planned to move the franchise north of the border. That's when a local fan group sprang up, hoping to turn sentiment in Buffalo against Bon Jovi and his partners.

These activist Bills backers called themselves "12th Man Thunder" and began orchestrating colorful stunts like establishing "Bon Jovi-Free Zones" in local bars, antics that earned them ink everywhere from Breitbart to New York magazine. (All that attention also got them into a legal showdown with Texas A&M over the use of the phrase "12th man," which the Aggies had trademarked.)

But what almost nobody knew—until now—is that the whole thing was pulled together by the then-future president of the United States. In the spring of 2014, Trump hired veteran Republican operative and Buffalo resident Michael Caputo—a close associate of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Caputo had worked with Ollie North during the Reagan years and then helped boost the careers of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin as a political consultant in Russia—now he was enlisted to create a group that would scuttle Bon Jovi's NFL chances.

"Trump knew he couldn't outbid the Canadians," Caputo recounted to me recently. Instead, Caputo explained, he would scare them off by turning Buffalo against them. Two days after we spoke, the president took the stage at a political rally in Alabama and began his smoldering feud with the NFL by calling any player who showed the temerity to kneel during the national anthem a "son of a bitch."

Having been publicly involved with abortive efforts to launch Trump into New York's gubernatorial race the year before, Caputo was too closely associated with the mogul to be the public face of the 2014 effort, so he recruited others. "I had it all set up with neighborhood guys who lived by the stadium," he explained.

"We weren't even allowed to mention [Trump's] name because of the agreement that he signed."

In a stroke of cunning, Caputo recruited Chuck Sonntag, a double amputee cancer survivor, to serve as the group's leader. Press coverage would occasionally identify Caputo as a "PR consultant" to the group, while reporting that it was founded by Sonntag as he lay recovering from his amputations in a rehabilitation center. "It was easier for Sonntag to lose his leg than his team," Caputo recalled.

(Astroturfing like this—covertly funding a supposedly grassroots group—was not a new tactic for Trump and his operatives. Back in 2000, Stone and Trump's Atlantic City casino business paid massive fines after they funneled $150,000 to a group called "the Institute for Law and Society" to run newspaper ads opposing the legalization of a Native American casino in the Catskills and failed to disclose the transaction to New York's lobbying regulators.)

Trump's involvement in the Buffalo scheme was short-lived. According to Caputo, not long after 12th Man Thunder was formed, Trump entered a $1 billion bid for the Bills, and as a condition of that offer, was forbidden from participating in public outreach efforts related to the sale. So, as Caputo recalls, Trump called him and told him that he had to break off contact with him and the fan group. "I can't talk to you anymore because of the NDA I signed," Caputo remembers Trump saying. "Have a good time."

"We immediately made it far more aggressive and anti-Toronto than the president ever envisioned, mostly because we didn't have to worry about getting him crossways with the NFL,"

Charlie Pellien, a Buffalo local who co-founded the group said that keeping a lid on Trump's involvement was a challenge. "It was all behind the scenes and we weren't even allowed to mention his name because of the agreement that he signed," Pellien told me. "I was bursting at the seams to tell people, 'Hey, this was Donald Trump's idea.'"

With Trump having removed himself from the picture, Caputo took the gloves off. "We immediately made it far more aggressive and anti-Toronto than the president ever envisioned, mostly because we didn't have to worry about getting him crossways with the NFL," he said.

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. A local radio station, Jack FM, started playing a version of "Livin' on a Prayer" with new lyrics that went, "Johnny used to get played on Jack / Now he wants our Bills / But Buffalo just won't take that / He's wack."

It generated so much noise and color that Texas A&M, which has trademarked the phrase "12th man" took notice and sent a cease-and-desist letter to the group over its use of the phrase.

Unbowed, Caputo generated a raft of coverage of the dispute that amounted to: Texas A&M threatens double amputee cancer survivor with lawsuit.

The conflict caught the notice of Keith Olbermann, who in July of that year dubbed the university's then-president, Dr. Mark A. Hussey, "The World's Worst Person in Sports" for taking on Sonntag. "Screw you!" Olbermann declared in a segment about the controversy on his eponymous ESPN show. (Olbermann is now GQ's Special Correspondent and host of "The Resistance")

"It changed everything," said Caputo, recalling that immediately after the school landed in Olbermann's crosshairs, he received a call from one of its attorneys looking to broker peace. Feeling emboldened, Caputo said he wouldn't settle with the university unless they gave money to his group, to help them keep the Bills in Buffalo.

"The beating continues unless they donate 25k to this organization to stop the Canadians from buying our team," Caputo said he told the university's attorney. Caputo said the school quickly okayed the sum and that he now wishes he had demanded $50,000 for the group. On July 30, the school and the group announced they had reached a settlement and that the group would change its name to "Bills Fan Thunder."

Representatives for the NFL and the White House did not offer comment for this story. A spokesman for Texas A&M declined to comment and instead referred me to a joint press release from the time that describes the settlement as "amicable."

With the threat of legal action out of the way, the group's campaign continued—and it worked, partially. Bon Jovi didn't get the Bills, but neither did Trump. Instead, in September 2014 the team went to Pegula, who has kept it in Buffalo.

Without an NFL team to run, Trump entered the presidential race nine months later, capitalizing on anti-foreigner sentiment, outrageous stunts and the enthusiasm of colorful grassroots groups to win the presidency. Caputo, Stone and Manafort each joined his presidential campaign as advisers and then left it amid various public blowups. All three have been hauled before Congress as it investigates possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Caputo said Bills Fan Thunder still exists, and that it now has 20 season tickets it uses to send underprivileged youth from Buffalo, along with chaperones, to each home game. Caputo told me that after Trump launched his White House bid, he informed the candidate that the group had transformed into a vehicle for taking poor kids to Bills games. Trump, he said, seemed pleased and regularly peppered him for updates on the organization over the course of the campaign.

Olbermann, meanwhile, has just published a book based on his GQ work critiquing the president—it is called, unsubtly, "Donald Trump is F*cking Crazy." Despite their differences, Caputo places the imperatives of football over mere political disagreements.

"He can do whatever he wants on GQ and say whatever he wants," Caputo said of Olbermann. "He'll always be a hero to me."

Ben Schreckinger is a GQ correspondent in Washington, D.C.

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