Mark Cuban vividly remembers the second he realized that Donald Trump was a fraud.
The previous president naturally got here up on Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show” as Cuban, a billionaire businessman and former actuality TV star himself, used to have lengthy conversations with Trump over the cellphone — however publicly distanced himself in 2016.
Jon Stewart graciously steered the Republican presidential nominee initially appealed to Cuban as an “outsider” by decrying the “status quo” and company seize of Washington, D.C., earlier than asking when Cuban lastly realized Trump merely needed “the deed to the swamp” — somewhat than drain it.
“About the third time I talked to him,” Cuban advised Stewart. “He wasn’t about changing.”
“We were talking about this one debate for CNBC that he wasn’t going to be at,” he added, “and … I’m like, ‘Donald, why don’t you go to a local small business and sit there at the table and just show off your business chops? Just show people you’re a businessman.’”
“He goes, ‘Donald Trump and Mark Cuban don’t go to people’s houses and have dinner. Are you kidding me?’” Cuban recalled. “That’s who he is. When we talked about … [his political] ground game: ‘I got all these religious people who are gonna do the work for me.’”
Stewart steered that the Trump Group proprietor has run his family enterprise as a “monarch” for thus lengthy, that his routine dismissal of checks and balances within the White Home may not even stem from “malevolence” — however from how he’s all the time operated previously.
“Yeah, ‘This is my country,’ right?” Cuban replied. “‘Everybody else is bad, Donald good.’”
Rocky Widner through Getty Photos
Stewart argued this has additionally led Trump, who has routinely attacked anybody who disagrees with him, to deem “whoever thinks Donald good, also good.” Cuban was as soon as chief amongst them, in the meantime, and even contemplated being his operating mate within the 2016 election.
“Would I consider? Yes,” the man billionaire advised Business Insider in 2015.
“I don’t care what his actual positions are,” Cuban added on the time. “I don’t care if he says the wrong thing. He says what’s on his mind. He gives honest answers rather than prepared answers. This is more important than anything any candidate has done in years.”
When requested on Monday concerning the final time he’s had “these counseling sessions” with Trump, the Dallas Mavericks minority proprietor stated they mentioned “medical care type stuff” through the pandemic — prompting his interviewer to shut with a bona fide crowd pleaser.
“Were you the guy who suggested bleach?” Stewart quipped.
