Mark Cuban vividly remembers the moment he realized Donald Trump was a fraud.
The former president naturally appeared on Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show” because Cuban, a billionaire businessman and former reality TV star himself, used to have long conversations with Trump on the phone — but publicly distanced himself in 2016.
Jon Stewart graciously suggested that the Republican presidential nominee initially appealed to Cuban as an “outsider” denouncing the “status quo” and corporate takeover of Washington, D.C., before asking when Cuban finally realized that Trump simply wanted “the deed to the swamp” — rather than draining it.
“The third time I talked to him, he didn’t want to change,” Cuban told Stewart.
“We were talking about a CNBC debate that he wasn’t going to be on,” he added, “and … I said, ‘Donald, why don’t you go to a local small business and sit down at the table and show off your business skills? Just show people that you’re a businessman.'”
“He says, ‘Donald Trump and Mark Cuban don’t go to people’s houses for dinner. Are you kidding me?’” Cuban recalls. “That’s him. When we talked about… [his political] field game: “I have all these religious people who are going to do the work for me.”
Stewart suggested that the Trump Organization owner has run his own family business as a “monarch” for so long that his systematic rejection of checks and balances in the White House may not stem from “malice” — but from how he has always operated in the past.
“Yeah, this is my country, right?” Cuban replied. “Everyone else is bad, Donald is good.”
Stewart argued that it also led Trump, who has regularly attacked anyone who disagrees with him, to assume that “anyone who thinks Donald is good is also good.” Cuban was once chief among them, and even considered becoming his running mate in the 2016 election.
“Would I consider doing it? Yes,” the billionaire told Business Insider in 2015.
“It doesn’t matter what his actual positions are,” Cuban added at the time. “It doesn’t matter if he says something wrong. He says what he thinks. He gives honest answers instead of canned answers. That’s more important than anything any candidate has done in years.”
Asked Monday about the last time he had “those counseling sessions” with Trump, the Dallas Mavericks minority owner said they discussed “healthcare-type topics” during the pandemic — prompting his interviewer to conclude with a genuine crowd-pleaser.
“Were you the one who suggested the bleach?” Stewart joked.
