Mark Cuban vividly remembers the moment he realized that Donald Trump was a fraud.
The former president naturally came up on Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show” as Cuban, a billionaire businessman and former reality TV star himself, used to have long conversations with Trump over the phone — but publicly distanced himself in 2016.
Jon Stewart graciously suggested the Republican presidential nominee initially appealed to Cuban as an “outsider” by decrying the “status quo” and corporate capture of Washington, D.C., before asking when Cuban finally realized Trump merely wanted “the deed to the swamp” — rather than drain it.
“About the third time I talked to him,” Cuban told 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 suggested that the Trump Organization owner has run his own family business as a “monarch” for so long, that his routine dismissal of checks and balances in the White House might not even stem from “malevolence” — but from how he’s always operated in the past.
“Yeah, ‘This is my country,’ right?” Cuban replied. “‘Everybody else is bad, Donald good.’”
Stewart argued this has also led Trump, who has routinely attacked anyone who disagrees with him, to deem “whoever thinks Donald good, also good.” Cuban was once chief among them, meanwhile, and even pondered being his running mate in the 2016 election.
“Would I consider? Yes,” the fellow billionaire told Business Insider in 2015.
“I don’t care what his actual positions are,” Cuban added at 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 asked on Monday about the last time he’s had “these counseling sessions” with Trump, the Dallas Mavericks minority owner said they discussed “medical care type stuff” during the pandemic — prompting his interviewer to close with a bona fide crowd pleaser.
“Were you the guy who suggested bleach?” Stewart quipped.