Back when I was a subscriber, Playboy interviewed both Donald Trump and Mark Cuban (separately over the course of years, I should add). Here are a few highlights that I thought you might be interested in.
I wonder if Hochman is still "comfortable" with Trump. Also, "sumptuous" is possibly the grossest way to refer to Trump's office. But the part about him being enthralled with himself is by no means a stretch of my imagination. The Duke of Mammon only thinks about other people when he's in a room with an attractive blonde woman, and it's not because he's considerate.
How's the Taj Mahal doing these days?
That was probably the extent of it back then, but now I want to know who does his combover. Ever watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit? There was an episode on hair featuring a Vegas magician with the most elaborate combover ever. I suspect Trump might use that guy. I mean, Trump knows Penn, so . . .
He keeps talking past tense here. I think he's still a brat, which is a little weird considering how, in the 2024 election, it was his opponent that kept getting called a brat. But did you notice the lie he told in this answer? He lies so often that it's hard to catch them all, but he just claimed to not be violent, yet he gave one of his teachers a black eye?
Everything you need to know to understand this piece of human offal is right here. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if Fred Trump had only told his son that he loved him, we wouldn't be going through this fucking disaster.
This interview was in 2003 or 4, so he really hasn't changed all that much. He's been using the same tactics all these years. Also, there's that V word again. I've listened to a lot of Washington insiders who used to work for him talk about the experience, and they all agree: if Trump doesn't get his way, and he's not in front of a camera, he throws a temper tantrum, which I think is a more accurate term than "controlled violence."
That part about the Guinness Book of World Records is true. He was very, very briefly listed for this comeback. However, per Politico, they dropped it a year later because the idea of a comeback "was subjective and not standardizable across the globe." I wonder how he feels about no longer having that record. Is he even aware of it?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you're wondering what my laughter is in reference to, look up how that foundation is doing these days and, uh, why it doesn't exist anymore.
I do believe him when he says he's never had booze or drugs. I even believe the coffee thing. He gets his caffeine from Diet Coke instead. The good news is, when we get to the Nuremburg part of this shitshow, he can't say, hey, I was drunk at the time. Or, I was high at the time. All of this madness is him. Sober. No excuses to save him from being found guilty. Also, why are you talking to people who are fucking on a table in front of you? They're busy, and that's rude.
So. How's that call to Saudi Arabia going?
I would pay good money to see that clown doing his jerking-off-two-tall-invisible-men dance while listening to Eminem.
Hm. Something sticks out in that block above. What could that possibly be? When you see it, please join me in wondering where *that* Donald Trump went. Oh right, he never existed. This is just more bullshit.
I'm just going to let that one stand on its own. Because holy shit, that is a staggering level of hypocrisy. I mean, he had no way of knowing that one day he would be in such a leadership role, but still, if you're going to talk about how the world should be, and then find yourself in a position to make those changes, and you do the exact opposite? I don't believe in Hell, but I'm pretty sure that if Hell existed, it would be built specifically for people like Donald J. Trump.
And don't get me started on John Trump.
(I guess I didn't let that one stand on its own. Ah well.)
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. This was Trump vs. Cuban. Don't worry, there aren't a lot of excerpts from Mark Cuban's interview.
There are two things happening here. Remember those insiders I mentioned earlier? They all agree that almost all of Trump's bullshit is performative. Behind the scenes he's polite, and he always apologizes for giving someone a hard time publicly. So if he's on TV calling you names, he usually gives you a call after to say, hey, sorry for all of that, but you gotta play the game.
The second thing is, of course, Trump's love affair with himself. I'm sure Cuban has a high opinion of himself. He's a billionaire. It comes with the territory. But it's refreshing to see someone on his level note this about Trump.
This probably goes without saying, but this was before streaming was a thing. This idea was clearly ahead of its time. Playboy was right in this case. It was too early. There's more:
Here is the key difference between Trump and Cuban. Trump clearly cares more about money than anything else on the planet except maybe for himself. That makes him like almost every CEO on the planet. To them, the purpose of a business is to make money. And while it's true that this is *a* purpose, it's not *the* purpose.
Cuban understands the latter. He concerns himself with the consumer experience. A business exists to solve a problem for the consumer. The byproduct of that is putting money into the hands of the business. Also note that he wants to cut the theaters in on the profits. If Trump had come up with this idea, sharing the profits would be unthinkable to him. That's why, if I had the choice to work for either Trump or Cuban, I would pick Cuban. Trump's employees get yelled at. Cuban's employees make money. Just ask the people who worked for him at MicroSolutions. How many of them walked away from that business as millionaires? Almost all of them.
I'm ending on this note because Cuban is warning businesspeople not to buy their own line of bullshit. Sure, it's easy to look back on that particular bubble and say, yeah, it was destined for failure. Yet here we are again, except this time the bubble is AI. The techbros are drunk off their own shit, thinking they have the ability to print money.
Except . . . do you keep an eye on the Stock Market? I do, enough to know that facts are meaningless in the current market. Confidence is the only thing holding it up. What's the percentage of the market that's currently propped up by AI technologies? I've seen numbers ranging from 30-45%. Even if it's closer to the former, what happens if that bubble pops?
I think we're about to have another depression, one that will put the Great Depression to shame. I know in America we're trying to turn the clock back to when heterosexual rich white men held all the power, not just most of it, but can we not rewind to the 1930s, please?
I'm at a loss as to why we don't do what we usually do: wait for someone else to figure out the AI thing, then kill them and steal it and claim it as our own. We'd save a lot more money that way. Although to be fair, we don't have a lot of weapons right now due to our quixotic Iran jerkoff fantasies*, so if China beats us to the punch, we probably wouldn't be able to take them in a fight.
All right, that's all for now. The Playboy series will continue. I already have a new batch of shit, including a Dustin Hoffman fart joke told by John Malkovich, but we'll get to that at some point in the future. I'll try to make tomorrow night's GF shorter.
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*I think we went into Venezuela first because Trump's administration knew, 100%, that we'd be in Iran for months, if not years. The oil in Venezuela is supposed to tide us over until we conquer the Strait of Hormuz. And by "us" I mean US oil companies.
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