“He’s finally toxic. Donald Trump is finally toxic,” said Mark Cuban.
The billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks—and star of the reality competition series Shark Tank—was of course referring to the leaked video published by The Washington Post late Friday of the Republican presidential nominee, in a 2005 hot mic moment with Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush, bragging about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity because of his fame.
Trump told Bush, the cousin of Dubya and Jeb!, that his then B-list celebrity status afforded him the right to “just start kissing” random women. “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,” said Trump.
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Cuban addressed the heinous video during the panel segment of Friday’s edition of Real Time with Bill Maher. But later on in the program, Cuban, who once offered Trump $10 million to agree to a sit-down interview with him, put his financial chops to use, breaking down the recent revelation by The New York Times—thanks to leaked income tax forms—that Trump lost a whopping $916 million in 1995, thanks to his cratering Atlantic City casinos, airline, and the Plaza Hotel. The Times called it “a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.”
After Cuban claimed that, unlike Trump, he was a “for real” billionaire, the entrepreneur took on the real estate heir’s tax imbroglio.
“That’s crazy! First of all, when you look at that tax return, it shows he didn’t have a billion dollars in cash. You can work backwards from the amount of tax and interest that he earned,” said Cuban. “That means if he didn’t have it, he didn’t have it to lose—so he had to borrow it. So not only did he lose it, he lost someone else’s money. How the fuck do you do that!” “[Trump] actually took the loans that he got from somebody else for we don’t know what, sold those loans—because he had personal guarantees—sold them to the shareholders of those casinos, so not only did he fuck the people that he borrowed $915 [million] or a billion dollars from, he then fucked the casino shareholders who are little guys who are just trying to own a stock and make some money. So he got double the fun,” Cuban continued.
Maher then read the Trump Campaign’s official response to the Times story: “Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes, along with very substantial charitable contributions. Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one that knows how to fix it.”
“Bullshit!” exclaimed Cuban. “He’s horrible. Here’s how you know, right: has there been anyone who’s come forth and said, ‘Donald Trump was a great mentor to me, I learned so much and it helped me build my business?’ Has there been anybody who’s come forward and said, ‘You know what, I invested in Donald’s business and I made so much money?’ Has there been anybody who came forward and said, ‘Donald Trump invested in my business and he helped me make [money]?’ No! All you see is, ‘He took this,’ ‘he stiffed me,’ ‘he sucks.’ He’s horrible at everything! He hasn’t been successful at anything!”
