Donald Trump was extremely interested in learning about cocaine during a podcast appearance on Tuesday.
Speaking with comedian Theo Von on his This Past Weekend show, the former president spoke about the scourge of addiction and how it affected his own brother, Fred Trump Jr. The two were discussing opioids specifically when Trump asked Von—who is in recovery from cocaine, not opioid, addiction—about how he’d gotten addicted to drugs himself. “I would just do cocaine,” Von answered.
Trump laughed and remarked: “That’s down and dirty, right?” He also asked if Von still takes cocaine or if it became “too much to handle.”
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“Some of the stuff started to get a real rattle in it too,” Von replied. “I don’t know where we were even getting it from in this country, but yeah, it started to make me feel like I was a mechanic or something.”
“So the thing you go back to then is alcohol, for the most part?” Trump asked.
“Right, yeah, but what I want probably is cocaine,” Von said. “But I know that if I have a drink, then it’ll give me, it’ll be like, OK, well, I had a drink, then I can do this.”
“Is cocaine a stronger up?” Trump asked, presumably meaning high.
“Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie,” Von answered. “You know what I’m saying? You’ll be out on your own porch. You’ll be your own street lamp. You’re frickin’...”
“And is that a good feeling?” Trump asked, cutting in.
“No, it’s horrible,” Von said. “But you do it anyway.”
“So it’s not even good during what would be normally the good time, in other words?” Trump summarized. “So why would you do it?”
The wild exchange came after Trump had spoken about his own teetotalism, saying he’d never had a “glass of alcohol” in his life. He also asked Von if he thought quitting drugs or alcohol is harder.
“You think you’re controlling it,” Trump said, with Von adding: “And then you’re go-kart racing with hookers and stuff. It gets bad.”
During the interview, Trump attributed his own aversion to alcohol to some sage advice he’d received decades ago. “I had a great brother who taught me a lesson: Don’t drink,” Trump said.
Trump’s older brother, Fred Jr., died in 1981 at the age of 42 from a heart attack that his family said stemmed from alcoholism. Their father, Fred Sr., had disapproved of his eldest son’s drinking.
“He was a great guy. He was a handsome, very handsome guy,” Trump told Von of his older sibling. “I admired so much about him. He had so much going. He had the look, he had unbelievable personality.”
Trump said he could see his brother’s issues, which he thought may have originated during his college days. “Somewhere along the line it happened and all of a sudden—you know, this is not unique,” he explained. “This is a very common story, unfortunately. And then the family would see it and start to notice it. It didn’t get better.”
The Republican nominee also speculated that he too could have ended up like his brother. “I would say that if I did drink, I could conceivably be the type of personality that would have—like you—that would have a problem,” he said.
“He was wise, in a sense,” Trump added of his brother. “Think of it: He’s got this problem, and it was very important for him to convey to me not to have this problem. And I couldn’t have been successful if I had that problem.”
Von asked Trump if he and Fred Jr. had fun together. “He had a great talent for flying, he was a pilot,” Trump said. He added that Fred had been a “really talented” aviator. “But ultimately he had to give that [up] because of the alcohol. He had to give that up, which was a hard thing for him to do, but he had to give that up.”
Trump has previously spoken about his regret at pressuring Fred Jr. to abandon his dream of becoming a TWA pilot and join the family business—a move for which their father had also pushed. Trump told The Washington Post in 2019 “the biggest mistake” was the “double pressure” that he and his father put on Fred Jr.
