Josh Brolin opened up about his past friendship with President Donald Trump, calling him “marketing genius” while emphasizing that his personal experiences with Trump don’t match his current public persona.
The “Wake Up Dead Man” actor met the then business mogul when they filmed Oliver Stone’s 2010 “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” Trump was eventually cut from the “Wall Street” sequel but the pair were friends for a while.
“I’m not scared of Trump, because even though he says he’s staying forever, it’s just not going to happen,” Brolin said in an interview with The Independent, published Saturday. “And if it does, then I’ll deal with that moment. But having been a friend of Trump before he was president, I know a different guy.”
“I’m sure there was a lot of corruption involved,” Brolin said of Trump. He described him as an entrepreneur, saying to the paper he was curious about him being able to build a $400m hotel “in the middle of a cesspool city during the late Seventies – that’s interesting to me. Now it’s power unmitigated, it’s unregulated.”
However, he credited Trump’s ability to market not only his business projects, but also himself saying, “There is no greater genius than him in marketing – he takes the weakness of the general population and fills it. And that’s why I think a lot of people feel that they have a mascot in him. I think it’s much less about Trump than it is about the general population and their need for validation.”
Brolin has never publicly discussed when his friendship with the president ended. Right before the 2020 election, the actor made an Instagram post speaking out against Trump.
“I refuse to believe that Donald Trump is our core version of American masculinity,” Brolin said in the post at the time. “The America that was great was never based on creating hate and conspiracy in order to win. There have been a few, but none has lasted. Donald Trump has lied over 50,000 documented times, but we still are willing to let it go because he speaks to an American demographic that no longer felt masculine.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Brolin reflected on his “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” character. In the film, the actor plays Monsignor Wicks, a religious leader who “preaches hateful rhetoric in the form of piety.” While some may draw parallels to the character and the president the actor insisted there was no connection.
“I could make something up and say it was rooted in a kind of Trumpian greed,” he said. Instead, he did note of the character, “Wicks garners a sense of power, then there are no boundaries.”
