Woody Harrelson has revealed how he had a “brutal” dinner with Donald Trump back in 2002.
In an interview with Esquire, Harrelson recounted that his friend Jesse Ventura, who was the governor of Minnesota at the time, invited him to a meeting with Donald Trump and his would-be wife, Melania.
Trump was apparently going to agitate Ventura to run on a joint Democratic ticket in the 2004 election (Trump did consider running in 2004 but never announced a bid, revealing later he had voted for George W. Bush).
According to Harrelson, the dinner took two and a half hours and did not go down well, at least for him and Ventura. “The fun part was watching Jesse’s moves,” he recalled.
“It would look like Trump had him pinned, was going to get him to say yes, and then Jesse would slip out at the last second. Now, at a fair table with four people, each person is entitled to 25 per cent of the conversation, right? I’d say Melania got about 0.1 per cent, maybe. I got about 1 per cent. And the governor, Jesse, he got about 3 per cent. Trump took the rest.”
The True Detective star said it “got so bad” at some point that he had to go outside and “burn one” before returning to the “monologue monopoly”.
He continued, “Listen, I came up through Hollywood, so I’ve seen narcissists. This guy was beyond. It blew my mind. He did say one thing that was interesting, though. He said, ‘You know, I’m worth four billion dollars,’ or maybe he said five billion dollars—one of those numbers, I forget.”
“Anyway, he said, ‘I’m worth, however- many billion dollars. But when I die, no matter how much it is, I know my kids are going to fight over it.’ That was the one true statement he made that night, and I thought, ‘Okay, yeah, that’s pretty cool.’”
As if a meeting with Trump wasn’t enough for a good story, Harrelson shared some more details about his political connections: it emerged that he went to college with incumbent Vice President Mike Pence.
“As a freshman, I gave a sermon to a youth group, and Mike was the guy running the show. He was a junior, I think,” he said. “He struck me as a nice guy, very sincere. I don’t know how well we’d get along now, but we got along okay then.”
