Borat Star Sacha Baron Cohen Explains What Happened When He Interviewed Donald Trump

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat sequel was released on Amazon Prime Video this week, unabashedly making a mockery of a portion of the United States’ political beliefs. While President Donald Trump does not participate in any of Borat’s schemes in the film, Cohen had previously encountered the current President while playing another one of his characters. For the Ali G movie, Cohen dressed up and met with Trump, asking silly questions and ultimately trying to pitch a product for trump to invest in. While promoting Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm on A Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Cohen recalled his encounter with Trump.

“I was interviewing him as Ali G. The producer of the show was a kind of very handsome, well-spoken English man in a nice tweed jacket. Donald Trump assumed that he was going to be the interviewer and the producer said, ‘No, this is the interview. He’s call Ali G,’” Cohen recalls. according to the actor, Trump was still all in on believing it was a real thing. “And I remember Donald Trump looking at me and I was wearing a sweat suit, I said, ‘Oh, wicked! What is your name? How do you spell that? Is you called Donald?’ His face dropped. He was immediately furious that he was going to have to speak to someone from a lower class borough rather than this rather astute, Etonian producer.”

Cohen recalls, he did manage to keep Trump’s attention for the duration of their scheduled interview. “Actually, he sat through the interview, we had about seven minutes,” Cohen describes. “Publicly, he’ll say, ‘I was the only guy who saw through it.’ He didn’t see through the interview. He answered all of the questions completely normally. In fact, I asked him, ‘How long has people been doin’ business?’ He answered, ‘Well, human beings have been doing business, dealing in rocks for millions of year.’ Obviously, homo sapiens haven’t been around for millions of years and they were dealing in salt. I think the first records were 5 to 10 thousand years ago. He was in it for a long time. Only, really, when I was asking him for money for a business scheme that I had…I was asking for 50 million dollars from him that at that point he was quite rightly not interested. He made his excuses and left.”

Cohen’s full conversation with Colbert can be seen in the video above.

Ultimately, Cohen declares he and Trump do have one thing in common: “I am a professional phoney, like him and I interview the President many years ago.”

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is available now on Amazon Prime Video.