Donald Trump was apparently so upset by one of Lewis Black's Daily Show segments that he tried to contact him about it, Black told The Daily Beast.
"His assistant called my assistant, said he wanted to talk to me," Black recalled. "At first, it was like, ‘What? Why would he call me? No one ever called me about anything I ever did on The Daily Show. So I said I was too busy and couldn't talk to him. I thought, 'Wow, I'm a comic, he's an entrepreneur—a businessman. How is it that I'm more busy than he is? That's unbelievable."
Black said in the 2011 segment that Trump's embrace of "birtherism" was a signal that the then-Apprentice host was planning his own presidential run.
"I, for one, couldn't be more on board," Black cracked at the time. "Trump 2012 -- you're fired, America!"
What the US needed, Black argued, was "a crazy Third World dictator."
"He's got what every good dictator needs: a ridiculously over-sized ego," he argued, adding, "This is what I've been waiting for my whole life! A president who's not afraid to tell the truth -- about being a lying a*shole."
That commentary -- ominously titled "President Trump" -- prompted the real estate mogul to try to contact Black not once, but twice. Black told The Beast he outright refused to take the second call.
"I didn't want to talk to him to legitimize him. That's how I felt," he said. "'If I accept his call, that legitimatizes him. And I didn't want to give him any little sense of legitimacy that I could have given him by answering the phone."
Black said he would rather vote for "someone of another species" instead of Trump in this year's election, but did say that he thought both Hillary and Bill Clinton suffered from "a lack of common-f*cking-sense." If "push came to shove," he said, he would vote for the former Secretary of State.
"I'm certainly not going to be happy about it," he added. "But once [Trump] said Mexicans were raping, and pillaging, and stealing our avocados, the ballgame was already over for me."
Watch Black's take on Trump from 2011 below.
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