MTV News has unearthed a previously unreleased interview with Tupac Shakur, in which the late rapper makes a prescient assessment of the culture of greed and materialism championed by Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.
“If you want to be successful, if you want to be like Trump,” he said, “Gimme, gimme, gimme. Push, push, push, push. Step, step, step. Crush, crush, crush. That’s how it all is, it’s like nobody ever stops.”
The interview was about more than Trump, however—who, in 1992, was just as much a symbol of self-importance as he is today. The politics of social responsibility are the focus of the conversation, with Tupac refuting the idea that any American is truly self-made. “Everybody needs a little help on their way to being self-reliant,” he says. “Everybody needs a little something to become independent. No independent person just grew up and was born independent.”
Trump should be all too familiar with this idea, having built his real estate, hospitality, and entertainment empire on a “small loan” of $1 million from his father.
“We’re got too much money here,” Tupac adds. “Nobody should be hitting the Lotto for $36 million while we’ve got people starving in the streets.”