What Prompted Charlie Sheen to Once Say, "If Trump Will [Have] Me, I'd Be His VP in a Heartbeat!"

Charlie Sheen has always been a well-known critic of former president Donald Trump. So when actor Owen Wilson compared the Anger Management actor to the Republican leader in his 2017 interview with the Daily Beast, titled "Donald Trump Is the Charlie Sheen of Politics," Sheen responded with a witty jab. "Dear O. Wilson they took your comment out of context! I'm honored! Thank you! If Trump will [have] me, I'd be his VP in a heartbeat!" he wrote on X. 

Wilson had used the analogy to explain why Trump's brazen remarks were helping him 'win' the media game. “You can’t help but get a kick out of him, and I think part of it is we’re so used to politicians on both sides sounding like actors at press junkets – it’s sort of by rote, and they say all the right things,” the Fool's Gold actor said. “Here’s somebody who’s not following the script. It’s like when Charlie Sheen was doing that stuff – like, wow! He’s answering a question completely honestly and in an entertaining way. You sort of feel he could be a character from ‘Network.’”

Wilson further opined, “I don’t know if I’m not taking [Trump] as seriously as I should, but when he said he was going down to the border, and he showed up at a press conference and said, ‘Now I’m going out to the border, and I hope I’ll see you later’ — sort of suggesting that it was so dangerous that ‘who knows if I’ll see you later’…I don’t know, it was just funny to me. The guy is a showman. You have to sort of get a kick out of the guy. It is entertaining, for sure. That’s why people are tuning in.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, months prior to Wilson's remark, Sheen had criticized Trump with a set of controversial tweets that he later deleted. “Hey Trump, ‘A farce or comedy is best played; a tragedy is best read at home’ Abe Lincoln,” he wrote while quoting the 16th President of the United States. (The late President Lincoln is said to have made the statement after witnessing a play of Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice, as per The Washington Examiner). “America please Wake Up! #AnyonebutTrump," Sheen penned back then. Likewise in July 2015, the Brothers in Arms actor tweeted, then deleted, “Trump you’re a sad and silly homunculus. Your words are as poignant as a sack of cat farts. You’re a shame pile of idiocy.” 

In 2016, while appearing on The Graham Norton Show, Sheen narrated a personal incident that made him dislike Trump. “I was at a dinner with my ex-wife Brooke [Mueller] and her family, and about halfway through I noticed Donald staring at my watch,” Sheen recounted. “He says, ‘I want to give you an early wedding gift as a gesture from me and Melania’ — and she doesn’t say a word...she’s very sweet and very pretty but she just kind of sits there. Anyhow, so he says ‘These are platinum diamond Harry Winston’ and he pulls off his cufflinks and he gives them to me.”

As per EW, he continued, “Smash cut to about six months later, I had some jewelry getting appraised at the house... She took the loop, spent about four seconds, and kind of recoiled from it — much like people do from Trump — and says, ‘In their finest moment, this is cheap pewter and bad zirconias.’ And they’re stamped ‘Trump,’ and I just thought, ‘What does this really say about the man, that he said, ‘Here’s a great wedding gift,’ and it’s just a bag of dog sh–?’”