Donald Trump’s victory last week It made me think of a conversation I had with one of his closest friends – the late, great Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot.

It was exactly one year ago to the day of his death. A frail but still fighting Bernie told me he was in a “particularly angry mood”. Capitalism has been attacked by the left-wing forces of the Biden-Harris administration.

Marcus believed (on good evidence) that they were out to dismantle what made this country great: the free market. Bernie was going to focus what was left of his energy on making sure he didn’t, including helping elect Trump president.

It was the last long-form interview Bernie did as his health continued to fail. Last week he died peacefully surrounded by family and friends, knowing he had lived a life worth living. He single-handedly lifted himself out of poverty and battled the anti-Semitism of his day to become a billionaire and major philanthropist.

He created one of America’s great companies—the shining example that capitalism actually works for the average American.

He didn’t do it alone, of course, but with the help of friends like his old friend Ken Langone. Long before the name “Langone” became synonymous with a world-class healthcare system (full disclosure: I am a prostate cancer survivor thanks to the excellent care provided by NYU Langone Medical Center), “Kenny,” as Bernie called him, he was a Wall Street Legend.

Bernie moved out of a house to achieve the American dream; Ken was the son of a Long Island plumber who struggled to make ends meet. Like many ambitious men of the day, Ken looked to the big city to make his mark.

Cutting his teeth

After college, Langone cut his teeth at a RW Pressprich firm. Bigger, WASPy firms in the early 1960s wanted nothing to do with a straight-talking, working-class Italian kid. (For the full story of Langone’s amazing life and career, pick up his great autobiography, “I Love Capitalism!: An American Story.”)

But Langone was a great stock analyst and banker. Let’s just say you couldn’t put it down. He convinced another upstart, Ross Perot, to hire him as lead banker on the IPO of Perot’s computer company, Electronic Data Systems. The frenzy surrounding the deal cemented Perot’s status as a business leader and billionaire. It also cemented Langone’s status as one of the world’s great financiers.

Knowing all this, you can see how Bernie and Ken became friends, eventually business partners, when Marcus hit a low point in his life. In a corporate restructuring, Bernie was fired as CEO of Handy Dan, a highly profitable, publicly traded chain of hardware stores. He soon turned to “Kenny” for advice.

“When Bernie came to see me, he was shot. . . he told me it was almost broken,” Langone said last week in an interview with The Post.

Langone recalled that Bernie often dreamed big about how to revolutionize home goods retail — a new company that would offer a one-stop shop for tools, cement, paint, you name it. Langone was impressed.

“Okay, you’re fired,” Langone recalls telling his friend. “But I think you got kicked in the ass with the golden horseshoe.”

Langone used all his Wall Street contacts to raise money for that dream. Home Depot started small; it barely had inventory. It is now a $400 billion company that employs nearly half a million people across the country.

One big reason, Langone tells me, is that Bernie wanted to spread wealth to the average Home Depot worker through free markets.

“We called our business model the ‘inverted triangle,'” Langone said. “In most businesses, the important people were at the top – the CEO and his people. Not us.”

Langone said Bernie was adamant that “we didn’t even have a headquarters,” believing it would create distance from the employees at the outlets. People were paid a decent wage and had a chance to become owners. Workers were given the opportunity to buy stock, including “kids packing shopping carts in the parking lot,” Langone tells me.

Becoming millionaires

“I know at least 3,000 of these employees, many of whom started out making minimum wage, who have become millionaires,” Langone said proudly during our conversation.

Bernie, on his deathbed last Monday, was confident his other friend Donald Trump would be elected president within hours and played a role in that, says a friend who was there. A Trump victory would help expose the left’s lies about the foundations of our great nation, which include their false claims about the evils of capitalism.

Yes, it’s a great sight to see a huge Home Depot store full of shoppers and hardworking employees getting by and knowing the government didn’t build this. Instead, it was a poor kid from Newark and his friend, the son of a plumber from Roslyn, LI.

As “Kenny” would say, you’ve got to love capitalism. And you gotta love Bernie Marcus.