Billionaire Mark Cuban has shed more light on his reasons for distancing himself from former President Donald Trump.
“I’m not a Trump fan at all,” he said on Wednesday’s episode of the “This Past Weekend” podcast. “Used to be, but then kind of grew out of it.”
When Trump announced his bid for the White House in 2015, Cuban had called his candidacy the “best thing to happen to politics in a long, long time.”
Looking back at that moment on “This Past Weekend,” Cuban recalled how he eventually began to change his mind, citing a remark that Trump made after the “Shark Tank” star criticized him publicly.
“What he would do is, he would write it, and then somebody would scan it, and then they’d email it to me. And so he sent me ‘What happened?’ because he saw a CNN interview where I criticized him. And I literally, I told him, I’m like: ‘You’ve got to start learning the issues, right? You can’t just talk,’” Cuban said.
“All these things are important, and if you’re going to be president and … you’ve got a chance to win, then you’ve got to learn this stuff. And I just never felt he made an effort to learn anything. Not just that, but anything, right? And so whenever you try to get into a conversation about details, it never worked,” he continued.
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Last month on “The Daily Show,” Cuban reflected on another interaction that shifted his opinion of Trump’s character, recalling how the former president acted as though he was above meeting with small-business owners.
“He goes: ‘Mark, Donald Trump and Mark Cuban don’t go to people’s houses and have dinner. Are you kidding me?’” Cuban recalled. “That’s who he is.”
Cuban, who describes himself as an independent voter, made multiple media appearances this week in which he slammed the Republican and voiced support for Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2024 White House race.
On Tuesday, he said Trump is unable to demonstrate depth or nuance on policy.
“Whenever Donald Trump says something, everybody else has to explain for him what he said, right?” Cuban told MSNBC. He contrasted that with the Democratic presidential nominee, arguing that she “says what she says [and] everybody knows what she means. That is such a stark difference between the two.”
