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Mark Cuban told the All-In podcast hosts that he spoke a lot with former President Donald Trump.
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During Trump’s 2016 campaign, Cuban said he tried to give some advice, but it went unheeded.
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Cuban said he would try to get Trump involved in the policy, but that it “never amounted to anything.”
Mark Cuban wasn’t always a never-Trumper.
In an interview on the “All-In” podcast published Thursday, Cuban said he was excited to see then-candidate Donald Trump, once an outsider candidate, run for president in 2015.
What soured the billionaire about Trump is that, according to Cuban, the former president never listened.
Cuban said during the podcast episode that he was once excited about the prospect of an outsider running for office.
“Okay, this guy has no chance of winning, but I think it’s great because I don’t like traditional politicians,” Cuban said, recalling the time he saw Trump descend the golden escalators in June 2015. “There’s nothing about me that makes me think that the way we do politics or the way the government is run is any good at all.”
During the early stages of Trump’s campaign, Cuban told the podcast hosts that he spoke with Trump a lot, about 10 to 15 times on the phone, and that he would try to give advice or talk about policy.
A Trump campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
But Cuban felt those conversations were going nowhere.
“I remember asking him, ‘You know, do you realize that as president you have to make decisions that could kill people?’” Cuban recalled. “And he really didn’t want to respond: ‘Yes, I get it, I get it.'”
Cuban told the podcast hosts that he would ask Trump about his campaign’s ground game, and Cuban said Trump would address concerns: “Yes, I let the evangelicals do all that, I’m not worried about it.”
Cuban also recalled a time when he tried to engage Trump in a discussion about privacy issues.
He “just didn’t want to talk about that at all,” Cuban said, “and that happened several times, where I tried to start conversations about some kind of policy, and it didn’t get anywhere.”
One of the last straws, according to Cuban, was when he emailed Trump: “At some point you have to learn these things, you literally have to learn these things to be president, and he didn’t respond.”
Cuban said on the podcast that he then went on CNN in 2016 and told the newspaper that Trump makes no effort to learn.
“Look, I like the guy, but he’s not learning,” Cuban told CNN. “He makes no effort to learn anything, and I think that remains true to this day, because you can’t look at the things he says and say, ‘That’s a really profound answer.’ Or: ‘That’s a nuanced answer.'”
Cuban did not respond to a request for comment.
Cuban has been outspoken about his complaints against Trump, calling the former president “unethical” and criticizing him for turning the Republican Party into his “family business.”
Even though the billionaire is keen to emphasize that he is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, the Cuban endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July.
“I’ve said this many times: If it was a non-MAGA candidate, especially if it was still Joe Biden, I would vote Republican,” he told the podcast hosts. “I’ve voted Republican before.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
