“Shark Tank” billionaire Mark Cuban is plowing into politics again with some interesting perspectives on President Donald Trump. The owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team tweeted a backhanded defense of the president on Saturday, arguing that Trump is essentially too clueless to have pulled off any collusion with Russia during his campaign.
“No chance this is a DJT-led conspiracy,” Cuban wrote on Twitter. Trump “isn’t detail oriented, organized or big picture enough” to orchestrate it, he added.
As “people with Russian connects came into the campaign,” Trump “had no clue that those connections were possibly being influenced by Russia,” Cuban speculated. Trump likely “had no idea this was happening,” according to Cuban. “He was doing what he was told to do. Stick to the script and read what was written for him.”
Russians probably “took advantage” of Trump’s greed, Cuban said, by “back channeling coordinated misinformation in an attempt to influence voters” that they apparently suspected Trump would exploit.
It’s hardly the first time Cuban — who hasn’t ruled out a run for the presidency in 2020 — has attacked Trump’s intelligence. Cuban earlier this month slammed Trump as the “Zoolander” president for his narcissism and intellectual shortcomings. Last September, Cuban offered to pay $10 million to a charity of his choosing if Trump would meet him in a four-hour interview to explain his own policies. Trump snapped back that Cuban wasn’t “smart enough to understand what’s going on.”
Beyond being unaware of the mechanisms of his campaign, Cuban believes Trump also stumbled into trouble because he failed to act like a politician and made decisions based on business concerns.
“Russians have made him a lot of money buying condos and investing in his buildings and hosting his beauty pageant,” Cuban tweeted, describing his Trump theory. “That makes them his friends. He ignored their backgrounds.” Trump praised Putin because he hoped it would shake some Russian funds loose for Trump’s business deals, according to Cuban’s view.
Cuban is also convinced that Trump was simply “thinking like a businessman” when he hired Paul Manafort as his campaign manager. Bringing on board a man with Russian ties and lucrative contracts with Russian movers and shakers would have been a “win-win” in Trump’s eyes, Cuban tweeted. Manafort would either help him win the election, or help him get Russian business if Trump lost, Cuban noted. He closed out with a reminder that this is all just conjecture: “That’s what I think happened. Feel free to agree or disagree.”
Trump, for his part, has tweeted about Cuban dozens of times. Just last month, after Cuban hinted he was thinking about a presidential run of his own, Trump tweeted that the investor “isn’t smart enough to run for president.”