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Mark Cuban: ‘I Was Dumb’ To Underestimate Trump

Mark Cuban Image by Getty

By Helen Chernikoff November 29, 2016

Billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, a host on the widely watched TV show “Shark Tank” and a serial entrepreneur, is used to backing a winner. An early Trump fan turned vociferous Clinton surrogate, Cuban’s feeling quite the fool three weeks after the election, he’s written on his “Blog Maverick.”

In a post called “My Thoughts on the MSM Getting President Trump Elected and Then Some,” Cuban admits that he played right into the Trump campaign’s hands by describing their candidate’s weaknesses and flaws, such as his tendency to lie and his demonstrated cruelty: “The Trump campaign had to be laughing at me and thanking me at the same time.”

Cuban is a kind of mirror image of Trump — a billionaire who became a household name on reality TV. During the campaign, he thought he was taking Clinton’s fight into Trump’s territory, but now he realizes he wasn’t a threat at all.

Instead of making Trump suppporters rethink their vote, such a tactic intensified their allegiance to him, Cuban has realized. Most Trump supporters don’t actually believe he will build a wall, for example, but they admire the man who sees such a thing as desirable, and is willing to say so.

“The more the media and people like me criticized Donald, the more it played right into their hands. We were the bad guys. We didn’t get it. We represented everything they wanted to change. We were the forces behind the corrupt media. The elites. The establishment. The suckers getting paid off by George Soros and foreign corrupt interests,” Cuban wrote.

What’s more, the same thing is still happening, according to Cuban. The “MSM” is reporting on Trump’s appointments; his supporters interpret that as a “plot against him”; and Trump’s power grows.

At this point, Cuban writes, he’s willing to give Trump a chance: “I’m not yet convinced that all of our President Elect’s NY Values are gone. We will see.”

Contact Helen Chernikoff at[email protected] or on Twitter @thesimplechild

Helen Chernikoff is the Forward’s News Editor. She came to the Forward from The Jewish Week, where she served as the first web director and created both a blog dedicated to disability issues and a food and wine website. Before that, she covered the housing, lodging and logistics industries for Reuters, where she could sit at her desk and watch her stories move the stock market. Helen has a Master’s of Public Administration from Columbia University and a BA in History and French from Amherst College. She is also a rabbinical school dropout. Contact her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @thesimplechild.

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