Mark Cuban’s name may be familiar to supporters of Donald Trump as a man who loves to harangue Trump, on everything from Trump’s worth to the reality television star’s business acumen, and the two have traded insults with each other since at least 2015.
There’s been commentary running in the media about how much the Dallas Mavericks owner and star of the ABC program Shark Tank hates our country’s president and doubts his intelligence.
The gambler in Cuban seemed to like his chances were he to enter an imagined contest with the Republican president, with Cuban insisting, “If it was me vs. Trump, I would crush him. No doubt about it.”
At one point before the November election, Cuban said he would “rather lose every penny than have Trump as president.” For his part, Trump tweeted, “I know Mark Cuban well. He [formerly] backed me big-time, but I wasn’t interested in taking all of his calls. He’s not smart enough to run for president!”
Two years ago, Cuban called Trump’s estimation of the latter’s fortune at $10 billion optimistic “bragging” and a “play number” while referring to the real estate titan as a “paper tiger.” In May of last year, Cuban claimed, “[Trump]’s the guy at the bar who will say anything to get laid. That’s Donald Trump right now. But it’s all of us who are going to get f***ed.”
By July, Cuban outed himself as a #NeverTrump supporter, tweeting, “Dear World: please ignore what the loud guy in the suit is saying. Americans are nothing like him. We love our country and are proud of it.” Cuban subsequently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and insulted Trump’s worth and failed businesses.
At the end of the month, Cuban endorsed Hillary Clinton and called Trump “a jagoff.” Still later in the year, Cuban predicted a stock market crash if Trump won the presidency, but it appears that he’s had to eat those words as the stock market has gained more than 2,500 points since Trump’s election victory.
Now, Cuban has taken to Twitter to once again bash the country’s commander-in-chief, this time over student debt.
Recently, President Trump confirmed that he was rolling back federal guidelines to student loan collectors barring the charging of high fees on long-overdue loans after it was announced that the number of students defaulting on their debts had increased by double-digits.
Although the number of first-time defaulters actually has slowed, second-time defaulters and worse offenders number in the tens of thousands. The value of all student loans currently outstanding is a whopping $137 billion.
Predictably, however, Democratic lawmakers such as Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts reacted to Trump’s action, sending a protest letter to the Education Department asking to uphold the guidelines to prevent “an unnecessary financial burden on vulnerable borrowers.”
On March 29, Cuban tweeted, “@realDonaldTrump: When will you address the exploding cost of college and the problem of student debt?” Cuban is likely referring not just to the rollbacks, but also to proposed cuts to work-study programs in the budget the White House sent to Congress.
When he was campaigning, Trump talked about taxing wealthy universities that didn’t contribute some of their endowment toward assisting low-income students. Also, he discussed a new repayment plan for student loans, giving borrowers the opportunity to repay their loans with a flat 12.5 percent of their annual income for 15 years. So far, however, there’s been no action taken on either of these ideas.
In the meantime, however, Cuban has told the press why he went to his alma mater, Indiana University. A primary reason, he said, was the low tuition cost. While Hillary Clinton was campaigning for the presidency, Cuban argued that some of her college risk-sharing schemes might encourage universities to abandon liberal arts programs. This might be caused by students’ lack of real job prospects when they entered the real world without a degree in a lucrative field, forcing colleges to pay for students’ post-graduate livelihoods.
But at the same time, Cuban believes that robots taking Americans’ more technical jobs, such as accounting, may lead to degrees in subjects such as philosophy becoming more important. “Knowing how to critically think … I think is going to be more valuable than what we see as exciting careers today, which might be programming or CPA or those types of things.”
The war of words between Cuban and Trump is far from over, but neither is the Trump presidency. Until Trump has been able to enact all of his policy proposals, Mark Cuban would be well-advised to keep his big mouth shut and remain a spectator, rather than a commentator.
~ Conservative Zone
