Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo
Businessman Mark Cuban speaks after attending meetings at the White House, March 4, 2024, in Washington.
Earlier this week, I jumped on a Harris campaign call featuring Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur and minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks. James Curbeam, the Teamsters National Black Caucus chair, was on there as well, but Cuban dominated the call. The idea was to push back on Donald Trump’s economic ideas in advance of Harris’s broader rollout. Cuban brought up two examples.
First, he objected to Trump’s call to slap a 200 percent tariff on John Deere if the company moved to Mexico. It wasn’t because that would be impossible given the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free-trade agreement that Trump signed into law; Cuban briefly alluded to that while saying, “I’m not the expert in this space.” The worst part of it, Cuban insisted, is that putting a bigger tariff on Mexican-made John Deere products than on Chinese farm equipment manufacturers would “[make] it cheaper for Chinese manufacturers to compete with John Deere … You literally face the destruction of one of the most historic companies in the United States of America.” That historic American company Cuban is celebrating, in this telling, should not face disapproval or sanctions for outsourcing American jobs, because it might harm the business.
Next, Cuban attacked Trump’s endorsement of a 10 percent cap on credit card interest rates. “Bernie Sanders suggested a cap of only 15 percent,” Cuban said. “Now you have Trump getting involved in price caps and price controls to a greater degree than self-described socialist Bernie Sanders.” Aside from throwing a stray attack at a fairly well-liked figure among Democratic base voters, usury caps, which date back at least to the Bible, happen to be incredibly popular. Polling researcher David Shor puts the policy among the most popular ideas he’s ever tested. Interest-rate caps have passed overwhelmingly every time they’ve ever been placed on a ballot; four years ago, an interest-rate cap won more than 80 percent of the vote in Nebraska.
Later on in the call, responding to a question about crypto, Cuban said: “The open sore is what happens at the SEC, and she hasn’t said anything in support of the SEC head, so I take that as a positive. In my conversations with people on the campaign, they’re very clear that they are not fans of regulation through litigation … so I think that’s a huge positive.” Cuban’s comment is generally aligned with that of every major crypto mogul who wants Gary Gensler fired and crypto unencumbered by federal rules.
The Harris campaign was so impressed by this performance that they put out the entire video of the call on YouTube. And Cuban, an in-demand surrogate, has given versions of these answers in recent interviews and on social media.
Kamala Harris has clearly tried to rebut claims that she’s a Marxist and worse by allying herself with business interests. The public face of this in recent weeks has been Cuban, who has a public profile from ABC’s Shark Tank and doesn’t present like a billionaire. I appreciate what Cuban’s doing with his Cost Plus Drug Company, taking on the venal and consolidated pharmacy benefit manager industry. But for someone who is so quick to lash out at Trump, Cuban displays many of the same qualities: someone who thinks business success and a reality game show perch entitle him to opine on public policy, who is just as prone to the same rash and unhelpful judgments that made Trump’s presidency so shambolic.
Kamala Harris has clearly tried to rebut claims that she’s a Marxist and worse by allying herself with business interests.
Even putting Cuban aside does not absolve the Harris campaign, which is doing plenty to court crypto cash on its own. And after all, they’re empowering him. But everyone involved seems to have zipped ahead to the part where you govern (in prose, as Mario Cuomo once said), and not the part where you actually have to inspire people to campaign and vote for you. This defensive crouch is creating a lot of problems, and Cuban is a manifestation of them.
As I wrote yesterday, if you know where to look, you can find in Harris campaign materials a worker-centered manufacturing agenda and a vow to take on corporate malfeasance, from price-gouging to hoarding the supply of homes. Even the Sunrise Movement endorsed the climate and energy plans in Harris’s policy book, calling it “a significant step forward.” But you have to dig for this stuff.
On the surface, you have Mark Cuban winging it. And in that circumstance, you get a combination of crypto boosting, which no voter really cares about, and shortsighted swipes at Trump that condemn positions with 80 percent popularity or praise U.S. companies that ship jobs to Mexico. “He makes things up in real time and everybody around him tries to justify it,” Cuban has said of Trump. Physician, heal thyself.
As a political issue, candidates stumping for crypto don’t even move subgroups of young men to care. We know this because the ubiquitous ads run by the crypto industry, put together by actual campaign professionals, never mention crypto. Sucking up to crypto is a play purely and solely for donations, not votes, and most politicians are sensible enough not to waste time and alienate people by signaling about it in public.
Cuban, of course, is a crypto investor and completely conflicted on the issue. Yet he’s driving campaign thinking on the topic. Trump is obviously worse; he started his own crypto business to take advantage of his supporters. The fact that Trump, who has latched onto every innovation in grifting over the last few decades, sees the “potential” in crypto should tell you something about that industry. Have you heard Harris say a word about this? You won’t.
Decrying “regulation by litigation” is an industry talking point, but a former prosecutor and attorney general should know that taking litigation off the table as a tool to ensure compliance just invites bad behavior. Harris has said repeatedly that “bad actors” will feel the sting, but here’s Mark Cuban telling the crypto world that they won’t.
Trump has made plenty of missteps coddling the mega-rich in this election too. He’s given over much of his campaign to Silicon Valley bros, as they commiserate in a victimization narrative. And there are easy ways to parry his oafish lunges at populism, simply by pointing to his track record. As former Biden Treasury official Graham Steele has written, Trump ushered in financial deregulation that quickly led to a financial collapse at Silicon Valley’s leading bank; he was terrible for ordinary people up against financial behemoths. And Trump’s threats to companies that offshore ring hollow, given the increased amount of offshoring—even from companies he threatened!—during his presidency. Trump gave hundreds of billions in federal contracts to outsourcers, and his 2017 tax law included incentives for companies that take jobs out of America.
Harris knows all this. Many of the points I just made about Trump and outsourcing came from a Harris campaign rapid response sheet! The candidate herself called out Trump in her economic speech for making fake promises about Carrier and watching the jobs go away. There are actual plans in her materials to disincentivize offshoring. And while I don’t agree with how she handled the foreclosure crisis as California attorney general, the fact that she persistently touts that part of her record indicates she knows it’s strong politics to take on Wall Street.
Mark Cuban, it seems, knows none of this. He’s a business guy who has business-guy thoughts that can frequently be toxic to ordinary people. He’s out there, with the imprimatur of being a Harris campaign adviser, demeaning 80-20 policies, praising companies that outsource, and pushing his own financial interests. He is an avatar for a campaign that is starting to lose the plot. In its zeal to prevent fearmongering about socialism and radicalism, the Harris campaign has retreated to using a billionaire as a shield, who is shooting from the hip in extremely unproductive ways.
