According to a new report from the Daily Beast, Trump's former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been actively pushing Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to run for President in 2020 as a Democrat.
As he publicly flirts with a run for the presidency in 2020, Mark Cuban has also privately been in touch with potential allies and strategists to plot out a campaign.
The Dallas Mavericks owner confirmed that he has corresponded on multiple occasions since the 2016 election with Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.
He downplayed the interactions in an email exchange with The Daily Beast, saying merely that he “texted with him a few time[s]” and that none, he believed, had “been more than one full sentence.” But according to four sources familiar with their conversations, the two have been in touch for months about a possible 2020 bid. Bannon, these sources say, has encouraged Cuban to run and to consider doing so as a Democrat, seeing it as a realistic path to a viable presidential run.
“They talk regularly,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser who is close to Bannon. “They’re very similar. They have a lot of synergy there. Even when [Steve] went to work for Trump, Mark would be interviewed and say nice things about Steve.”
Of course, it's unclear how the White House might respond to these new revelations. On the one hand, Mark Cuban could be a fairly disruptive force in the Democratic primary process. But, on the other hand, his celebrity and outspoken personality could prove useful in challenging Trump in a head-to-head competition.
For Bannon, the question is why President Donald Trump’s one-time top political consigliere would encourage a challenge to his former boss—assuming, that is, that Trump opts to run for a second term. Trump declared his re-election candidacy mere hours after he was inaugurated. But Bannon has reportedly expressed doubts that Trump will stick around for another four years, according to a Vanity Fair report last month.
Cuban is an idiosyncratic political figure. He campaigned for Hillary Clinton and has made various anti-Trump statements this year, recently dubbing the president a “Twitter troll.” Cuban’s politics are a mix of social liberalism, big-business-friendly centrism, and a love of objectivist icon Ayn Rand.
And while it's unclear at this point whether Cuban will actually launch a campaign, it seems that the rumblings are serious enough to have provoked a response from Trump Jr...
You misspelled “looking for attention” https://t.co/EiIz16XeP0
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 9, 2017
Meanwhile, Cuban's quick response could mean that the first big Twitter war of the 2020 Presidential contest has already begun.
Seriously Jr ? https://t.co/Zh50DLegSE
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) November 9, 2017