Over the weekend, apart from a show of solidarity with Japan’s prime minister over reports of a ballistic missile launched by North Korea, President Donald Trump took time to revisit an old feud on Twitter.
Between bidding farewell to Shinzo Abe and acknowledging senior aide Stephen Miller’s Sunday morning show appearances, Trump took aim at billionaire investor and TV personality Mark Cuban.
“He backed me big-time but I wasn’t interested in taking all of his calls,” Trump wrote, branding Cuban “not smart enough to run for president.” CNBC reports that it wasn’t immediately clear what or who triggered the President to rekindle this rivalry, last seen during the 2016 general election.
The Shark Tank investor and owner of NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, who supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the election, was fast to hit back.
“LOL,” read his first response, sent within an hour of Trump’s original tweet, with a few follow-ups after that.
One of them was a side-by-side picture, showing a handwritten note he received from Trump and an email from him to the Trump campaign dated last May. Cuban appeared to have advised the then-Republican candidate to “learn the details” of being president on the campaign trail, according to CNBC.
The Mavericks owner later said he had no idea why Trump attacked him on Twitter, and offered another retort.
Cuban and Trump’s relationship shifted dramatically over the course of the former Apprentice star’s run for the presidency. First praising the campaign as “probably the best thing to happen to politics in a long long time” in July 2015, Cuban gradually turned against Trump and emerged as a Clinton supporter by the summer of 2016. He even attended the first presidential debate in September at Hofstra University in person to support Clinton.
