Mark Cuban speaks at a campaign rally for Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, in La Crosse, Wis., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024.
Abbie Parr | AP
Mark Cuban mocked Donald Trump on Thursday for his sweeping tariff proposals, saying the Republican presidential nominee doesn’t understand his own tax ideas.
“I learned a lot about business, including how tariffs work,” the billionaire investor and former “Shark Tank” host told supporters of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris at a campaign rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Trump “thinks China is paying for them,” Cuban said of the proposal to raise tariffs on all imported goods from China by up to 60 percent or higher.
“He’s the same guy who thought Mexico was going to pay for the wall,” Cuban quipped, drawing laughs and cheers from the crowd.
Trump has repeatedly pointed to tariffs as a kind of panacea, arguing that heavy import taxes — including a blanket tariff of up to 20 percent — would bring in huge amounts of foreign revenue, fund a series of tax cuts and boost U.S. industries. all this without causing inflation.
But U.S. importers are the ones paying those tariffs directly to the government, and mainstream economists say implementing Trump’s plans will increase costs for Americans. The Peterson Institute for International Economics, for example, found that a 20% universal tariff and a 60% tariff in China would cost the typical US household more than $2,600 a year.
Cuban added that he believes Trump “used to understand how tariffs work” in the 1990s and 2000s.
“But I don’t know what happened to him,” Cuban said.
The appearance in Wisconsin marked the first of three states Cuba is visiting to support the vice president’s bid for the White House.
Cuban is set to head to Phoenix, Arizona, on Saturday to host a speech on Harris’ economic agenda, according to the Harris campaign. On Sunday, he will campaign with the second-in-command, Douglas Emhoff, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Trump is also getting a boost in on-the-ground support from a well-known billionaire: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Elon Musk speaks as part of a campaign town hall in support of Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump in Folsom, Pa., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024.
Matt Rourke | AP
Musk on Thursday was scheduled to begin a multi-day speaking tour in Pennsylvania with America PAC, the super political action committee he uses to spend tens of millions of dollars in support of Trump.
He was scheduled to host a town hall in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, Thursday afternoon to promote absentee voting and early voting in the commonwealth, NBC News reported.
Musk announced his plans to go to the polls shortly after Federal Election Commission filings revealed that he gave nearly $75 million to America PAC between July and early September alone.
Musk recently joined Trump on stage at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, at the same July 13 rally where an alleged assassin nearly killed Trump and fatally shot another attendee.
The Cuban’s swing into the majors, first reported by Yahoo Finance, follows Harris’ frequent praise on CNBC and other media outlets.
Cuban has long been an outspoken critic of Trump. At a Harris campaign news conference last month, Cuban called Trump’s promise to impose sweeping tariffs and even higher import taxes on China “crazy.”
“And so to say we’re going to put a 10% or 20% or 60% tariff on China or any other company, countries, that’s just inflationary, and that’s just the tax on the American people. This is a sales tax all the way,” Cuban said on that Sept. 24 call.