Mark Cuban’s Post Critical of Republican Party Takes Off Online

A social media post from Mark Cuban criticizing the Republican Party on Saturday is taking off online, with the business mogul seemingly taking aim at former President Donald Trump.

Cuban, a vocal critic of the former president, took to X, formerly Twitter, to share a quote from a story published on Friday by The Guardian titled, “US farmers turn toward Biden over Trump’s past agricultural policies.”

The article discusses how a growing number of farmers are planning to vote for President Joe Biden as they fear Trump could cost them due to threats of renewed trade wars. One of those farmers, Christopher Gibbs, a row crop and cattle farmer in Shelby County, Ohio, was a Republican who supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

On Saturday, Cuban shared a quote from Gibbs, who previously served as chair of his county’s Republican Party branch for seven years and is now a member of the Democratic Party, as the farmer explained the GOP has “just one voice.”

“‘In the Democratic Party, not everybody gets their way, but everybody gets a voice. In the Republican Party, there’s just one voice.’ Christopher Gibbs, Farmer, Shelby County Ohio,” Cuban posted.

Since being shared on Saturday, Cuban’s post has received over 2 million views.

Newsweek has reached out to Cuban and Trump’s spokesperson via email for comment.

This comes as Trump and Biden continue to campaign ahead of this year’s presidential election. The two are set to face off in their first debate on June 27 in Atlanta.

According to Gibbs, his support for Trump began to change in 2018 when then-president began trade tariffs against many of the country’s international allies.

“Our allies retaliated by going after our soft underbelly: our agriculture. When China retaliated by no longer taking our soybeans, I lost 20% of the value of my crop overnight,” Gibbs told The Guardian.

Trump is reportedly considering up to a 60 percent tariff on all imports from China and a 10 percent “universal” tariff on all other trading partners if he wins reelection this year. However, Trump told Time magazine in April, “it may be more than that,” referring to the tariff. “It may be a derivative of that.”

Amid the 2020 election, Biden remained unpopular with farmers as a majority of rural voters were supporting Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal in October 2020. During that time, Gibbs was only among 12 percent of U.S. farmers who typically vote for candidates of the Democratic Party.

However, an analysis of the 2022 midterms by centrist Democratic think tank Third Way found that most Democratic candidates improved on Biden’s 2020 performance in rural America, according to Axios.

In addition, a recent June Fox News poll has put Biden 2 percentage points above Trump with rural voters. Biden scored 50 percent and Trump garnered 48 percent, according to the survey, which the former president and many of his supporters have claimed is illegitimate.

Trump blasted the entirety of the poll on Truth Social, his social media platform, calling it “trash” and accused Fox News of “using a biased, Democrat-leaning sample of voters.”

Despite the results, Fox News does cite its 2020 data, saying Trump generally does well with rural voters (+17).

This is not the first time Cuban has taken aim at Trump. In March, he dubbed the former president a “snake oil salesman,” telling Axios he was backing Biden in November’s election.

Comparing Trump to Biden, Cuban said: “It’s the snake oil salesperson vs the incumbent, traditional politician. One will tell you his snake oil will cure everything that ails you. The other will show you the details of his policies through charts, graphs and statements.”

Last week, an X user asked Cuban: “Why do you hate Trump so much? What is it about this guy that you can’t stand?”

In response, however, Cuban replied: “I don’t hate the guy. Just don’t want him to be President.”