Mark Cuban might believe he can win the presidency with Charles Barkley on his team, but the former NBA owner has no interest in putting his family through that wringer.
Cuban joined the latest episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart and during the interview, he was asked about potentially taking on a larger political role. According to Cuban, he doesn’t consider himself a viable political player, which prompted Stewart to ask whether being around the Kamala Harris campaign further cemented his desire to avoid running for office.
“I loved it,” Cuban insisted of campaigning for Harris. “It wasn’t that, it’s my family. I mean, look at all the sh*t that they did to JD Vance. I don’t want my kids hearing about me f***ing a couch!”
To be clear, that wasn’t an admission from Cuban that he did f*** a couch. It was a reference to the false rumor that spread over the summer, which claimed Vance’s 2016 memoir included a passage about the time he had sex with a couch. The rumor gained traction on social media, but there is no such mention of having sex with a couch in Vance’s book.
While Cuban wants to avoid politics to protect his family from ridiculous rumors, Stewart questioned whether running for office would make the vitriol directed at him worse than it already is.
“Oh yeah,” Cuban said without hesitation. “It was mostly on Twitter. I’m fine with that, but it’s if they go after my kids and my family and dealing with that. My kids are 15, 18 and 21 now. And more importantly than that, I want to be around them.”
Cuban considered running for president as an independent candidate in 2020. And he recently joked about being able to win the White House with Charles Barkley on the ticket. But after seeing the way unsubstantiated rumors about a candidate can spread on social media, Cuban appears to have no real interest in a political career.