Mavs' Mark Cuban: Donald Trump Was 1st Person to Tell Me to Run for President

Donald Trump wasn't sure he'd win during his 2016 presidential campaign. On the other hand, he did see Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban as a potentially perfect presidential candidate.

"He said to me one time, 'I don't know if I'm going to win, but you should run for president some day,'" Cuban said on the Just B with Bethenny Frankel podcast (via Scott Gleeson of USA Today). "He actually was the first person to ever tell me to run for president. But I just didn't get the sense that he thought he would win. I heard from people close to him he didn't think he would win either."

Trump did win and has gone on to be the most polarizing president in modern history. Cuban said he supported Trump at the beginning of his presidential bid because he thought Trump would shake up a political landscape in need of reconfiguration. However, Cuban said he never thought Trump would win and has been an outspoken opponent of the president during his first term. 

"Professionally as the president, I think he's an idiot. You know, I never thought he was smart in talking to him," Cuban said. 

Trump has had an overwhelmingly negative relationship with the NBA and its players since taking office. No NBA team has been to the White House during his first term, and he's gotten into spats on social media with LeBron James, Stephen Curry and other stars. Trump was also critical of the league's support of the Black Lives Matter movement and players kneeling for the national anthem.

Cuban said that while the two used to talk on a regular basis, he and Trump had a "falling out" because the Art of the Deal author did not understand the real-estate business that made him famous:

"When he first started to run, I said Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to politics because he speaks his mind. I basically he doesn't give a (expletive). He's not a politician. I had no inkling that he might win. And so we would talk all the time after I said that because I was supporting him. Because again, I didn't think he would win. And then as I started talking to him more about things, I asked him questions about real estate and he didn't really understand the financial side of real estate. ... It was just clear he wasn't somebody who learned about anything. That's where we kind of had our falling out."

Cuban has said he will vote for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in the November election.