Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris deployed some of her most prominent surrogates to the Pittsburgh area in the second-to-last weekend before the election.
Even as President Joe Biden was on his way to make a campaign visit on behalf of his vice president, Pittsburgh native and businessman Mark Cuban addressed a gathering in East Liberty Saturday — one day after Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made a visit of his own.
Speaking at a campaign event held at the headquarters of language-learning app developer Duolingo, Cuban strode out to the strains of the "Pittsburgh Steelers Polka." He wasted little time ripping into a key part of Donald Trump’s biography: his stature as a businessman.
“He’s never had to literally start a business,” Cuban said. “He walked in the door and took over a company his dad started. There’s nothing wrong with that … but he’s never been in your shoes.”
Cuban’s hour-long appearance was marked by efforts to take issues that have been at the heart of Trump’s campaign — such as inflation and immigration — and turn them against the Republican and former president.
While inflation rose after the coronavirus pandemic, Cuban said, Trump’s proposal to level across-the-board tariffs of up to 20% — and 60% for China — would drive up prices even higher.
“Think about Christmas this time next year if Donald Trump wins,” he said. “Most of the stuff we buy for Christmas is imported from somewhere. … [If] there’s a 60% tariff on Chinese imports, what happens to the cost of your Christmas presents?”
And Cuban said Harris had a plan to bring down prices for one key product: prescription drugs, by challenging pharmacy benefits managers — firms that act as middlemen who administer drug benefits for insurance plans, and whose pricing policies have increasingly been blamed for drug costs. Harris has proposed reforms for the industry that require more price transparency — moves Cuban himself has called for.
“She's going after the pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen, and taking them out of the equation,” said Cuban, who currently operates a discount pharmaceutical distributor, Cost Plus Drug, “You're going to see immediately the price of drugs that you have to buy go down.”
Cuban also sought to argue that, while Trump has focused heavily on illegal immigration and its impact on jobs, the disruptions that could follow from the mass deportations he has talked about would have unanticipated costs — both in economic and human terms. Even Trump’s rhetoric was damaging, he said.
“He said foreign countries use us as their garbage cans,” Cuban said. “Who says that? ... When he says nasty stuff about this country, he’s talking about you. He’s talking about me. He’s talking about everybody but himself.”
Some questioners asked how they could sway voters who are either Trump supporters or people still on the fence.
“If they’re just on the wrong side, there’s nothing you can say,” Cuban said. “I mean, there’s people who don’t root for the Steelers.”
But he emphasized that, while he had had differences with Harris and Biden — he has been critical of FTC Commissioner Lina Khan, for example — he said Harris “is a leader because she will tell you what she is going to do,” while being open to changing her mind.
By contrast, "Trump pretends to be a leader, but he never tells you exactly what he's going to do, and he never explains it," he said.
Cuban’s visit came one week after a Pittsburgh-area stop by Trump’s most prominent private-sector surrogate: Elon Musk.
Unlike Musk, Cuban did not distribute a $1 million check Saturday. When WESA noted the fact in a conversation with reporters, Cuban promised it was “in the mail,” but then dismissed Musk’s approach to the campaign.
“Elon is there because Donald is desperate,” he said.
Referring to accounts that Trump has subcontracted out much of his campaign’s voter-turnout efforts to Musk, Cuban said, “the idea that the head of the Republican Party turns over their ground game to a third party that has no experience in it — that says a lot. The fact that he feels the need after going through that process [he] has to pay people in a sweepstakes $1 million each. That says a lot. … You only do that because you have to. And so when I see Elon do those things, I think it's because they're not coming from a position of strength.”
But Musk had transformed the political debate in other ways, Cuban said, by purchasing Twitter and removing moderation rules that, in his view, made the site more toxic — to the point of cowing even business leaders who Cuban said agree with him.
“Twitter emboldens a lot of Trump supporters to kind of take on the personality of Donald Trump," he said. "[When] so many people are so vocal … and negative on Twitter, that can scare somebody about their business.”
Pete Buttigieg raised similar concerns about social media’s impact on politics during his stop Friday at the Roberto Clemente Museum.
Buttigieg was joined by a handful of national Republicans, including former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, to warn that a second Trump administration would threaten American democracy.
Asked by WESA why, after eight years of such warnings, Trump is polling better than ever, Buttigieg said, “People are getting different information from different sources. We've never had more information and been less informed because of the polarization of the internet and even TV and radio.”
But he said that’s why it was important to have Republicans like Weld, as well as rank-and-file voters, sounding the alarm. And both Friday’s event and Cuban’s appearance Saturday were attended by a number of self-identified Republicans who said they would vote for Harris.
“We can go back to fighting over fiscal policy or anything else later on,” Buttigieg said. “But right now, we've got to make sure we have a leader who actually believes in that democratic process.”
