Trump jabs at ‘Mini Mike Bloomberg’ for debate stage absence
January 17, 2020President Donald Trump on Friday accused Michael Bloomberg of skirting the 2020 Democratic primary debates for fear of embarrassing himself on stage — training his Twitter fire on the former New York mayor for the second time this week.
“Mini Mike Bloomberg doesn’t get on the Democrat Debate Stage because he doesn’t want to - he is a terrible debater and speaker,” Trump wrote online. “If he did, he would go down in the polls even more (if that is possible!).”
Bloomberg, who is self-financing his White House bid, is unable to appear in the party-sanctioned primary debates due to the Democratic National Committee’s qualifying rules, which stipulate that participants must achieve certain numbers of individual campaign donors.
“I want to debate, but I don’t qualify because I’ve never taken a penny in contributions from anyone. Not even a ‘very small loan’ of a million dollars,” Bloomberg tweeted Friday, responding to Trump’s attack.
Trump claimed while campaigning for president in 2015 that he launched his business career with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father, insisting that amount of money “isn’t very much compared to what I’ve built.”
An investigation by The New York Times in 2018 found that Trump actually received at least $413 million from his father’s vast real estate empire over the course of several decades, inheriting much of that wealth through dubious tax schemes including acts of outright fraud.
Roughly a half hour after his initial post on Friday, Trump criticized Bloomberg again for the billionaire businessman and philanthropist’s historic levels of spending on campaign advertising.
“Mini Mike Bloomberg ads are purposely wrong - A vanity project for him to get into the game,” Trump tweeted. “Nobody in many years has done for the USA what I have done for the USA, including the greatest economy in history, rebuilding our military, biggest ever tax & regulation cuts, & 2nd A!”
Bloomberg replied to that barb, as well, calling Trump “the expert on vanity projects” and tweeting a GIF of the president’s name being removed from a New York building branded with a “Trump Place” sign.
The president previously complained about Bloomberg’s hundreds of millions of dollars in ad buys on Monday, when Trump charged that the Democratic candidate was misrepresenting his administration’s record on health care and sought to distort his yearslong attempts to strike down the Affordable Care Act.
Source: https://www.politico.com/