Bloomberg: 'Why the hell would we hire Donald Trump for another four years?'
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spent more than a billion dollars on his short-lived bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination, made his case for Joe Biden at the party’s virtual convention by blasting President Trump’s handling of the economy.
“Why the hell would we hire Donald Trump for another four years?” Bloomberg said in a live speech from Colorado on Thursday’s final night of the Democratic National Convention.
The billionaire owner of Bloomberg LP skewered Trump’s handling of the economy, which has been decimated in part by his halting response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Donald says we should vote for him because the economy was great before the virus. Huh?” Bloomberg said. “Biden and Obama created more jobs in the last three years of their administration than Trump created in his first three, and economic growth was higher under Biden and Obama than under Trump.”
Bloomberg credited Obama and Biden with leading the country out of the 2008 recession. Trump, by contrast, he said, “has not only failed to lead — he has made the current crisis much worse.”
“So when Trump says he wants to make America great again, he’s making a pretty good case for Joe Biden,” he added.
In a speech at the 2016 Democratic convention, Bloomberg said “New Yorkers know a con when we see one.”
“Tonight, I’m not asking to vote against Donald Trump because he’s a bad guy,” Bloomberg said Thursday. “I’m urging you to vote against him because he’s done a bad job.”
Bloomberg served three terms as mayor of New York City, from 2002 to 2013, running first as a Republican and then as an independent, before registering as a Democrat in 2018.
He acknowledged his shifting allegiances at the top of his speech.
“I’ve supported Democrats, Republicans and independents,” Bloomberg said. “Hell, I’ve actually been a Democrat, Republican and independent.”
Since leaving the mayor’s office, he has faced criticism for the way Black and Hispanic residents were treated by his “stop-and-frisk” police policy and his skepticism of the #MeToo movement.
In early 2019, Bloomberg announced he would not run for president in 2020. But by November, he reconsidered, launching a campaign on which he spent a record $1 billion of his massive personal fortune. It lasted just four months.
Bloomberg skipped the first four state primaries and caucuses, focusing instead on Super Tuesday.
He participated in just two primary debates. At his first, in Las Vegas, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., unloaded on the billionaire former mayor.
“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians,’ and, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg,” Warren said.
She pummeled him a week later at a debate in South Carolina, saying he should allow the women employees who had left his company and were bound by nondisclosure agreements to speak out, so voters could hear their allegations of discrimination against Bloomberg or his company. She also repeated an allegation that he once told a pregnant employee to have an abortion.
Bloomberg claimed that of the “few” women who had signed NDAs, “none of them accuse me of doing anything other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told.”
Other rivals, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, accused Bloomberg of buying his way onto the debate stage.
Bloomberg ultimately bowed out of the race after winning just one primary contest — American Samoa — and endorsed Biden. The billionaire vowed he would spend “whatever it takes” to defeat Trump in November, at one point suggesting he could put up $1 billion of his estimated $55 billion net worth toward the anti-Trump cause.
But while Bloomberg remains perhaps the Democratic Party’s most significant donor, Huff Post noted Thursday that he has not made major donations to any of the major super PACs backing Biden, and has not spent anywhere close to $1 billion.
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