Trump, Bloomberg tweet war heats up ahead of Nevada debate
Bloomberg and Trump, both New York City billionaires, are longtime rivals
President Trump and Michael Bloomberg continued slinging Twitter insults at each other on Wednesday morning, hours before the three-time New York City mayor was set to appear in his first Democratic presidential debate in Nevada.
Trump questioned whether Bloomberg News would accurately cover the ninth Democratic debate, and its owner, on Wednesday night, while hurling barbs at his 2020 rival.
"Is corrupt Bloomberg News going to say what a pathetic debater Mini Mike is, that he doesn't respect our great farmers, or that he has violated campaign finance laws at the highest and most sinister level with 'payoffs' all over the place?" Trump wrote.
Bloomberg responded within 30 minutes, jabbing Trump about House Democrats' vote to impeach him at the end of 2019: "Impeached president says what?" (In December, the Democrat-led House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The Senate voted along party lines to acquit him at the beginning of February. Trump has maintained that he acted appropriately).
The co-founder of the financial information and media company Bloomberg LP, Bloomberg is currently among a crowded field of Democratic hopefuls vying to unseat Trump in November. He owns about 88 percent of the business, according to Forbes, which is worth a reported $10 billion.
Because he's running for president, Bloomberg's roughly 2,700 journalists are allowed to write about day-to-day developments in the campaign but must avoid in-depth investigations of the Democratic field. It resembles how the news outlet covered Bloomberg’s 12-year tenure in City Hall.
Trump's jab about the farmers was referring to a resurfaced audio clip earlier this week that appeared to show Bloomberg belittling farmers and factory workers at a university forum in 2016. Bloomberg News does not appear to have written a story focused solely on the audio, in which Bloomberg, who has never farmed, claimed he could "teach anybody in this room” to be a farmer.
Still, Bloomberg News has covered other unflattering aspects of Bloomberg's campaign, including another unearthed audio clip that revealed the 78-year-old billionaire defending "stop and frisk," the controversial policing strategy that disproportionately targeted men of color.
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If elected in November, Bloomberg's campaign confirmed that he would likely sell Bloomberg LP, which he founded in 1981. The process would begin with him placing it in a blind trust.
Longtime rivals, Trump and Bloomberg frequently fight on Twitter, with the president focusing many of his insults on Bloomberg's height. Trump is six feet, three inches and Bloomberg is five feet, eight inches.
Bloomberg entered the race too late to participate in early-voting states and has instead concentrated his efforts, and $60 billion fortune, on the 14 states that will cast their ballots on Super Tuesday, March 3. Already, Bloomberg has spent an unprecedented $124 million in advertising across those delegate-rich states, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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Candidates need 1,991 delegates to become the Democratic nominee; a combined 1,344, or about one-third of the total, will be allotted on Super Tuesday alone.
According to an aggregate of polls by RealClearPolitics, Bloomberg is in third nationally, behind former Vice President Joe Biden and frontrunner Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.