Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg dismissed his fellow 2020 Democrats’ chances of beating President Donald Trump in a general election match-up, warning “Trump would eat them up.”
“I looked at our national government getting worse. The way we were behaving overseas and domestically, led by our president. I said back in 2016 he is the wrong person for the job. He doesn’t have the temperament, the ethics, or the intellect to do the job,” Bloomberg told CBS This Morning’s Gayle King in an interview which aired Friday. “I watched and I said we just can’t have another four years of this.”
“Then I watched all of the candidates, and I just thought to myself, ‘Donald Trump would eat them up,'” continued the billionaire and former New York City mayor.
Bloomberg then clarified his comments by claiming he believes he would be best suited to challenge the president.
“Let me rephrase it. I think that I would do the best job of competing with him and beating him,” he judged.
Bloomberg entered the crowded primary field last month amid fears within Democrat rankings that former Vice President Joe Biden lacks the stamina to beat President Trump. The billionaire’s entry as came as doubts continue to grow whether far-left candidates such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — both who have proposed radical changes to the U.S.’s financial system — can defeat the president as the economy continues to do well.
The billionaire’s entry has created further division among an already ideologically fractured primary field, drawing arrowing for what other candidates claim is his attempt to buy the primary race by pouring millions into advertising campaigns across the country.
“I don’t believe that elections ought to be for sale,” Warren said in a recently-released ad. “And I don’t think as a Democratic Party that we should say that the only way you’re going to get elected — the only way you’re going to be our nominee — is either if you are a billionaire or if you’re sucking up to billionaires.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose own bid has failed to gain traction, used Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) departure this week from the race to attack Bloomberg.
“It’s a damn shame, frankly, that Kamala Harris’s voice is no longer in this race,” Booker told BuzzFeed News’s AM to DM.
“I’ve seen the bile, the anger, from my family members, to people in the Congressional Black Caucus, to leaders of color across this country who just don’t understand how we’ve gotten to a point now where there’s more billionaires in the 2020 race than there are black people,” he added.