Billionaire oligarch Mike Bloomberg is running as the “anti-Trump,” casting President Donald Trump as a “bully.” “I bill myself as the un-Trump,” Bloomberg told a campaign rally last week.
But as mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, Bloomberg behaved like the authoritarian many Democrats believe Trump to be, changing the rules to allow himself to run for a third term, then voting to change them back.
As the Wall Street Journal noted toward the end of his three-term tenure:
Perhaps Mr. Bloomberg’s most controversial move was running for a third term in 2009 by engineering the repeal of a law passed twice by voter referendum limiting city elected officials to two terms. That decision colored his final years in office, as his approval ratings fell from the high 60s and never again cracked 50% in his third term, according to Marist. Voters reinstated term limits in 2010.
Bloomberg argued that only he could steer the city through the fallout of the global financial crisis in 2008. Almost half of New Yorkers disagreed: Bloomberg only won his third term by an unexpectedly narrow margin, barely reaching 51 percent, just five points ahead of his challenger.
Later, the Journal noted, Bloomberg voted in 2010 to reinstate a two-term limit, meaning that only he could enjoy a third term.
He called his third term “an extraordinary one-time thing.”
Bloomberg qualified Tuesday for Wednesday’s presidential debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the Paris Theater at 6:00 p.m. PT / 9:00 p.m. ET on MSNBC.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.