“Sanders has real followers, whether you like them or not,” the president said.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday insisted that he’d rather run against Mike Bloomberg than Bernie Sanders in the general election this November, amplifying complaints from Democrats that the billionaire former mayor of New York was buying his way into contention in the primary field.
“Frankly, I would rather run against Bloomberg than Bernie Sanders,” he told reporters, “because Sanders has real followers, whether you like them or not, whether you agree with them or not — I happen to think it’s terrible what [Sanders] says.”Bloomberg has poured hundreds of millions of his personal fortune into his last-minute presidential campaign and has seen that investment pay off in the form of a steady climb in recent polling.
Bloomberg could potentially appear on a debate stage for the first time next week after the Democratic National Committee changed its qualifying rules to drop its grassroots fundraising requirement, prompting complaints that the committee had changed the rules for Bloomberg since he is not accepting any donations for his bid.
Trump’s rant about Bloomberg was prompted by a years-old audio clip that began circulating Monday night on social media. In the audio, Bloomberg appears to defend the stop-and-frisk policing practice he instituted as mayor. But with the leak of the stop-and-frisk audio, Trump escalated his attacks further, calling Bloomberg “RACIST” in a since-deleted tweet, and suggesting to reporters at the White House that the former mayor’s contrition about the policy stemmed from political expediency.
Turning to Bloomberg, Trump explained: “I think when a man is with stop-and-frisk his whole life, and then he decides to go Democrat, and he goes to a church, and he is practically crying — he looked like hell — he is practically crying, saying what a horrible thing he did. I think that’s so disingenuous.”
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