Free political advice for Bloomberg: start a fight with Trump about how you believe his net worth is negative and he will pay so much attention to you your star will ascend; he'll never agree to prove any claim he makes, so he'll always appear to be lying thehill.com/homenews/campa…
1/ People will attack you for not focusing on bread-and-butter issues and you'll respond by saying all Democratic candidates are on record saying they're not against wealth and you're raising the wealth issue as a proxy for Trump's deceit, venality, and susceptibility to bribery.
2/ Bloomberg has an opening to use Trump's lies about his net worth and refusal to turn over docs as a metaphor for everything that's wrong with the man, his presidency and his policies. Essentially you troll the sh*t out of him, then take a sharp right into substantive critique.
3/ I'd recommend lines something like, "There's enormous honor in being working class, in struggling to make ends meet, in having a net worth in the five figures or less. Trump does a disservice to *all* of us when he acts like admitting being a member of that group is shameful."
4/ I don't support Bloomberg in the primary and will not do so. I don't want another billionaire in the White House, or I guess, more properly, a billionaire for the first time. That said, Bloomberg can only break out, in metamodern-paradox fashion, *if* he makes wealth an issue.
5/ When you're a long-shot candidate, the thing to do is take the thing you're not supposed to talk about or that's supposed to be harmful to you and put it at the center of your campaign. If you can do so while also trolling the man most likely to get you media attention, do it.
6/ The problem with Bloomberg's campaign is that a combination of his wealth and his advisers will have convinced him he's *not* a longshot candidate, so he'll run a conservative campaign that keeps his ceiling at 10%. He's learning from Steyer but *should* be learning from Yang.
7/ Of course you have to fit your trolling with your personality, so Bloomberg is not going to suddenly become some wacky troll. Instead he needs to play the patrician who's mystified that a man is considered a billionaire without ever proving it. He needs to concern-troll Trump.
8/ He can talk like he's a bespectacled CNBC analyst who feels that when you're assessing the value of a company, if the CEO has a fake tan and health problems he's hiding behind fake doctor's notes and a fragile ego and fake financial data that's just not a company you invest in
9/ And he should definitely intimate that all the super-rich in America are laughing at Trump behind his back, because they 100% are, and then underscore that it's *not* because he's actually exceedingly poor, though he is, but just because he's a poser and *no one* likes a poser
10/ In any event, I'll stop now, but the upshot is that if you're Michael Bloomberg and you're bringing up wealth in this campaign and you're not doing so in a way that makes Donald Trump so rage-facedly livid that he tweets at you *repeatedly*, you're *definitely* doing it wrong
