Mike Bloomberg’s debate meltdown is bad news for Donald Trump

| 4:50 am EST February 20, 2020
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Prisoners are being let out of their cells by an unhinged man wearing clown paint, and a flawed billionaire who lives in the shadows has decided he’s our only hope of stopping him. No, we’re not living in a Batman sequel. Donald Trump isn’t nearly as clever as the Joker, and as it turns out, Mike Bloomberg is no Bruce Wayne.

How bad was Bloomberg’s debate performance on Wednesday night? He’d have done far better if he hadn’t qualified for the debate, because then he could have just continued sitting back and using TV ads to win people over in sterile and safe fashion. Instead he had to go ruin it for himself by getting on stage and being an actual candidate, getting hit with actual questions about his record and his scandals and his failures, and suddenly Batman looked like, well, anything but a superhero.

Donald Trump couldn’t help but gloat: “Mini Mike Bloomberg’s debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates, and there have been some really bad ones. He was stumbling, bumbling and grossly incompetent. If this doesn’t knock him out of the race, nothing will. Not so easy to do what I did!”

That’s rich, coming from a guy who only won the Republican nomination because he was competing against people like Ben Carson, who wasn’t bright enough to go on stage when his name was called, and whatever Ted Cruz is supposed to be. Then Trump lost all three debates to Hillary, lost the election to her, and only took office through a complex combination of cheating and dumb luck that just happened to put him over the top in the weirdest way possible.

Trump shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate. Mike Bloomberg was always going to have to face the bright lights, and while no one was expecting him to wilt this badly, he was never going to be able to simply snatch the nomination from the shadows. If he wants to stay in this race he’ll have to do it like any other candidate in a crowded field: by scrapping it out, with good days and bad days alike, and the hope that there are more good days and bad days.

Mike Bloomberg’s real threat to Donald Trump continues to be this: Bloomberg clearly wants to take Trump down so badly, we’re starting to believe him when he says he’ll run massive TV ads in favor of any of these candidates if they become the Democratic nominee. If that’s the case, then it doesn’t really matter whether Bloomberg survives very long in the race or not.

Come to think of it, perhaps that’s the plan here. Mike Bloomberg clearly didn’t do much debate prep. He didn’t look like he wanted to be there. He doesn’t seem to be taking his candidacy nearly as seriously as his bandwagon supporters are taking it. Maybe he really is just “running” to get his name in the arena, so he can later take credit for having funded whoever knocks off Trump in the end. If Bloomberg truly doesn’t care whether he wins the nomination, it makes him far more dangerous to Trump. We’ll see.