Billionaire and Jeffrey Epstein associate Mike Bloomberg may never have heard of Fyre Festival, but he’s most certainly heard of memes. Kids like them, so if he puts his face on a fucking meatball the kids will surely back his current bid to be president. That’s how this goes, right? Well, Mayor Stop and Frisk has spared no expense in his efforts to seem relatable—he’s dumped roughly $415 million into marketing alone—and the subsequent fallout has been nothing short of indelible.
Not only has the blowback been swift against the viral accounts Bloomberg’s paying to meme him, but the “deputy field organizers” he’s paying $2,500 a month to advocate for his candidacy are getting banned from Twitter for passionlessly spamming out the campaign’s boilerplate copy. Others on his team, the L.A. Times reports, are piggybacking their official campaign texts with pleas to vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren instead.
Bloomberg’s pathetic outreach strategies hit a nadir on Monday, however, when the Team Bloomberg Twitter account decided to make a few “jokes” about the controversial comments Bernie made praising Cuba’s literacy and health care programs under the authoritarian rule of Fidel Castro (something Obama did, too, by the way). Using the hashtag #BernieOnDespots, Team Bloomberg shared a slew of fictional quotes. One example: “Should we really hold Muammar al-Gaddafi’s extrajudicial killings of political opponents against him, when he also built a pretty sweet countrywide irrigation system?” Another: “Who am I to question Kim Jong-un for starving millions of his own people, when he opened a kickass waterpark with over ten slides, a lazy river and a wave machine! What a blast!”
God help us, it didn’t end there.
While only a minuscule fraction of Team Bloomberg’s nearly 80,000 followers engaged with the tweets, the replies overflowed with people begging whoever was posting to put an end to this. One joke, in particular, drew massive ire: “Vladimir Putin is willing to poison anyone who disagrees with him, but have you seen how that guy looks without a shirt!! Mmm delish!”
Not only is it deeply misleading for a presidential campaign to attribute fake quotes to an opponent without some kind of disclaimer, but the Putin tweet also struck many as homophobic.
After a few thousand users piled into the tweet’s replies, Team Bloomberg hilariously added a sober addendum to the thread:
“To be clear—all of these are satire—with the exception of the 60 Minutes clip from last night,” the account tweeted out.
Thank you, Mara Wilson, for summing it up for everyone.
The dunks continued until, in the ultimate show of weakness, Team Bloomberg deleted each and every one of the tweets.
No reason was given for the deletion. We’d like to think shame was to blame, but we’re doubtful anyone who taking Bloomberg’s cash feels any.
Bloomberg returns to the debate stage tonight. Warren will probably roast him again.
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