Michael Bloomberg kicked off his Democratic presidential campaign by apologizing for the racist, brutal stop-and-frisk policy he embraced as mayor of New York City, but newly released audio shows just how much he has to apologize for. “Controversial, but, first thing is … 95 percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg said, speaking at the Aspen Institute in 2015. “You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25.”
Gross, despicable, and racist. So gross, despicable, and racist that Team Trump seized on it, with both father Donald and son Donald tweeting about how racist Bloomberg’s comments were. They’re not wrong—they’re just completely cynical and dishonest about their own feelings about racist stop-and-frisk policies, and of course, with Trump, there’s always a tweet. Or three of them.
Trump is now retweeting Van Jones about the evils of stop and frisk, but in 2013, he tweeted “Stop and frisk works. Instead of criticizing @NY_POLICE Chief Ray Kelly, New Yorkers should be thanking him for keeping NY safe.” And also “Chicago is a shooting disaster-they should immediately go to STOP AND FRISK. They have no choice, hundreds of lives would be saved!” Not to mention “Since stop & frisk was struck down, gun shootings & victims have spiked--while gun seizures have decreased.”
It sure would be interesting—in a rubbernecking-at-a-wreck kind of way—if the 2020 presidential election came down to two racist billionaires from New York. But this is a great reminder, when debate moderators ask Sen. Bernie Sanders if he’s worried that Trump will attack him for being a democratic socialist, or ask any of the other candidates if voters should be worried that Trump will attack them for being [any possible quality here], that the Trump campaign is going to attack literally any Democrat on anything it thinks might provide an ounce of leverage. Even Trump specialties like racism. Even on a specific policy he repeatedly endorsed.
Bloomberg, though, has a lot more apologizing to do. So much apologizing.