On Monday, after former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced over the weekend that he might be interested in launching an Independent candidacy for the presidency in 2020, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican who supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016, issued a statement that echoed the panic many Democrats expressed that a prospective Schultz run would jeopardize the Democrats’ chances of ousting President Trump in 2020. Bloomberg wrote, “In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-Trump vote and end up re-electing the President. That’s a risk I refused to run in 2016 and we can’t afford to run it now.”
Bloomberg’s contempt for Trump runs deep. Speaking at the Democratic National Convention in support of Hillary Clinton, he snapped:
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