Michael Bloomberg took a dig at President Trump’s real estate career on late-night TV.
“He was reasonably well-known. He was a real estate promoter,” the former New York City mayor and 2020 Democrat told CBS’s Stephen Colbert when asked about his relationship with Trump when he ran the nation’s largest city. “A lot of the buildings he didn’t build, he just put his name on it.”
Bloomberg, who booked the spot on The Late Show after missing out on the Iowa debate, added Trump “has a reputation for not being scrupulous in how he counts strokes” on the golf course and that he didn’t bother to keep his personal cellphone number after the then-president-elect gave it to him before his inauguration.
Bloomberg, 77, who is skipping the early-voting states in favor of a “Super Tuesday” strategy, failed to qualify for the seventh primary debate because, as a self-funder, he didn’t meet the fundraising thresholds. To compete with the six candidates on the debate stage, his staff staged a series of eccentric social media jokes.
On Tuesday, he also explained why he felt the need to apologize for “stop-and-frisk” policies he introduced as mayor. He said he implemented the measures to “stop the carnage” of a rampant homicide rate on his city’s streets before realizing his police force “was getting out of control and doing it too much.”
“If you can’t apologize, I don’t know how you live with yourself,” he said.
