For five minutes of the Democratic National Convention, Michael Bloomberg gave an utterly forgettable speech promoting Joe Biden. And it only cost him $936 million.
Bloomberg spent half a billion dollars in his futile run for president, with only a victory in American Samoa to show for it. Realistically, it cost Bloomberg a lot more to secure his spot at the convention; he transferred $18 million to the DNC, and it’s expected he’ll spend at least another $250 million to try and push Biden to victory in November.
Bloomberg is used to buying favor in the Democratic Party. He spent $100 million on Democrats’ efforts to flip the House of Representatives in 2018. During his brief run for president, he nearly slipped into saying that he bought the House majority, expecting that it would earn him support among Democratic voters. He has pledged another $60 million to help Democrats hold the House.
For that amount of money, you would hope Bloomberg would have some fresh material ready, but he mostly focused on comparing President Trump’s tenure to being a poor businessman, the exact same line of attack he used in 2016.
Bloomberg’s attacks on Trump as a sleazy businessman only out for himself fell flat as well. Bloomberg had promised staffers they would stay employed through November even if he dropped out. He then dropped out after Super Tuesday and laid off thousands, leading his own former staffers to write the DNC against giving him a speaking slot.
Bloomberg has also sold himself out to the Chinese Communist Party, proclaiming that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is not a dictator. As the Washington Post reported in January, Bloomberg had been “forging close financial ties there while showering praise on the Communist Party leaders whose goodwill is required to play a role in that fast-growing market.”
So, in the end, Bloomberg paid nearly $200 million per minute to deliver a speech he had given before — one that had been drained of all potency, given how Bloomberg had run his own campaign. By tomorrow morning, no one will even remember that he spoke.
