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Michael Bloomberg’s DNC speech really got under Trump’s skin

Andrew Prokop
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.

Since former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered a sharply anti-Trump speech at the Democratic convention on Wednesday, political observers have been waiting with bated breath for Trump to respond.

Bloomberg’s speech seemed uniquely tailored to get under Trump’s skin. He said Trump was a hypocrite and a con artist who’s also a terrible businessman, and even seemed to question his sanity.

Plus, Bloomberg is not only a fellow New Yorker but a far richer one than Trump — even according to Trump’s exaggerated reporting of his own fortune — so his criticism has to sting a guy who measures people’s self-worth by the size of their bank accounts.

Shockingly enough, Thursday came and went without the candidate tweeting angry insults at the former mayor. But finally, on Friday morning, Trump could remain silent no longer:

But not only is Trump’s “Little Michael Bloomberg” nickname an unoriginal repeat of his primary season attacks on Marco Rubio, his attacks on Bloomberg’s last term as mayor are completely contradicted by what he said at the time:

Keep in mind that this is just hours after Clinton suggested that Trump is so “easy” to bait that he shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons. “He loses his cool at the slightest provocation,” Clinton said. But as we’ve seen so often during this campaign, Trump can’t let a perceived insult stand without a crude, name-calling, misleading response.

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