Trump vs. Bloomberg: Fortunes collide in pricey knife fight

They are circling each other like wary boxers, with taunts on Twitter, snarky asides and belittling descriptions. They rose to prominence in Manhattan on parallel tracks, amassed wealth real and perceived and displayed a penchant for putting their names on things. That’s where the similarities end. President Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg could hardly be more different as people, but now they both want the same job: Trump’s.

Bloomberg is making the case that he is many things that Trump is not: a builder of a financial data and media company that employs 20,000 people, a billionaire whose worth Forbes estimates at $60 billion, a problem-solver with a steady temperament who was elected three times as mayor of the nation’s largest city, one of the world’s leading philanthropists. “Bloomberg is someone Trump would have liked to have been: to have invented something everyone uses, to have real wealth, to be seen as a creative person. Trump had to create an image for himself,” said George Arzt, onetime press secretary to former New York Mayor Ed Koch. Arzt knows both men professionally and personally.

He said Bloomberg is someone who likes to solve problems, who likes to be hands-on, even including the design of new Department of Sanitation trucks, while Trump is “basically a showman.” Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s senior adviser, said: “Mike hired Donald Trump to run a golf course in the Bronx but would not hire him for any other job. And the president knows that.”

Bloomberg is running for the Democratic nomination for president on a path no serious candidate in the party has ever taken, forgoing early primary states and debates while spending hundreds of millions of dollars on ads in larger Super Tuesday states, almost all of which take a hard shot at Trump. He doesn’t accept any campaign donations. In Texas, when asked whether the country wanted a race between two New York billionaires, he replied, “Who’s the other one?”

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