Black trans women for Bloomberg

We are apparently going to have Michael Bloomberg to kick around for a while longer. He is running a radio ad in Minnesota that represents the audio equivalent of a “listening tour.” The ad serves up the foremost concerns of three unidentified Minnesotans. They do not declare that they like Mike. They don’t even declare that they support him. They simply express their foremost concerns.

The first gives it as “the environment.” I don’t specifically recall the second; I think it must have been the sacrament of abortion, but I wouldn’t swear to it. The third is a woman who states her concern as “LGBTQ plus rights, specifically trans rights, specifically black trans women.”

This may be the weirdest political ad I have ever heard run on behalf of a “serious” presidential candidate. Looking around for an audio clip or text of the ad online — I wasn’t able to find one, so I am writing from memory — I found Dominic Holden’s 2019 Buzzfeed story “Mike Bloomberg Once Again Called Transgender People ‘It’ And ‘Some Guy Wearing A Dress.’”

Holden’s story concludes with this full text of the quote from a since deleted video of Bloomberg speaking in March 2019:

“Throw the bums out, they haven’t delivered, they didn’t listen to us.” If you go to the middle of the country, people would say. If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people. They care about health care, they care about education, they care about safety, and all of those kinds of things. And some of these social issues — and not just the American government, the EU government does as well — we are focusing on a lot of things that have little relevance to people who are trying to live in a world that is changing because of technology and communications and things like that. And so you can understand where somebody like Trump comes from; you can understand when you look at the Democratic Party, they are so far left that two years ago there was nobody on their side who would take these positions, and today virtually all the candidates for president of the Democratic Party are so progressive. I don’t know what progressive means. They are in a place where some of the American public is, and it remains to be seen if the remainder of the electorate is.

Before giving the full quote, Holden’s story concludes: “Back at the March 2019 forum, Bloomberg said he’d largely ruled out running for president this year due to his political views, saying in a video, ‘It’s just not going to happen on a national level for somebody like me starting where I am, unless I was going to change all my views and go on what CNN calls an apology tour.’”

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