Presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg seems to have misunderstood a bit of ancient show business wisdom embodied in the title of a Laurel and Hardy silent classic: “Leave ‘Em Laughing.” The intended advice is to send your audience away with a positive feeling. Bloomberg’s campaign staff apparently takes the adage literally. They have designed media appeals that leaves viewers laughing — but at the candidate, not with him.
First came Bloomie’s Twitter blitz in January. The media “event,” if that is the correct term, consisted of a series of sophomoric tweets that one can only guess were meant to be funny. One read “Mike’s house is designed to look exactly like the interior of the Millennium Falcon.” Another advised that “last year alone, Mike spent over $200 million dollars on scratch-off lottery tickets.”
The resulting laugh riot was followed a week and a half later by the former New York City mayor doing a promotion for Big Gay Ice Cream. The brand is for real, boasting five locations in New York City and one in Philadelphia. The question that arose in any normally functioning mind is why Bloomberg did the ten-second promo. Was it to curry favor with the LGBT community? And if so, does he really believe that pretending to like an ice cream brand developed by gay entrepreneurs will do the trick?
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Which brings us to Bloomie’s latest. It is a video of Donald Trump that has been altered so that the only word he utters throughout is lie. This goes on for two and a half minutes, which begins after ten seconds or so to seem like an eternity.
But there’s more. Team Bloomberg has also added an animatronic gingerbread man that dances on Trump’s shoulder. Smoke rises out of the animation’s head, and at one point his feet burst into flame, which one imagines is intended to hark back to taunt “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
But why a gingerbread man? And why 2 minutes and 30 seconds? Those are questions the 77-year-old candidate alone can answer.
Trump was in rare form during his post-acquittal speech. pic.twitter.com/jq8NTTn5yd
— Team Bloomberg (@Mike2020) February 6, 2020
