Former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ongoing feud with President Donald Trump is heating up—and taking on a higher price tag. As Bloomberg continues to burn through cash with the solitary goal of defeating Trump, Bloomberg News reports that the president’s reelection campaign and its major fundraisers are now scrambling to compete with the billionaire’s deep pockets. The Trump team is reportedly discussing plans to raise an $1 billion themselves to match Bloomberg’s $1 billion pledge to defeat Trump—by hounding the billionaires in their own camp for even more cash.
Trump officials and GOP fundraisers, including Trump son-in-law and campaign adviser Jared Kushner and Republican National Committee co-chair Tommy Hicks, have reportedly been meeting to “consider ways to keep up” with Bloomberg’s outsized spending, including by “rais[ing] more money from a handful of billionaires.” Trump-friendly billionaires like casino owner Sheldon Adelson, Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, Continental Resources Inc. founder Harold Hamm, and Blackstone Group Inc. CEO Stephen Schwarzman are expected to be prime targets for the fundraising push, which would funnel money to Trump-backing super PACs. (Campaign and RNC officials cannot actually legally solicit super PAC donations, but sources told Bloomberg that the meetings held with officials to discuss fundraising were “not to solicit donations but to discuss strategy.”)
Trump’s campaign and the RNC have so far managed to out-raise traditional Democratic candidates, amassing $525 million so far and ending last month with more than $200 million still on hand. (Senator Bernie Sanders, the top Democratic fundraiser, has only earned $121 million, for comparison.) But Bloomberg’s deep pockets have forced the already lucrative MAGA machine into overdrive, threatening to take away the financial advantage traditionally afforded to incumbent candidates. Trump has also reportedly personally felt daunted by his New York compatriot’s buckets of cash, suggesting that the fundraising drive to put his own campaign on par financially with the billionaire businessman could help the president’s increasing agitation over Bloomberg’s candidacy. Trump “takes money seriously,” one adviser told Axios in early February. “He’s a businessman.”
The escalating financial competition between the Trump camp and Bloomberg comes as the billionaire’s personal feud with the president shows no signs of slowing down. Hours after Trump and Bloomberg once again got into a Twitter feud Tuesday, as Trump accused Bloomberg of “illegally buying the Democrat Nomination,” the Bloomberg campaign sought to put even more distance between the two wealthy New Yorkers. In an appearance on CNN, Bloomberg campaign spokesman Tim O’Brien declared that Bloomberg would completely sell his company and release his tax returns if elected president—unlike Trump. “Mike Bloomberg will release his tax returns. Mike Bloomberg will also sell Bloomberg LP,” O’Brien said Tuesday. “There will be no confusion about any of his financial holdings blurring the line between public service and personal profiteering. We will be 180 degrees away from where Donald Trump is on these issues, because Donald Trump is a walking financial conflict of interest.”
Bloomberg’s ownership of Bloomberg LP has already become a source of concern since Bloomberg entered the race, as restrictions on investigating Democratic rivals and Bloomberg’s traditionally tight reins on the company—“I don’t want the reporters I’m paying to write a bad story about me,” he said in 2018—have resulted in accusations of bias and retribution from the Trump campaign. Should the former mayor sell the company outright, it would relieve these concerns, along with the charges of profiting off the presidency that have plagued Trump’s White House tenure. But reporting Monday on the current tensions at Bloomberg News over its owner’s candidacy, the New York Times noted that if Bloomberg does unload his company, it could come at the cost of its journalistic operation: