Mike Bloomberg on Trump’s Job Performance

Reid Hoffman
3 min readAug 21, 2020

So often people talk about the Democratic Party as the party of pluralist, pie-in-the-sky idealism and the Republican Party as the party of practical, results-driven business.

At last night’s Democratic National Convention, though, one of the world’s most successful, results-driven business leaders, Michael Bloomberg, made some key points.

Bloomberg, of course, is not just a great businessman, but also an experienced and accomplished public servant. For 12 years, he served as the mayor of New York City, and like any New Yorker, he knows how to spot a con.

The last time he spoke at the Democratic Convention in 2016, in fact, he told us exactly where we as a country would be with Donald Trump as our president. “Trump says he wants to run the nation like he runs his business,” Mayor Bloomberg said then. “God help us.”

He knew where we were headed because he knew Trump’s history. The thousands of lawsuits. The six bankruptcies. The predatory grift of Trump University. The imaginary PR people feeding fake gossip to reporters. The non-stop lying, cheating, and corruption.

As prescient as Mayor Bloomberg was, I doubt even he imagined things would get as bad as they’ve gotten. As he said in his speech last night, Trump has failed the American people catastrophically.

The pandemic is global, and countries everywhere have suffered great losses. But on August 19th, Germany recorded 7 deaths, Italy had 7, the U.K. had 16, and France had 17. The U.S. had 1369, but according to Trump, he’s doing an “incredible” job.

As America endures week after week of 1000-plus COVID-19 deaths a day, we still have higher unemployment numbers than we’ve had in 70 years. 30 to 40 million people are at risk of eviction over the next several months.

That’s why, as Mayor Bloomberg said in his speech, this election really isn’t about Trump’s character or temperament — deficient as they are. It’s about his job performance. After three-plus years, it’s time for a job review.

On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump bragged that he was a builder who would bring the results-oriented approach of a successful businessman to government, starting with his big beautiful border wall.

Reid Hoffman

Entrepreneur. Investor. Strategist.