Bloomberg news shakes up 2020 race

News on Thursday that Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and billionaire, is actively preparing a White House run as a Democrat without officially plunging into the candidate pool momentarily complicated an increasingly unpredictable presidential race.

Bloomberg, 77, has for months signaled both his interest in trying to defeat President Trump and his willingness to holster his ambitions on the sidelines as long as former Vice President Joe Biden appeared to be the frontrunner and most viable opponent who could knock Trump out of the Oval Office.

Bloomberg’s decision, first reported by The New York Times, to send aides to Alabama to gather signatures and to meet a deadline today for candidates to formally enter the race was both a trial balloon and a signal of his nervousness that Biden appears weakened and the rest of the field may not be up to the task of successfully battling Trump.

Howard Wolfson, a former New York City deputy mayor and Bloomberg adviser, tweeted that the former three-term mayor views the president as an “unprecedented threat to our nation” and has grown uneasy about the current trajectory of the Democratic primary. But a path for Bloomberg to become the nominee and then the president as a late-entry billionaire in a Democratic field hostile to big money, big business and capitalists from Manhattan appears unlikely one year from Election Day.