RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was a Drudge Report headline calculated to shock: “Exclusive: Bloomberg Considers Hillary Running Mate. The underlying story, at CNBC, stated that the Drudge Report itself was claiming that a source close to Mike Bloomberg’s campaign had stated that Bloomberg was considering asking Hillary Clinton to serve as his running mate. The reason given was that internal polling said that the two of them together would be a dynamic duo.

The story was met with incredulity and much hilarity (if you’ll pardon the pun). The idea that Hillary Clinton would play second fiddle to anyone was hard to fathom. Moreover, given Hillary’s grating personality, the collapse of all her initiatives during her stint as Secretary of State, her habit of enriching herself at the country’s expense, and her failed candidacy, it was hard to imagine why anyone would want her on the ballot.

Twitter, the repository of clever one-liners, had a wonderful time imagining what a Bloomberg/Hillary pairing would look like and the effect it would have on Trump’s campaign:

Perhaps because of the negative response, the Bloomberg campaign quickly “downplayed,” but did not deny, the idea:

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign on Saturday downplayed a report that he is considering 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as his pick for vice president.

[snip]

But the Bloomberg campaign quickly tamped down that report but fell short of denying it outright.

“We are focused on the primary and the debate, not VP speculation,” Bloomberg communication director Jason Schechter said in a statement.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Drudge is so anti-Trump that its hemorrhaging readers, people began to speculate that the initial announcement was trolling:

That idea makes no sense, of course, because neither Bloomberg nor Hillary scares Trump, whether individually or as a collective, so where’s the trolling in that?

By day’s end, the story had pretty much faded away. If his buy-in succeeds, Bloomberg, who has a long history of demeaning and harassing women, would almost certainly choose a female running mate, but he wouldn’t choose a white woman in her 70s who has a long, toxic record trailing behind her. Should he successfully buy the Democrat primaries, expect Bloomberg to choose a minority woman, possibly Kamala Harris or Stacy Abrams.