Trump rips into Bloomberg, says Sanders at least ‘has real followers’

President Trump on Tuesday said he would rather run against former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the November election, even as he acknowledged Sanders’s loyal following.

“Frankly, I’d rather run against Bloomberg than Bernie Sanders, because Sanders has real followers,” Trump told reporters during an Oval Office event. “Whether you like them or not, whether you agree with them or not, I happen to think it’s terrible what he says. But he has followers. Bloomberg’s just buying his way in.”

Trump’s comments seemed to implicitly recognize the strength of Sanders’s campaign, which has drawn comparisons to the president’s own 2016 effort in terms of energy and appeal to working class voters.

The president weighed at length on the state of the Democratic primary in the Oval Office, also offering his assessment of former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump characterized Biden’s campaign as “stumbling” and “mumbling,” but said he would not write off the possibility of a bounce-back in the South Carolina primary later this month.

“He could always turn it around. It’s not going to be easy,” Trump said. “I think he can turn it around, yeah. He’s got a shot.”

But much of the president’s diatribe was directed at Bloomberg, who came under attack earlier in the day over newly surfaced audio of him defending stop-and-frisk policing practices.

Trump ripped Bloomberg specifically for apologizing for the use of stop-and-frisk and made clear he still supports the policy.

“I support anything we can do to get down crime and to get rid of drugs,” Trump said. “But I think when a man is with stop-and-frisk his whole life and then he decides to go Democrat and he goes to church, and he’s practically crying, he looked like hell … saying what a horrible thing he did. I think that’s so disingenuous.”

Trump went on to dismiss Bloomberg as a “lightweight” and “one of the worst debaters I’ve ever seen.”

Audio surfaced Tuesday of Bloomberg describing the policy during a 2015 appearance at the Aspen Institute.

“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, it’s true in virtually every city,” Bloomberg is heard saying in the recording.

Bloomberg in a statement acknowledged he took “too long to understand the impact [stop-and-frisk] had on Black and Latino communities.” The former New York mayor apologized in November for supporting the policy during a speech to a black megachurch before formally getting into the presidential race.

Bloomberg has steadily climbed in the polls since entering the Democratic field, largely by flooding the airwaves with ads and spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money. He has managed to get under Trump’s skin, eliciting responses from Trump via Twitter on a semi-regular basis.