Reasons Not To Vote For Donald Trump,,Trump Deletes Bloomberg from His Friends List

By Djamilla R

Donald Trumpabruptly ended his friendship with fellow New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg after the former mayor, who is considering a White House bid of his own, snubbed him in the pages of the Financial Times.

“He was a friend of mine. As far as I'm concerned, he's not a friend of mine anymore,” Trump told Fox Business on Thursday, saying that Bloomberg had slighted him with a “nasty shot” in an interview where Bloomberg mused about entering the presidential race because he found “the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters.”

“I assume it was taken at me,” a fuming Trump toldStuart Varney. “But when my friends say things like that—assuming it was meant at me—I no longer consider them friends. I knew Michael very well. And he was a friend of mine.”

Rumors of a Bloomberg candidacy first surfaced last month in The New York Times, which reported that he had asked advisers to draw up plans for an independent run if Trump andBernie Sanders were the Republican and Democratic nominees—an outcome that became increasingly plausible after their double-digit victories in the New Hampshire primaries Tuesday. Allies and friends told the paper he was prepared to sink as much as $1 billion of his own fortune into the third-party challenge, news that was immediately heralded by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus as likely to split the Democratic vote. Trump has also welcomed his one-time golf partner to the race, telling Varney that he “would love to compete against Michael” and that he would inevitably “beat” him.

The relationship between the two New York–based billionaires goes back decades, with Trump praising his “friend’s” business intelligence as the head of a major financial news and media company (“It’s different kinds of business, it’s a very different kind of business”), bragging about their former business deals (one of which involved converting a construction site in the Bronx into a Trump-owned golf course) and hesitating to criticize him when given the chance. In recent days, however, he has appeared wounded by their falling out, saying he does not appreciate Bloomberg Media’s coverage of his candidacy. “I have been treated worse by Bloomberg than I think any other group,” said Trump. “Because of that, I think he’s running.”