Impeachment All but Behind Him, Trump Celebrates and Keeps Focus on Bloomberg

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — On many levels, President Donald Trump’s weekend — full of golf, catered salmon and plenty of patriotic-themed evening wear — could have been devised to offer relief and a sense of triumph to a president who spent the first month of an election year watching from the sidelines as the Senate debated his future.

With his acquittal all but final, the president passed from table to table in the dining room of his golf club Saturday quizzing his buddies on the 2020 election, at times lingering long enough to complain about his impeachment ordeal.

“What a waste,” the president told a group of supporters, according to one guest who had such an exchange with him. “What a waste of time.”

By Saturday night, the president was in a more celebratory mood when he greeted the band of supporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago, his private club.

Under a large illustration that depicted him dressed as a football player, Trump regaled them with his latest approval ratings — “We just had our best poll numbers that we’ve ever had,” he said to the group — and walked into the dining room to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” The song is played every time Trump takes the stage at one of his rallies, and Greenwood was performing it live for the special occasion.

“As usual, our president scored another victory,” Toni Kramer, the supporter who organized the party for him, said in an interview. “He won the Super Bowl of Washington.”

But that sense of celebration appeared to be fleeting as the evening went on and Trump’s anger over impeachment, and his antipathy toward his possible 2020 election opponents — in particular, Michael Bloomberg — spilled into public view. There were more pressing matters at hand, including the global spread of the coronavirus and his State of the Union address Tuesday, but he made little mention of them.

Sunday night the president and Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and a latecomer to the Democratic race who is not on the ballot in the Iowa caucuses Monday, faced off in costly Super Bowl ads. But Trump, who seems to be increasingly fixated on Bloomberg and the fortune he is vowing to spend on the election, apparently could not wait.

In a tweet sent just after midnight, Trump tried to implicate Bloomberg in a conspiracy theory he has used in an apparent attempt to sow divisions in the Democratic presidential field.

“Many of the ads you are watching were paid for by Mini Mike Bloomberg,” Trump said. “He is going nowhere, just wasting his money, but he is getting the DNC to rig the election against Crazy Bernie, something they wouldn’t do for @CoryBooker and others. They are doing it to Bernie again, 2016.”

More tweets about Bloomberg followed, culminating in an interview with Sean Hannity, a Fox News personality and presidential confidant, that was taped Saturday but aired three hours before the game.

In the interview, the president reiterated a false claim he had sent in a late-night tweet: that Bloomberg had demanded a box to stand on should he participate in a Democratic candidates’ debate.

“You know, now he wants a box for the debates to stand on. OK, it’s OK, there’s nothing wrong,” Trump said. “You can be short. Why should he get a box to stand on, OK? He wants a box for the debates. Why should he be entitled to that? Really. Does that mean everyone else gets a box?”

Bloomberg’s campaign spokeswoman, Julie Wood, did not hold anything back in her response. “The president is lying,” she said. “He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity and his spray-on tan.”

While he focused on Bloomberg, the president did not spare any of his Democratic rivals. He and Hannity played a lightning round where Hannity invited the president to say whatever came to mind about Democratic presidential candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Trump falsely called Sanders a “communist” and claimed that he had been married in Russia.

“I think of communism when I think of Bernie,” Trump said. “Didn’t he get married in Moscow?”

Sanders was married in Burlington, Vermont, before traveling to the Soviet Union soon after, and the trip has been used as fodder by his critics as evidence that he has communist leanings.

During his Fox sit-down, both Trump and his interviewer seemed more interested in allowing the president to focus on his grievances over impeachment and his reelection effort rather than elaborate on a global public health crisis.

“It’s been very unfair from the day I won,” Trump said. “Mostly it was unfair to my family.”

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He gave a comparatively cursory amount of attention to the spread of the coronavirus, which caused his administration to bar foreign nationals and Americans who had traveled to China recently from entering the U.S.

“We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” Trump said of the coronavirus. “But we can’t have thousands of people coming in who may have this problem, the coronavirus.”

Trump summed it up this way: “So we’re going to see what happens. But we did shut it down, yes.”

Trump was even less expansive when Hannity asked whether he had considered moving his State of the Union address, which is scheduled to take place before the Senate impeachment trial officially concludes Wednesday. The president replied: “No, I’m going to have it. It’s going to be done. We’re going to talk about the achievements that we’ve made.”

“Nobody has made achievements like we’ve made,” Trump said of his speech, “so many different things.”

As the game drew closer, the president appeared to once again redirect his focus — this time to attend the annual Super Bowl watch party he holds at his West Palm Beach golf club. Trump watched a marching band play “Born to Be Wild” on the club’s lawn, then went inside to watch the night’s competitors — and perhaps some football — before departing to Washington.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .