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Tom Steyer, the leftist billionaire who thinks he can save the world with “clean energy” and began a move to impeach President Trump nine months after The Donald took office, is running for president.
Steyer’s appeal: He might well be the Democratic Trump, a nonpolitician taking on establishment Democrats such as Sleepy Joe Biden, elderly socialist Bernie Sanders, pot partisan Kamala Harris, and fake Indian Elizabeth Warren.
The problem: Like the rest, the NextGen founder flaps around on his left wing.
The Video
Steyer, who said he wouldn’t run in January, announced his change of mind with a video focused on evil corporations and Republican politicians. “I think people believe that the corporations have bought the democracy,” he intoned. “That the politicians don’t care about or respect them, won’t put them first, are not working for them.”
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In fact, he continued, the politicians “are actually working for the people who have rigged the system,” a not altogether untrue claim.
Steyer said his aim is “to make democracy work by pushing power down to the people.”
Steyer’s upbringing, he intoned, had something to do with his quest for power. “I grew up in the middle of the civil rights revolution and the Vietnam war,” he recalled, when “the underlying injustice in America was coming under attack.”
Images of President Nixon and 1964 GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater appeared with that claim of “injustice,” and then comes the tale of his father’s role as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
Another GOP face prominently featured in the video is that of Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign legman convicted of financial crimes against the federal government and now facing more charges in New York.
Oddly, given his concern with “injustice,” Steyer didn’t show a picture of Democrat President Lyndon Johson, who told the Gulf of Tonkin lie that began the Vietnam War in earnest, called the Civil Rights Act of 1957 the “n***er bill,” and thought the civil rights movement showed that “these Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity.”
To his credit, Steyer did include some former high-dollar Democrat contributors in his lineup of the unjust and corrupt: stock swindler Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein, the Wall Street wizard recently indicted in connection with sex trafficking of minors.
Anyway, Steyer, who humbly reminded viewers that he and his wife vowed to give away half their wealth while alive, added that “if this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”
Everybody else isn’t living in misery, but Steyer continued: “The lawyers have basically gotten the Supreme Court to say that corporations are people and therefore they have all the right in the Constitution given to people.”
Corporations have no hearts, soul, or children, he said, and “if you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything because they only care about profits.”
Steyer’s upset about drug overdoses, and denounced the banks that are “screwing people on their mortgages.” With “almost every single major intractable problem,” he averred, “at the back of it you see a money interest.”
Money Bags
Steyer, who’s worth some $1.6 billion, will spend $100 million of his own on the campaign, the New York Times reported:
That figure exceeds the total fund-raising over the last three months by Joseph R. Biden Jr., Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris — combined. A $100 million budget would represent about half the cost of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 primary campaign; most candidates who run for president spend a fraction of that sum.
Beyond that, he presents the same problem for the Democrat establishment as Trump did for Republicans, the Times reported:
Should Mr. Steyer bring that pugilistic stance to the presidential race, it could represent a major disruption in a campaign largely defined by the candidates’ aversion to conflict. Outside of recent criticism directed at Mr. Biden — most notably by Ms. Harris — the Democrats have mostly shied away from direct confrontation.
For his part, President Trump is unafraid of the challenge. In October, Trump tweeted:
Just watched Wacky Tom Steyer, who I have not seen in action before, be interviewed by @jaketapper. He comes off as a crazed & stumbling lunatic who should be running out of money pretty soon. As bad as their field is, if he is running for President, the Dems will eat him alive!
Image of Tom Steyer: Screenshot of CBS News YouTube video about presidenttial bid
