Best billionaire play in 2020: Skip it

‘Both sides give me the sads’ is not a winner

Millions of Americans are one missed paycheck from a financial crisis and one billionaire away from four more years of Donald Trump.

As many as three billionaires are or were considering a campaign to replace our president, who became famous playing a billionaire on TV. This is a staggering number if you consider that there are only about 585 billionaires in this country, amounting to about .0002 percent of the population. Trump has the lowest average popularity for any president in polling history. If he manages to win another term, we will likely have a billionaire to thank.

Billionaire Howard Schultz, the former CEO and current largest shareholder of Starbucks, wants you to know he’s “seriously” considering running for president in 2020 as an independent because he thinks that Trump is “not qualified” to be president. But Schultz is also terrified that Democrats truly believe the country that made him rich by buying coffee milkshakes for almost $5 a pop can also afford to make sure everyone has quality health care.

This “both sides give me the sads” pabulum is the favorite lukewarm beverage of our mainstream news media, the core constituency for a Schultz campaign. It also might have some appeal for “Never Trump” Republicans willing to do anything to stop this lawless president, except actually vote for a Democrat who could beat Trump.

Since I’m not one of his overpaid consultants, I feel comfortable telling Schultz he will never become president as an independent. He will not succeed where Ross Perot, who was richer, and Teddy Roosevelt, who was a president, failed. But he could easily re-elect Trump, even if he only wins over Morning Joe’s roughly 1 million viewers.

That’s not just the opinion of almost every nervous liberal in America; it’s the operating theory of a billionaire who recently became a Democrat — Michael Bloomberg. There’s probably no one who has spent more time and resources probing an independent presidential run than the former mayor of New York City. What did he discover? “In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the antiTrump vote and end up re-electing the president,” Bloomberg wrote.

Of course, Bloomberg has a vested interest in this argument. He wants to run for president as a Democrat. In a massive Democratic field, which at this point looks more like a scattering marching band than a game, his planned $100 million budget could get him the nomination. And because he’d self-fund, he could do it without trying to win over the activist party base.

If Bloomberg is the Democratic nominee, he could also easily re-elect Trump — by acting as his own spoiler.

Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by fewer than 80,000 votes. That margin, enabled by effective voter suppression by Republicans, the Russians and the Trump campaign, was far less than the 132,476 tallied by just one third-party candidate — Jill Stein —in those three states.

Add in the Obama voters who stayed home and the shocking number of Michigan voters who didn’t vote for any presidential candidate, multiply it all by a ridiculous letter from FBI Director James Comey plus a few thousand hacked emails courtesy of Vladimir Putin, and you get President Trump.

If you want to imagine a similar dynamic in 2020, where Trump is reelected with even less of the 46.1 percent of the popular vote he won in 2016, give him a stiff billionaire or two to run against in the Great Lakes states. If Trump can win just one of the three key states he carried in 2016 by the margin of a crowd at a minor league hockey game, he’ll have a second term to degrade our democracy for his pleasure.

If Trump wins another term, billionaires know their taxes won’t go up. I’m not saying this is what’s driving the phenomenon of the rich-guy spoiler. But I will say that all of these billionaires with presidential fantasies would be wise to do what billionaire Tom Steyer has done. He has backed off a run for the presidency to focus on a cause near and dear to him and about 40 percent of America — impeaching Donald Trump.

That’s not the cause I’d pick, but at least it’s a good one.

Jason Sattler, aka @LOLGOP, is a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.