This NYT opinion piece contends that Michael Bloomberg’s US presidential campaign is taking a leaf out of Donald Trump’s playbook:

Take Mr. Bloomberg’s brazen spending, which has prompted claims that he’s an oligarch trying to bypass democracy by buying the presidency. Plenty of candidates would get defensive at such speculation. Mr. Bloomberg is unfazed. Who cares?! At least he’s in the conversation. More than that, the conversation is now centered around the idea that he could very well win.

The whole thing sounds Trumpian because it is. The Trump campaign was unabashed in 2016 and beyond about its plan to “flood the zone” with garbage or ragebait. The strategy worked in part because it engaged and energized his base. And, as Sean Illing detailed recently at Vox, it exploited a media ecosystem that is built to give attention to lies (in order to debunk them) and outlandishness (because it’s entertaining or newsworthy).

This reminded me of reading Matt Taibbi’s excellent book Insane Clown President. It’s essentially a mea culpa, with columns he wrote from the 2016 campaign trail followed by a commentary in hindsight, written soon after the elections. It demonstrates in real time how the candidate broke norm after norm, each supposed transgression further disqualifying him in the press as a serious candidate but in reality cementing his appeal with the population that voted for him. That process, it seems that Bloomberg recognises, has created new norms with fewer constraints, rendering propriety superfluous, an outright liability.