Donald Trump Instantly Tweets Insult At New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio After Presidential Bid Announcement

New York City’s 58-year-old Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday became the 24th candidate to enter the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination, and his candidacy was only 33 minutes old before Donald Trump took to Twitter to launch a barrage of insults at the second-term mayor, in which Trump dismissed de Blasio as a “joke.”

In his campaign announcement video, which he posted on Twitter at 5 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday morning, de Blasio promised to “take on the wealthy.”

“I will take on the big corporations. I will not rest until this government serves working people.”

But Trump was up early in the morning as he often appears to be, and at 5:33 a.m., he commented on de Blasio’s newly-minted presidential bid, saying that Democrats “are getting another beauty to join their group,” and going on to slam de Blasio as “the worst mayor in the U.S.”

“He is a JOKE, but if you like high taxes & crime, he’s your man. NYC HATES HIM!” Trump wrote.

Trump apparently composed the tweet before he had actually become aware of de Blasio’s official announcement — because in the tweet Trump refers to de Blasio as “supposedly” making a later announcement of his run for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

Trump is a native of New York City and, by continuing to maintain his Trump Tower residence there, is technically one of de Blasio’s constituents. But he is far from the only New Yorker who appeared less than pleased with a de Blasio presidential run. A poll by Quinnipiac University released in April showed more than three of four New Yorkers, 76 percent, saying that de Blasio should not run for president.

The same poll showed that de Blasio had an approval rating among New Yorkers of only 44 percent — not much better than Trump’s own national approval rating of 42 percent in the most recent polling average compiled by FiveThirtyEight.

The New York mayor, who was elected in 2013 and reelected to a second and — under New York City’s term limit laws — final term in 2017, also faces an uphill battle in the record-large Democratic field. Only five candidates in the field of 24 are now drawing poll numbers higher than 5 percent, in the average of all polls compiled by Real Clear Politics.

Per The Inquisitr, of those five top candidates, only former Vice President Joe Biden has established a firm grip on frontrunner status, leading his nearest competitor, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, by 23.5 percentage points, according to the RCP average.

How de Blasio plans to make inroads into the field and into Biden’s lead remains unclear. Yet, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis, “don’t rule him out just yet. New York, it’s where dreams are made of; there’s nothing a term-limited mayor can’t do.”