Bill de Blasio's 2020 Campaign Is Off to a Great Start!

Well, he finally did it. Large New York City Mayor and rodent extermination enthusiast Bill de Blasio announced his candidacy for the 2020 presidential election on Thursday, ending months of extremely unenthusiastic speculation about whether he’d elbow his way into pack of nearly two dozen other Democrats already vying for the White House. And as you might expect, it’s off to a great start already.

To begin with, de Blasio’s splashy campaign roll out seemed to be undercut by a staffer who confirmed that Bill was tossing his hat in the ring to NBC News Wednesday night, well before the mayor actually made his official announcement the following morning. Smooth!

Then there was de Blasio’s actual announcement video—a slick production featuring the mayor being chauffeured around New York City in the back of a black SUV, while he waxes on about why he thinks he’s qualified to be president.

For someone supposedly putting “working people first,” the optics of being driven around in a sleek SUV while his millions of constituents are stuck in New York’s incomparably shitty subway system (something Bill might care more about if he actually rode the train for anything other than just a photo op) is pretty terrible.

Bill couldn’t even be bothered to take the subway to his Good Morning America appearance, where he made his first in-person announcement that, yes, he’s running.

Once at the studios, de Blasio continued to stumble. Asked during the interview about recent polling that showed a majority of New Yorkers don’t want him to run, de Blasio offered some Hallmark card treacle, saying that: “It’s not where you start, it’s where you end.”

Boy, slap that baby on an inspirational poster of a bunch of Yalies rowing a boat or someone scaling the face of a steep cliff. To drive the point home even further, here’s how his hometown paper greeted his campaign this morning:

On Good Morning America, De Blasio used his time to awkwardly dub President Donald Trump “con Don” in an uncomfortable attempt to both sink to the president’s sophomoric level and also get some sort of trending action on Twitter, where the mayor used the same hashtag to respond to Trump’s reaction to his candidacy.

Suffice it to say, #ConDon hasn’t particularly taken off.

Oh, and while this all was happening, a large crowd had gathered outside the ABC studio to loudly chant “liar” throughout the mayor’s appearance.

De Blasio now heads to Iowa for the first leg of his now-official campaign. While there, he’ll presumably be angling for slightly larger crowds than he’s drawn in past months, including a recent trip to key primary state New Hampshire, where only 20 people reportedly showed up to hear him speak.