President Trump said Monday that Howard Schultz “doesn’t have the ‘guts’” to be President, a day after the ex-Starbucks Chairman and CEO told CBS’ 60 Minutes he was mulling running as an independent candidate in 2020.
“Howard Schultz doesn’t have the “guts” to run for President,” Trump tweeted Monday morning.
“[I] Watched him on 60 Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the ‘smartest person,’” Trump continued. “Besides, America already has that!,” he added, apparently referring to himself.
Like Trump, Schultz is a former donor to the Democratic Party. “We’re living at a most fragile time,” Schultz told CBS on Sunday.
He went on: “Not only the fact that this President is not qualified to be the president, but the fact that both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged every single day in revenge politics.”
Schultz has positioned himself as a business-minded centrist, and has criticized policies like single-payer healthcare supported by Democrats who have thrown their hats in the ring for 2020.
“It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left,” Schultz told CNBC in June 2018. “I ask myself, ‘How are we going to pay for all these things?’ In terms of things like single-payer or people espousing the fact that the government is going to give everyone a job. I don’t think that’s realistic.”
Democratic Party stalwarts, meanwhile, expressed their concern that Schultz’s decision to run as an independent could split the anti-Trump vote and hand the President a second term at the next election.
Schultz, who stepped down from Starbucks in June, has an estimated net worth of $2.9 billion, according to Forbes. Trump’s is $3.1 billion, according to the same calculations.
A sense of competition might have informed the last line of Trump’s tweet: “I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!”
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