Mike Bloomberg flopped during Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, and now he’s accused of playing a shell game with a video clip of the event.
On Thursday morning, the billionaire businessman released a deceptively edited video that falsely suggested he rendered the other candidates speechless at one point.
The video begins at the moment when the former New York City mayor declared: “I’m the only one here I think that’s ever started a business.”
During the actual exchange, his comment was greeted with about four seconds of silence, but the video below falsely implied it was more like 20.
It seems whoever edited Bloomberg’s video tweet took moments from other parts of the debate to make it look as if his declaration was so powerful candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former Vice President Joe Biden had no response.
HuffPost reached out to the Bloomberg campaign for comment on the reason for releasing the doctored video, but no one has immediately responded.
However, others did, shocked that the campaign would attempt to make artificial lemonade out of a lemon of a performance.
But at least one person (sarcastically) suggested this video might pay off for Bloomberg.
The video remained on Bloomberg’s Twitter page as of Thursday afternoon.
At least one person noted that the former New York mayor seemed to be following in the footsteps of President Donald Trump who, last May, tweeted a video edited to make it seem like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was drunk.
Twitter said last year that it is crafting a new policy to limit the reach of “deep fakes,” or videos altered using artificial intelligence in misleading ways, and other manipulated media.
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