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John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media and Liberty Global, and CEO of Discovery Holding, arrives at the conference.
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The Trump White House “is chaos” and the president isn’t the right person to lead the United States, media mogul and Liberty Media Chairman John Malone said Thursday.
“Look: I think a lot of the things Trump has tried to do — identifying problems and trying to solve them — has been great. I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it,” Malone told CNBC’s David Faber from New York. “Half the people that he’s hired and thrown under the bus are now trying to kill him. I mean, what kind of thing is that? It’s chaos.”
“I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it. He just doesn’t build a team: I think that’s the No. 1 problem,” he added.
The Trump administration has seen a marked number of high-level departures since the president took office in January 2017 including but not limited to former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
House Democrats are in the middle of the public stage of an impeachment inquiry into Trump and whether the president directed his personal attorney to broker a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine. U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified on Wednesday that Rudy Giuliani was conveying Trump’s wishes when he “demanded” Ukraine announce investigations into the president’s political rivals.
Instead, Liberty’s Malone said he’d vote for former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg in the 2020 presidential election despite his own reservations as a pronounced libertarian. He said he’d still favor billionaire Bloomberg even though he doesn’t know if the former New York mayor “has much of a chance.”
Bloomberg, the 77-year-old former Republican, is reportedly weighing an entrance into the 2020 competition despite what would be a later start than the current cast of Democratic frontrunners. But Bloomberg, if he decides to enter the race, could represent a more moderate option versus Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Warren in particular has drawn the ire of Wall Street for her high-profile spats with billionaires like Leon Cooperman and other executives across big tech and big banking. She’s proposed plans for big tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans and expansive government programs including “Medicare for All.”
But Malone told Faber that he’s no fan of the Massachusetts Democrat and what he sees as growing animosity toward affluent Americans.