Suppose you were a Republican operative looking to promote your party’s transparently fraudulent image as a vehicle for representing the interests of ordinary Americans against the dark forces of elite liberal paternalism. And suppose you somehow had the ability to boost a single candidate on the Democratic side who might best help you achieve this objective. Given the current state of America’s twenty-first-century political hellscape, there’s certainly no dearth of unfathomably wealthy liberals who might consider aiding your cause by launching a vanity run for president. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to imagine anyone who would be better suited for the role than Michael Bloomberg.

Particularly now, Bloomberg’s rumored run for the Democratic nomination is about as cartoonish an indictment of America’s two-party system as can possibly be imagined: a case study in the calamitous groupthink of well-heeled pundits and consultants who witnessed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 electoral train wreck and collectively murmured, “Hold my beer,” like a sacred mantra. In truth, a hypothetical matchup between Bloomberg and Donald Trump would almost certainly yield a victory for the latter so decisive that the contest would come to rank alongside the Charge of the Light Brigade and Muhammad Ali’s famous first-round drubbing of Sonny Liston in the annals of history’s most lopsided defeats. If the infamously Wall Street–friendly Clinton proved vulnerable to Trump’s faux-populist bromides, a man worth more than $50 billion and practically synonymous with the phrase “soda taxes” in the national psyche would doubtless prove even more so, whatever a handful of op-ed writers and cable news anchors say to convince us otherwise.

Mercifully, such a scenario is unlikely to occur, given that enthusiasm for a Bloomberg candidacy seems mostly limited to a handful of pundits and fellow billionaires — a recent Morning Consult poll found the fabled centrist maverick with a meager 4 percent among Democratic primary voters, barely ahead of such electoral dynamos as Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar.