“Mini Mike Bloomberg is playing poker with his foolhardy and unsuspecting Democrat rivals. He says that if he loses (he really means when!) in the primaries, he will spend money helping whoever the Democrat nominee is,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

“By doing this, he figures, they won’t hit him as hard .... during his hopeless ‘presidential’ campaign,” Trump wrote. “They will remain silent! The fact is, when Mini losses, he will be spending very little of his money on these ‘clowns’ because he will consider himself to be the biggest clown of them all — and he will be right!”

It’s the latest example of how a plank of Bloomberg’s campaign revolves around agitating the president, who has increasingly begun criticizing his former mayor from New York, a self-made billionaire who has spent years belittling Trump as a bad businessman and reality TV star.

Bloomberg also made sure to match Trump in advertising during the Super Bowl, a roughly $10 million endeavor for both campaigns.

And when Bloomberg first announced, one of the first places he bought ad time was in the West Palm Beach, Fla., media market so Trump might see the ad as he visited his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach.

Bloomberg’s ads are hard to miss. He has so far spent a jaw-dropping $250 million on TV commercials, many of them attacking Trump. In a primary that’s focused on defeating the incumbent, being on the receiving end of Trump’s ire is seen by many Democratic voters as a positive. As a result, Bloomberg has started to climb in polls of both the crowded Democratic primary and in general election matchups against Trump.

Earlier this month, another Bloomberg ad prompted a testy and inaccurate response from Trump over health care, a sore spot for the president in his own internal polling.

“I’ll be honest, we wish he wouldn’t do that and give Bloomberg a platform. We shouldn’t give him relevance,” said a political adviser to Trump who did not want to be identified criticizing the president’s Twitter use.

A consistent theme of Bloomberg’s ads about Trump revolve around his stability, with the latest commercial pointing out how the president recently lashed out at military advisers. When Trump angrily responds, Bloomberg’s advisers say, it helps drive home the Democrat’s message.

"Less than an hour after releasing an ad calling out Trump's erratic behavior, he responds erratically,” Bloomberg spokeswoman Galia Slayen said. “So yeah, I'd say we're getting under Trump's skin."

