Michael Bloomberg has a history of believing the kind of nonsense that billionaires tell themselves to make their complicated business dealings and powerful impact on society simpler to rationalize.

The nonsense Bloomberg has believed ranges from blaming the financial crisis on poor people to insisting Chinese President Xi Jinping is not a dictator.

As voters, we need to know if Bloomberg is willing to let go of this nonsense to represent his constituency.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

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The biggest problem with Michael Bloomberg as a presidential candidate, and possibly as a president, is that he believes “billionaire nonsense.”

By that I mean he believes the fables that come with being a person in his social position – his position of power. These are the stories wealthy and powerful people tell each other to absolve themselves of culpability for things that have gone horribly wrong in society. At best they simplify things that are in fact complicated. Most of these fables are told for commercial convenience.

We’ve already seen a few examples of Bloomberg’s belief in billionaire nonsense come to the forefront of his campaign, like his stumbling apologies for the stop-and-frisk policy he ramped up as the mayor of New York City.

But Bloomberg’s belief in billionaire nonsense goes far beyond that, and it has wide-reaching implications for a presidential hopeful. In the past, he’s blamed the financial crisis on the end of redlining, said Chinese President Xi Jinping is not a dictator, and made comments about Vladimir Putin’s actions that sounded eerily like Kremlin talking points.

All these misconceptions are various kinds of billionaire nonsense, and it is crucial that Bloomberg explain whether he still believes any of it, because – like it or not – he’s a serious contender. His team is made up of some of the savviest operators in the business, he’s been pumping millions into the election, and the Democratic nomination is still anyone’s game.

And so we need to be realistic about Bloomberg as a candidate – about both his strengths and his faults.

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As a mayor, he ran a tight ship, a clean city, but one that became increasingly inhospitable to the middle class the longer he ran it. As a citizen, he’s long supported causes that will improve our democracy, like gun control and expanded voting rights. Plus the man genuinely wants to do something about climate change.

That said, not all billionaires believe their own class’ nonsense, as Bloomberg repeatedly has. The ones who do are telling you something about themselves. They’re telling you that they prefer to believe fictions that make life easier – that make their sense of responsibility lighter – because they can then deny the power that money gives to people in their class. And they can deny how they can cause harm with that power.

Bloomberg has, on several occasions, chosen to take the comfortable way, believing nonsense instead of facing these harder realities. This is not a good quality for a president.

Some billionaire nonsense is racist and classist

The clumsiest and most obvious billionaire nonsense that Bloomberg has bought into comes with a helping of racism.

As a billionaire mayor who eschewed the mayor’s typical residence, Gracie Mansion, for his townhouses in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Bloomberg had little interaction with people in neighborhoods targeted by stop and frisk. So he believed the people who told him that harassing young men on the street would lower crime rates.

For that he has apologized, which is a promising sign.

As a billionaire founder of a technology-and-information company that serves the financial industry, Bloomberg didn’t want to acknowledge that his former colleagues or clients caused the financial crisis. Instead of blaming it on them, people with actual power, he took the billionaire-nonsense way out. He blamed it on the poor by saying that eliminating the practice of redlining, in which banks discriminated against people of color seeking loans, created the crisis.

It did not. Wall Street caused the financial crisis. On one side, the financial industry sold poor-quality mortgage loans, and on the other side, it lied about the quality of those loans-turned-securities. It then traded those loans back and forth around the world, causing a gigantic mess of toxic assets. Needless to say, poor people can’t do things like that.

But Bloomberg has spent his life doing business on Wall Street. And when you do business on Wall Street, and when the whole world is mad at you for destroying the economy, it’s a lot easier to blame someone else. So that’s what a lot of Wall Street did. Instead of taking responsibility, they blamed the poor, Congress, borrowers, anyone else. Bloomberg did it too, and that’s a problem when we’re looking for a leader to combat the economic inequalities we’re facing.

Some billionaire nonsense can threaten national security

Every now and again on Wall Street you hear a billionaire say something fawning about an authoritarian leader. Invariably, it’s because they have done or may do business in that country. Sometimes they’ve done business directly with the authoritarian or their associates.

Because of that business relationship, the billionaire will convince themselves that they have special information about what’s “really going on” in this authoritarian’s country – that the prevailing narrative about oppression is misconceived. They will then carry that information back to their fellow power brokers in the United States, and voilà, that authoritarian has a useful spokesperson in America.

We’ve seen Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater, do this. Last year, he rationalized the Chinese Communist Party’s encroaching national-surveillance and social-credit system as a part of Chinese “culture.”

We’ve seen JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon do this. This year at Davos, he extolled the virtues of the Communist Party’s ability to tell businesses what to make and when.

Bloomberg has also fallen into this trap.

In September, Bloomberg said Xi is not a dictator – even though Xi has made himself president for life and the party has crushed any opposition in the country for the better part of a century. It’s worth noting that Bloomberg has worked closely with Chinese officials and that his news organization has been criticized for killing stories that would expose and discomfort the country’s elites.

And we saw it again in comments from 2015, recently resurfaced by The Washington Post, in which Bloomberg offered an eyebrow-raising response to Putin’s annexation of Crimea, a part of Ukraine, that sounded as if they were lifted straight from Kremlin talking points:

“I was talking to somebody the other day about Russia, and nobody thinks that Russia should be in the Ukraine and trying to take land in an independent sovereign country.

“Except, if you really think about it, what would America do if we had a contiguous country where a lot of people in that country wanted to be Americans. Texas and California ring a bell? We just went and took it. I’m not suggesting that Putin’s doing a good thing or that it should be allowed. But we did this. That was 200 years ago, but we did it.”

It is no longer the 1800s. And the idea of Russia as an expanding “contiguous” country would probably upset anyone from, say, Germany or Finland. Bloomberg is using false equivalences – or “whataboutism,” a Kremlin specialty – to justify Russian aggression. It’s hard to say where he could’ve picked up the idea, but it certainly makes you wonder who’s been in his ear.

And some billionaire nonsense is about success itself

What we need to know, as voters, is how deeply Bloomberg believes all the billionaire nonsense he’s floated in years past and how willing he is to let it influence his policy decisions.

There are some signs Bloomberg is over some of it. On Tuesday, his campaign released its plan to reform Wall Street. It doesn’t go as far as more aggressive plans from Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but Bloomberg’s plan would tighten regulation.

It seeks to raise the money banks have to keep on hand in case of emergencies, curb proprietary trading, reinstate reporting on systemic risks, create a corporate-crime division of the Justice Department, and reinvigorate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

These are all good things, but there is too much nonsense being floated by Bloomberg’s campaign to take the change to heart for now.

Foto: Bloomberg at a press conference to announce a nationwide campaign to reform or repeal Florida-style “shoot first” laws in states across the country. Definitely not billionaire nonsense.sourceAP Photo

On Sunday, one of Bloomberg’s surrogates, Tim O’Brien, explained away the dozens of lawsuits filed against Bloomberg or his organizations, the majority of which deal with discrimination based on gender, race, disability status, and pregnancy status, by trying to make them seem normal – by saying they’re just something someone with large organizations has to deal with.

This is the defense we’ve been hearing for some time now from Bloomberg’s representatives. But it’s classic billionaire nonsense – success and lawsuits needn’t go hand in hand.

The last thing this country needs right now is someone in charge whose inclination is to rationalize ways to keep power in the hands of the already powerful. That’s what billionaire nonsense does. If Mike Bloomberg can get over that, great. But let’s be real: It’s hard for anyone to get over their own nonsense.