Michael Bloomberg is trying to buy the presidency – that should set off alarms | Robert Reich

If the choice comes down to tyrant or oligarch, we must choose the latter. But our democracy would still be in peril

We haven't seen his name on any of the ballots in the first four states, but that's about to change. I'm talking, of course, about multibillionaire presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg has a chance of winning the presidency because his net worth is more than $60bn.

Related: Why Democrats share the blame for the rise of Donald Trump | Robert Reich

The heart of Bloomberg's campaign message is that he has enough money to blow Trump out of the water

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Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His next book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, will be out in March. He is a columnist for Guardian US