Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D-N.Y.) released a strange campaign ad on Tuesday that almost immediately drew criticism and mockery on social media, Fox News reports.
In the 10-second ad, Bloomberg asks “where is my ice cream?” After someone off-screen hands him a carton of ice cream, he takes a single spoonful of it and then simply says “big gay ice cream is the best.”
The ad, which drew wide criticism from across the political spectrum on social media, is the latest in a long series of bizarre gaffes from the Bloomberg campaign. Earlier this week, a video emerged of Bloomberg encountering a dog while greeting voters, and shaking the dog’s head like a handshake rather than petting it. During the most recent Democratic debate (for which Bloomberg did not qualify), his campaign’s Twitter account posted numerous strange tweets that led many to believe the account had been hacked.
Bloomberg, who entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination unusually late in the month of November, has not made it into any of the televised debates, and he missed the deadlines to appear on the ballots in the first four primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. Instead, the mega-billionaire has been spending heavily on states that will vote on Super Tuesday, March 3rd, such as California. He is currently in fourth place by most national polling averages, behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).