On December 12, 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s campaign got viral attention online — though probably not in a way they anticipated, thanks to comedians Nick Ciarelli and Brad Evans.
“Look out #TeamPete because us Bloomberg Heads have our own dance!” Ciarelli wrote on Twitter alongside a video he said was “taken at the Mike Bloomberg rally in Beverly Hills”:
Look out #TeamPete because us Bloomberg Heads have our own dance! Taken at the Mike Bloomberg rally in Beverly Hills. #Bloomberg2020 #MovesLikeBloomberg pic.twitter.com/UCNo0fRZcE
— Nick Ciarelli (@nickciarelli) December 13, 2019
Evans not only shared the same video, he posted his own attempt at what he called the “#MovesLikeBloomberg challenge”:
Here’s my #MovesLikeBloomberg challenge vid. How do YOU move like Bloomberg? pic.twitter.com/vI0eiByFad
— Brad Evans (@bradfordevans) December 13, 2019
The duo, who have made their reputation for their online “anti-bro” comedy, altered their own Twitter profiles to pose as Bloomberg staffers.
Roughly ten hours after the “Moves Like Bloomberg” clip — a spoof of a video posted a month earlier by supporters of another Democratic Party presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg — appeared, Bloomberg’s campaign denied that it came from them.
“To clarify, @NickCiarelli is not an intern for our campaign,” it said on its own Twitter account. “And he does not have moves like Bloomberg.”
“Wait are you firing me?” Ciarelli responded.
The video also caught the attention of Sebastian Gorka, the former White House “deputy assistant” who was criticized for wearing a medal first awarded to his father by the Nazi-aligned Hungarian group Vitézi Rend. “Apparently NOT a parody,” wrote Gorka, who left the White House in August 2017. That prompted a response from Bloomberg’s former press secretary Stu Loeser.
“This is a fraud. So is the parody Bloomberg video he tweets,” Loeser wrote in highlighting Gorka’s tweet.
Ciarelli did not respond to a request for comment. He did, however, upload the audio used in the clip and encouraged fans to submit their own “#MovesLikeBloomberg” videos.