This could perhaps--even probably--be written off as mere trolling but if it's to be taken seriously--and the woman offering it today certainly seemed to be in earnest--it's astonishingly ill-informed. Sanders never personally attacked Hillary Clinton at all in 2016, nor has he personally attacked any of his Democratic opponents in the present cycle, but he is (and always has been) among the harshest critics of Trump.
I've written about this before. In 2017, I was debating a Mediumite who, in the course of our exchange, insisted Sanders had "been tougher on Hillary Clinton than he has been on the current president." In response, I assembled a quick collection of Sanders' comments about Trump:
"Sanders has called Trump 'an embarrassment for our country' and 'the most dangerous candidate to run for president in the modern history of America. Period.' He’s said Trump 'has made bigotry and divisiveness the cornerstone of his campaign,' is a would-be dictator, is a 'pathological liar' who 'changes his mind every day,' a guy who 'is a fraud,' who 'has brought forth the worst group of cabinet nominees in the modern history of our country.' Sanders publishes here on Medium from time to time, articles in which, among other things, he's called Trump a faux-populist, a guy pushing a 'reactionary agenda,' who 'has complete disregard for reality and who makes assertions heard by billions of people around the world that have no basis in fact.' He's never said anything remotely like that about Clinton."
Sanders' view of Trump hasn't changed over the last couple of years. Just days ago, on the verge of what was billed as the kick-off to Trump's reelection campaign, Sanders appeared on MSNBC and offered this assessment:
"You have a president who... is in fact a pathological liar, he is a racist, he is a sexist, he is a homophobe, and he is a religious bigot."Sanders called Trump a "phony" and went on to rake him over the coals regarding multiple policy initiatives, including throwing millions off their health insurance, gutting Medicare and Social Security and cutting taxes for the wealthy.[1]
Later, after Trump's event, Sanders issued a video response to it:
"...I just had the extremely unpleasant experience of actually watching Donald Trump in action for an hour-and-a-half, and wow, that was certainly something. An hour-and-a-half speech of lies, distortions, and total, absolute nonsense."He then spent 11 minutes scalding Trump and the Republican congressional leadership. "[Trump] is a man living in a parallel universe, a man way out of touch with the needs of ordinary people and a man who must be defeated."
Sanders has, in fact, issued detailed video rebuttals to all of Trump's major official addresses, and his have been both better than the official Democratic responses to same and a lot tougher on Trump.
Those responses are available on Sanders' YouTube channel, which, more broadly, provides a wealth of Sanders' views on Trump:
"What Happened To 'Drain the Swamp'? 160 Lobbyists Work For Trump"
"Six Months of Trump's Tax Lies"
"Why the Trump-Putin Helsinki Summit Was A Disgrace"
"Trump Lies About Death-Toll in Puerto Rico"
"Trump Keeps Lying About Medicare For All"
"Trump's Disastrous Pick For Social Security Commissioner"
"Corporate Criminals Go Free Under Trump"
"Trump's Dangerous Power Plant Plan"
Trump's 2019 budget is "breathtakingly cruel"; Trump's budget is "just vicious"; Trump's decision on DACA is "ugly and cruel"; the Trump administration is "an international embarrassment"; Trump and his friends in the fossil fuel industry, "in the name of short-term profits, are destroying the planet that we will be leaving to our children and our grandchildren, and that is criminal."[2] And so on.
In May, Trump was publicly salivating over the prospect of his "removal forces" deporting millions of brown people; Sanders called this "xenophobia and racism." It's a theme he's hit often. In his book "Our Revolution," he noted that
"Donald Trump engaged in a level of unabashed xenophobia and immigrant bashing not seen in our country for a very long time. It is hard to believe that in the year 2016, we had a major party candidate for president who made bigotry the cornerstone of his campaign."That book is mostly about the 2016 Democratic primaries but Sanders does sometimes devote a little attention to Trump. At one point, he describes him as
"a major party candidate who, instead of bringing the American people together, seemed intent on doing everything possible to divide us up. Donald Trump threatened to deport 11 million Latinos, restrict immigration based on religion, and create a national database of Muslim citizens. And his relationship to the African-American community featured his role as one of the leaders of the 'birther movement,' a disgusting effort to undermine the legitimacy of our first African-American president by suggesting that he was not born in the United States."Sanders regularly spotlights things like that, Trump's most insane claims. In the same book, he also noted that Trump "believes that climate change is a hoax, developed by the Chinese." In April, when Trump made the idiotic claim that noise from wind turbines causes cancer, Sanders put in a public appearance before a bank of wind turbines in Iowa and mocked Trump's comments. Last year, when pimping new laws restricting voting, Trump made the remarkable claim that, at present, Americans need photo ID to buy groceries; Sanders highlighted--and mocked--this in the process of refuting Trump's larger voter repression schemes.
"Why does Trump love dictators so much?," asks Sanders' official Senate site. "The president makes it more and more clear with every authoritarian or dictator that he meets that he not only admires them but wants to follow their lead."
This is a regular theme for Sanders. Back in October, for example, he appeared at a rally hosted by the Nevada Democratic party and said of Trump
"He's a tough guy when it comes to presenting a budget that cuts nutrition programs for low-income pregnant women--really tough guy. But, ain't so tough taking on the dictator of Saudi Arabia who has his dissidents murdered in cold blood... You know that we have a president who claims to be a very tough guy because he is prepared to tear little babies from their arms at the Southern border. But he ain't so tough when it comes to taking on Vladimir Putin."That Nevada rally was part of a larger project: Sanders has spent a few years now extensively touring the U.S. on behalf of progressive causes and candidates. No one else in national politics does anything like it, and--relevant here--Sanders has made it a point to target Republican red-states in these tours, taking the progressive gospel to places Democrats typically ignore. This was actually a Sanders priority before Trump came along. In 2013, he toured Southern red states in an effort to recruit progressive populist candidates. In 2015, when the DNC was considering its debate schedule for the upcoming presidential campaign, Sanders requested that Dems hold debates in traditionally red states:
"I also think it is important for us to debate not only in the early states but also in many states which currently do not have much Democratic presidential campaign activity. While a number of these non-target states have not in the past had much organized campaign presence, I believe it is critical for the Democratic Party and progressive forces in America to engage voters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. By expanding the scope geographically of debates beyond the early calendar states we can begin to awaken activism at the grassroots level in those states and signal to Democrats and progressives in places like Texas, Mississippi, Utah, and Wyoming that their states are not forgotten by the Democratic Party."This was, of course, rejected, like all of Sanders' other requests, by a DNC that, in that cycle, was determined to elect Hillary Clinton (and, it later emerged, was, in fact, owned by Hillary Clinton). In the wake of his 2016 loss, Sanders has toured at an often breakneck pace, making it a point to aggressively challenge Trump where Trump's support lives. The corporate press rarely reports this but in March 2018, CNN ran an analysis that noted Sanders' frequent focus on red states.
"'We have put a significant effort into going into states that Trump won,' Sanders said in an interview. 'Not exclusively, but most of the states that I've visited have been states that Trump won. The reason for that is I think it's important for people who voted for Trump to understand that many of the promises that he made on health care, on taxes, on many other issues, are promises that he did not keep.'"In April, Sanders broke with fellow Democratic candidates and agreed to appear at a town hall event hosted by Fox News. From the belly of that Beast, Sanders was just as relentless:
"'Trump cannot even tell the truth' about something as simple as where his father was born, Sanders said during his Fox News town hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. 'Whether you’re a conservative or moderate or progressive... I don’t think the American people are proud that we have a president who is a pathological liar.'"Sanders could have expected a very cool reception from the assembled Fox crowd but instead, he won them over and had them cheering him on.
I've focused much more here on Sanders' general assessments of Trump than his criticism of specific Trump policies. The latter is simply too extensive; Sanders has been critical of every bad thing Trump has ever done. His criticism of Trump is, in fact, both more extensive and more intense than that of any of his Democratic rivals, and though all of them have scorched Trump at times, it isn't even close. English-speaking peoples are going to have to introduce some new words before the language even exists to condemn Trump in stronger terms than Sanders does, and unlike so many of the Democratic party's elected chatterers (including some of his Dem opponents), Sanders doesn't just offer his criticism from an air-conditioned office in the Capitol; he's gone to Trump's home turf and denounced the man as a liar and a fraud and a reactionary to Trump's own supporters. He's done this over and over again.
Maybe this article is an unnecessary exercise. A few quick Google searches could have turned up what I've assembled here and plenty more, and they won't turn up any examples of Sanders saying anything like this about any of his Democratic rivals. I had a little time today though, so I threw this together. I don't really see this idea that Sanders isn't critical of Trump or is more critical of fellow Democratic candidates taking off but weirder things have happened. If, dear reader, you see this happening, you now need only point those making the claim to this piece.
--j.
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[1] Sanders was echoing an appearance he'd made on CNN in April. "Look," he said, "in my view, Donald Trump is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country. He’s a pathological liar. He’s a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe... This is somebody who should not be president."
[2] Sanders takes every opportunity to point out that Trump is an oligarch and tool of self-interested industry. At an AFL-CIO breakfast, for example, Sanders called Trump a "pathological liar" who "works night and day on behalf of his fellow billionaires" to the detriment of the public.
