Posted on 04/01/2017 11:38:03 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has some advice to help bridge the current political divide: Don’t make fun of those who voted for Donald Trump.
Sanders, who spoke Friday at Boston’s Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, has been vocal about opposing the political views of the current president. But, the former Democratic presidential candidate said he doesn’t want Americans to dislike their fellow countrmen who put Trump in office.
“If you sit at home and think, well, Trump won because all the people who voted for him are racist or sexist or homophobes, I think you got it wrong,” Sanders said during his speech. “I think what Trump understood is that there’s a lot of pain in this country.”
Sanders believes that the American people actually do not support cutting Medicaid for millions of adults or giving tax breaks for billionaires. Instead, he said, people do believe in things like paying workers a living wage.
Sanders even said there were things Trump discussed during the campaign that Sanders himself agreed with. For instance, Sanders said the U.S. needs to fix a crumbling infrastructure, something Trump has continually pushed for. The senator also agreed with the president that Americans should not continue to pay some of the highest costs for medical care.
But, Sanders told the crowd that Trump tricked the voters, and played on their fears.
“When you go before the American people, many of them living in desperation, and say ‘I’m going to stand with you and take on the establishment, trust me, vote for me,’ and then the day after you get elected, you turn your back on them — that is being a fraud,” Sanders said.
Sanders acknowledged that more people are getting involved with politics now, and pointed specifically to the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, an effort he described as “unprecedented in American history.”
“Our job right now is to do two things,” Sanders said. “One is to expose Trump for the fraud that he is. Two is to bring the American people together around a progressive agenda.”
He also added that he has one request of those listening to him: Go outside your comfort zone.
“It’s very easy for you and your pals to make fun of Trump,” he said. “[But] start talking to people who voted for Trump and ask them whether they voted for massive cuts to Medicaid or Pell Grants or environmental protection, and I think you’re going to get some surprising answers.”
Sanders emphasized that for those who are looking to be politically active or make a change in the country, it’s not their job to “make fun of people who voted for Trump.” It's equally unproductive, he said, to call Trump's supporters “sexist, racist and homophobic, because I personally do not believe that’s the case."
Instead, he said, the job is to bring people together to make changes in areas like minimum wage, health care, the criminal justice system and immigration reform.
“When we stand together fighting for rights of all people," Sanders said. "When we demand our government, that represents all of us, not just the 1 percent, extraordinarily beautiful things are going to happen in our country.”
It’s okay to make fun of me. I like to make fun of the snowflakes who voted for second place Clintoonie.
It’s ok to make fun of people who voted for Bernie Sanders.... and definitely make fun of people who voted for Shrillary!
In other words, he wants private enterprise ruined, government to run health care in full (a single payer system), "victim" classes to get away with murder, and wide open borders with the intent off flooding the country with tens of millions more Democrat voters completely dependent on the Plantation Party for their survival.
I think Bernie Sanders is Trump’s real competition.
Hillary blocked him for the nomination, and Trump won. But Sanders is now set to be Trump’s true competition, next time around.
If Trump truly turns around the American jobs situation, if he builds up jobs in America bigtime, he will win. If he does not, Bernie will win the next time around.
Trump you need to bring back jobs from China. You will meet with a huge surge in approval across this country. You will be re-elected, and you will be enormously popular.
If you don’t, the next election will probably go to Bernie.
I think it is that simple.
Ahem... Trump already is bringing jobs back, have you been reading the news?
And Burnie will be seriously ancient by then and won’t have moderated his views at all. I don’t think he’ll be any competition at all, if he even thought of running. He already looks about 80.
Bernie will be 79 next time around. That might be pushing the limits on age.
Yep. He wasn’t us all to come together so we can continue the commiescum rampage through our nation until we’re a nation no more.
A reminder: Negotiating with a leftist on any issue at any time for any reason what-so-ever is no different than negotiating with a gang of psychotic serial killers for access to your family.
Nothing can be gained and everything is always lost.
No, don’t make fun of them, beat the **** out of them. /s
He has some nerve calling Trump a fraud.
I call BS This is on the par with the disingenuous “how long have you been beating your wife” question
Where was this concern when your infernal acolytes were beating up Trump supporters? Where were your (and the other so called leaders of the left including 0 and Granny Bobblehead) post- election calls for them to stop rioting?
You should be behind bars for inciting public disorder...GTFO
and retire to your Hilliary! paid dacha, Rumplehair
Bernie Sanders was, at least until he sold out to Clinton for a new house, one of the few politicians who at least appeared to have some convictions.
If he runs again he'll probably just run long enough to gather a good stash of money and then he'll endorse whatever statist liberal he is running against. Just like he did last time.
The Democratic party has devolved from the worker’s party to the party of squabbling special interest groups; gays, Hispanics, Blacks, “the poor,” and unattractive women with bad haircuts. Bernie is an old-fashioned white, male, heteronormative communist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Bernie would like to be the Democrat’s presidential candidate in 2020. But he has none of the grievance points it is now perceived by the Democrats that they need to win. Ideally, he would be a black, woman*, transgender with bad haircut and a Hispanic name. That’s who they are looking for. There’s poor, white, male Bernie saying...”uhm, power to the workers?”
* Here’s something that’s been bothering me. When they say on the news that “he” is transgender, does that mean a woman with an add-on? Or, is that a man dressed up as a woman? Is there an editorial standard? If not, those Dems had better get on it and make some grammatical calls. Pretty soon people will walk up to each other and give the other person a handout containing their sexual preference and micro-aggression trigger words. Then, there will be a lot of referencing each other’s handouts and filling in the missing bits.
Say what you will, but Bernie has more sound political instincts than the rest of his party.
So says the former unemployed porno-writer who got ignorant VT voters to give him his government job, which he has parlayed into three expensive homes and millions of dollars of income…as a socialist who got rich complaining about unfair capitalism.
Can we still make fun of Bernie?
It has done so for the last 50 plus years.
What Obama did was expand its perversion for even more control and greater profits for the insurance industry and medical system vampires, who in turn use that ill gained control, power and profit, to support more and more repressive government.
All trump has done is try to reign it in and make it less expensive and more accessible for the average American.
To the thinking of many Americans, access to health care, its cost and availability to poor Americans, are items that are clearly within the scope of promoting the general welfare of the nation as a whole. When one person around us sick, it can and does affect us.
Bigger centralized government controls and crooked kick backs to government officials to maintain the system of graft... are NOT the way to do that. But once that systems takes two steps forward, we will never get it to take more than 1 step back.
We have LONG SINCE passed our "event horizon" in this Nation.
This nation needs God's intervention, which will only come AFTER there is repentance for all of our sins. God is committed to bringing about repentance, by driving us to our knees... LONG TERM, suffering and grief will be applied, unlike a simple election that gives us an illusion of 'turning it around'... He will have his Nation Under God, one way or another. Since before any of us living here today were born, choices were made that set this course in action.
Patriots and Tyrants... see it and tremble.
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