Bernie Sanders was asked why he believed that he would fare well with Donald Trump’s supporters during Sunday’s “Face the Nation” on CBS.
Bernie answered that although Donald Trump was able to rally the financially anxious working class voters, he was doing so by dividing them against minorities with his anti-minority rhetoric, turning them away from rational solutions:
“Many of Trump’s supporters are working-class people. And they’re angry. And they’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries. They’re angry because they can’t afford to send their kids to college, they can’t retire with dignity. And I think what Trump has done successfully is take that anger, take that anxiety, about terrorism and say to a lot of people in this country, ‘Look, the reason for our problems is because of Mexicans,’ and he says they’re all criminals and rapists, we gotta hate Mexicans. Or he says about the Muslims, ‘they’re all terrorists. We gotta keep them out of the country.’ That’s what we have to deal with to make America great.'”
Trump’s victim-blaming policies would not solve the problems of the working class, and takes the pressure off of the real culprits who had American jobs shipped to places like China:
“This is a guy who does not want to raise the minimum wage, he has said that wages in America are too high. But he does want to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top three tenths of one percent.”
“I think we can make the case that if we really want to address the issues that people are concerned about: why the middle class is disappearing, massive income and wealth inequality in this country, that we need policies that bring us together, that take on the greed of Wall Street, the greed of corporate America, and create a middle class that works for all of us, rather than an economy that works just for a few,” concluded Sanders.
Indeed, once again we see Sanders reaching over the false-divide perpetuated by the red AND blue moneyed elite- angry Trump supporters just need to get angry for the right reasons.
Sources: Alternet, Gawker, CBS, The Guardian
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