At his Philadelphia appearance this week, Bernie Sanders tempered his frustrations with the Democratic Party, Donald Trump and the media with a cautiously optimistic call to action to progressives.
“Donald Trump has got to understand he has no mandate; he lost by 2-million votes,” Sanders said about the lead Hillary Clinton has over Trump in the popular vote, despite his winning the Electoral College vote. “On virtually every major issue, the American people are on our side. The president cannot divide us by race, by gender, by sexual orientation; we’re not going to retreat back into bigotry in this country.”
The U.S. Senator who lost the Democratic nomination for president to Clinton spoke to a sold-out crowd of several-hundred supporters Monday night at Central Library. The appearance was part of his national tour for his new autobiography, “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.”
The event was planned before Trump’s upset win in last month’s presidential election, which was a primary point of discussion during the one-hour program.
Part of Trump’s victory, Sanders said, can be credited to his tapping “into the anxiety and levels of pain that we don’t often see on CBS or NBC.”
Much of Sanders’ prepared remarks, along with his Q&A with journalist and author Amy Goodman, was devoted to recounting his interactions with everyday Americans while he was on the campaign trail.
He recalled meeting with struggling families in McDowell County, W. Va., where opiate addiction is rampant, and in Pine Ridge, S.C., where the life expectancy is equal to that of Guatemala. He walked a desolate open-air drug market in Baltimore, Md., where heroin addiction is decimating the neighborhood, and took a tour of a public-housing complex in New York City with city council members who said they needed $17 billion to rehab the city’s public-housing facilities.
“A lot of people are hurting in this country,” Sanders said, adding it is a “tragic mistake” to believe that all Trump voters are “deplorables,” a word Clinton was criticized for using to describe some Trump backers.
The Democratic Party, Sanders contended, failed to adequately tap into the economic and quality-of-life challenges facing many Americans, paving the way for a Trump victory.
Sanders also decried the media’s role in the election, particularly the dearth of mainstream-media coverage of his campaign. He cited a study that found 90 percent of mainstream coverage of the presidential election regarded “gossip” about the candidates, with just 10 percent devoted to coverage of the substantive issues.
“That is a great 12 seconds,” Trump said about the media coverage of Trump’s various gaffes during the election season. “But poverty can’t be [addressed] in 12 seconds.”
Goodman questioned Sanders about his own experience watching the coverage of election night, which he called a “depressing evening.” He said he went into the night thinking Clinton had a two-to-one chance of winning.
“I was not shocked,” he said about Trump’s victory. “I was surprised, but not shocked.”
Sanders struck a sobering note in many of his remarks about the pending Trump administration. He said Trump’s tweet this week that he would have won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” was “delusional” and encouraged future voter suppression.
“I’m very nervous about the future of American democracy,” Sanders said. “We need to fight back in state after state after state to give no ground to voter suppression.”
He went on to call Trump a “pathological liar” and said he was “deeply concerned about virtually everything” the incoming Trump administration could do.
But, he encouraged supporters to remain vocal, and to look to the past for direction.
“Republicans may be many things but they’re not dumb. If millions of people stand up and fight back, they’ll think twice about doing bad things,” Sanders said. “Think about the issues we’ve had to confront. People fought back for women’s rights, for civil rights, for gay rights. Think of all the hurdles those folks had to overcome. Where we’re at now is a difficult moment. But serious people fought back before and that’s exactly what we have to do. Nobody has a right to say ‘I give up.’ You have to jump in and start fighting.”
For his part, Sanders pledged to use his new post as the outreach chair for the Senate Democrats to “transform” the Democratic Party, engaging Americans dissatisfied with establishment politics. He also promised an enhanced focus on securing Democratic victories in both state and national elections.
Goodman asked Sanders if he would consider another presidential run in four years, eliciting cheering from the crowd and a laugh from Sanders.
“No comment on 2020,” Sanders said.