“I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told CNN‘s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, “but this guy’s a fraud.”
The immediate reference was to a meeting President Donald Trump held with Wall Street executives on Friday in which he vowed—in what Common Dreams reported as a “spectacular betrayal”—to repeal key elements of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill enacted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
“We have a president, I fear very much, is moving us in a very authoritarian direction.” —Sen. Bernie Sanders”It is hard not to laugh,” Sanders said, “to see President Trump sitting alongside these Wall Street guys. This guy ran for the President of the United States saying, ‘I’m Donald Trump and I’m gonna take on Wall Street—these guys are getting away with murder…’ But suddenly he appoints all these billionaires; his major financial adviser comes from Goldman Sachs; and now he’s gonna dismantle legislation that protects consumers. This is a guy who ran for president saying, ‘I’m the only Republicans who’s not going to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid’—and then he appoints all of these guys who are precisely going to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”
And so, Sanders continued, “I hope those that all of those folks who voted for Mr. Trump—because they thought he would stand up for working people—man… and he’s a good showman, I will give him that… but I think he’s gonna sell out the middle class and the working class of this country.”
Watch the full interview:
Elsewhere in the interview, Sanders said he would stand with Democrats in the Senate who have said that Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, must reach the 60-vote threshold in order to be confirmed.
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