Even as President Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton Thursday,beach sex video he took the time to thank Bernie Sanders for raising important issues of inequality, and for bringing young people back into the political process.
He was right to do so. If it stays connected and engaged the way it has been on social media so far, Bernie's 11.5 million-strong army could do to the Dems what the Tea Party did to the Republicans -- dominate their local politics, win their primaries, win state houses and effectively capture Congress. By playing the long electoral game, we could actually see a day where single-payer healthcare passes both houses, thanks to Bernie.
SEE ALSO: President Obama officially endorses Hillary Clinton for presidentOn the other hand, some Sanders supporters are already talking about going against the wishes of their candidate, who said Thursday he wanted to work with Clinton to defeat Trump. They could yet help to put a race-baiting, climate change-denying, abortion rights-ending scofflaw demagogue in the White House -- and hand him the political swing seat in the Supreme Court to boot.
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If you don't think that's a possibility -- if you are absolutely certain that Team Sanders is too smart to harrumph off to the polls in November and vote for Trump out of denial or spite -- I dare you to head over to the "Sanders for President" subreddit.
Here you'll find the kind of comments that seem designed to keep sane people up at night. Especially on a popular thread that points to the size of the Bernie voting bloc, and how few of them Trump would need to win -- 15%, the original poster claims based on primary math.
General election math is different, of course, with many more people turning out. But that's not the point. Some polls have suggested 33% of Bernie supporters won't vote for Clinton. And in any case, this topic is merely a magnet for Bernie supporters who are hurting and willing to lash out -- a minority blinded by Clinton hatred enough to become Trump supporters.
SEE ALSO: Hey America, you may be sleepwalking into a Donald Trump presidencyCould some of them be Trump trolls? Sure, but not all. Were people fighting the pro-Trump commenters? Sporadically and sort-of. Did plenty of others chime in that they'd be voting for libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Party's Jill Stein? You betcha.
But the threat is real; this, after all, is surely one reason Bernie has long been beating Trump by greater numbers than Hillary in the polls. (Here's another important reason.) When asked about supporting Bernie over Trump, her voters have no hesitation. When the reverse question is asked, enough of Bernie's voters hesitate to depress the margin.
Strange bedfellows? New Hampshire back in February, Bernie and Trump supporters mingled outside a polling place. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/ Getty Images So for a snapshot of possible things to come, check out the kinds of pro-Trump arguments the thread attracted. They have been anonymized and categorized. Necessary annotations have been added. Original grammar has been preserved.
Trump is actually more popular than Hillary, and his popularity is bulletproof!
HRC is dead in the water for the general unless Trump starts wearing a Hitler costume to rallies
Nope. The Reuters/Ipsos poll has found Clinton up by 10% against Trump for the past two weeks running, even as the Democratic party remained split almost exactly down the middle about her. Sure, her lead is tighter in other polls of the last month. But since February, nearly every poll has put her ahead. Only Fox News and the notoriously right-leaning Rasmussen polls have occasionally found Trump ahead by a point or two; even they have found Hillary ahead by as much as 11% in that timeframe, too.
A candidate doesn't need to dress like Hitler for people to find his speech abhorrent.
Trump is self-funded and thus truly independent!
[Trump] would be our first president not funded by the same establishment that has funded all our presidents (and Hillary) for the past few decades. And THAT is far more historic than having an evil woman saying she is the first female president.
I'm going to vote Trump troll on this one, but let's tackle it regardless. No, Trump is not self-funded, and hasn't been for a long time. He's happy to take the GOP's money, both in hard cash and in unlimited soft money ads, for the general election.
But sure, if you define "independence" as Trump saying whatever egomaniacal hater nonsense spills out of his head, be it outrageous or merely illegal, he's pretty "independent." By that measure, so was Idi Amin.
Trump fights for the working class, like Bernie! He's probably a secret progressive!
Bernie was the first Democrat I ever got behind. On my main issues, excluding healthcare, him and Trump are the same.
His foreign policy is basically Bernie's. So is his trade policy. He is okay with gays and transgenders. Trump is a progressive on social issues and not a warmonger...
All my energy and passion is now going to Trump. He's against the TPP. He's against NAFTA. He kicked the warmongers and globalists out of the GOP.
Trump has better policies on corruption and trade deals than Clinton and those are my top national voting issues.
Where to start here? Let's dismiss immediately the notion that Trump is "okay with the gays" or at all progressive on social issues. He's against gay marriage, even now it is the law of the land. He would seek to reverse that with his Supreme Court picks, as teed up for him by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation. Trump says his justice(s) would try to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Anyone who says "Bernie and Trump are the same excluding healthcare" should turn their Bernie supporter card in
Anyone who says "Bernie and Trump are the same excluding healthcare," or compares their foreign policy favorably, should turn their Bernie supporter card in. Has Bernie suggested arming Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons? Does Bernie want to build a multibillion-dollar boondoggle of a wall, or use a new immigration police force to round up 11 million people?
Has Bernie proposed banning 1.5 billion of the world's citizens from entering the United States, based on a religious test? Does Bernie dig torture or war crimes?
More importantly than any of this is the belief that Trump actually believes in and cares about anything or anyone that is not gratifyingly pro-Trump.
What is Trump's trade policy, really? We don't know, because all he has spouted is abject nonsense about "winning," a ridiculous and illegal proposal to add a 45% tariff to all Chinese goods, and the occasional crowd-pleasing diatribe about trade deals.
But you go ahead and project all your progressive hopes on Trump based on something he said on a particular day, before he replaced it with something new the next day. He is happy to let you do that. That's the reason fascist politicians have incoherent and broad economic policies; it allows anyone to imagine they actually share the same beliefs, under the surface.
It'll hurt Hillary!
Honestly, gotta consider trump. its a double hit vs hillary. a denied vote to her, and one given to her opposition.
My only vote is going to Trump. Poke them in the eye. The establishment has made us so mad that we may not favor them with any votes.
Her campaign and their blatant circumventing of the rules are the biggest affront to democracy I've witnessed in my lifetime. If it takes a trump presidency to show them they can't do this shit anymore than so be it.
A phrase about cutting, your nose, your face and spite comes to mind. Or if you'd rather talk about poking and eyes, imagine yourself trying to go all Mountain-vs.-Red Viper on the "Establishment", only to realize you've actually crushed the life out of the Paris Accords, the world's last best hope on climate change, and accidentally annihilated the Environmental Protection Agency's budget. Whoops!
SEE ALSO: Trump on climate: He's even worse than we thoughtAnd if you still believe that the Clinton campaign "circumvented the rules", rather than played by the rules of a primary and caucus game that was convoluted, unhelpful and byzantine to outsiders in the first place, I'm prescribing you a repeat dose of this John Oliver video. Watch it twice and call me in the morning.
He won't really be powerful anyway! But magically, Hillary will!
I always feel like Trump's insane and dangerous ideas don't have a snowball's chance in hell of passing through Congress. Hillary Clinton's insane and dangerous ideas (more wars, fracking, "free trade" agreements, etc.), on the other hand, do.
We will get 4 years of nothing done, but it will be 4 years of the Republicans back peddling from Trump's message.
Clinton is far more likely to get us into war. She'll get Democrats and Congress to go a long with her war and she's already promising one. If Trump tries to start something we may finally see Congress assert their power by cutting off funding or voting against military action. Besides, war is bad for business. He's probably all talk.
Again, Trump doesn't have much of an agenda to pass through Congress. Just as the Supreme Court will be picked by the Heritage Foundation, policy-making will almost certainly be ceded to the Tea Party in the House. Trump will be happy to focus on the glamor of being president, and to sign whatever piece-of-red-meat law will keep his base happy and make sure they vote for him next time around.
As for "promising war," there's only one candidate who is beating the drums with talk that destabilizes just about every international relationship America has. One candidate who wants to "bomb the hell out of ISIS," a logistical impossibility given the civilian situation, and has talked of sending 30,000 troops into Iraq and Syria. His name isn't Hillary Clinton.
In the abstract, going to war with someone, anyone, most definitely benefits a President Trump. He not only gets to look stern and Churchillian, his best look, he also gets to dismiss all criticism of him being a lightweight as unpatriotic. You all remember how much America desperately needed to believe George W. Bush was a good wartime president?
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable We'll get a Bernie-like president faster!
I hope Trump wins and we have another go around for a real prog[ressive] in 4 years.
A Trump victory will have consequences for the Democratic party insiders who put their thumbs on the scales and sandbagged Bernie.
maybe US needs Trump to wake the hell up and in 4 years there is a solid chance we get to have a progressive candidate winning after all
Right! Because we all remember how well that worked out in 2004, when a lightweight president had led us into not one but two wars and instituted a torture regime that he could plausibly deny. He was swept out of power rather than reelected, right?
He totallydidn't use his office to promote wedge issues against minorities his base could hate, helping to boost turnout (then: The gays! Next up: The Mexicans!) and eking out a 50.1% general election victory. No sir.
But seriously, how bad was Hitler anyway?
Just making Hitler president wouldn't replay 1930s-40s germany in the US. I do honestly think that a Hillary presidency would turn out worse.
I have finally reached the point where the GOP could run Hitler himself and I still wouldn't be moved to cast for the DNC.
Why don't you like trump, you realize every country in the world deports illegal aliens, even mexico. His speech might be crass and offend some of the liberal elite but is he wrong? Why?
what you get from hillary will be the enslavement of men to women. no thanks I'll pass
I can't even. And I don't know any Bernie supporters -- as a rule, very intelligent and historically aware people -- who could even with this.
He's the lesser of two evils!
If Hillary's "Track record" is anything to go off of then give me Trump.
I know I'm voting Trump if Bernie gives up. Lesser of two evils and all.
He honestly seems like the lesser of two evils. I feel like all his crazy things he says will never get passed anyways.
I'm betting a lot more than 15% will be MORE than happy to swing the election to Trumps favor
I'm really leaning towards Trump at this moment.
Honestly, at this point I am not seeing any downside of a Trump Presidency. Fuck all of you who voted for the establishment. The original recipe was Bush vs Clinton for this year, and at least the Republicans saw through it and change the script. The establishment will pay. Fuck this bullshit.
Fuck this bullshit indeed.
If you think being pro-choice is more evil than being pro-life, if you think trying to save the planet with carbon-reduction agreements is more evil than letting it burn, if you think gay marriage is more evil than being unequal, if you think the rule of law is more evil than having contempt for judges, if you think one Secretary of State seeing sensitive state documents in her private email is somehow more evil than Colin Powell doing the exact same thing, then guess what. You have nothing at all in common with Bernie Sanders.
Will 15% or even 33% of Bernie's supporters cross the aisle and vote for Trump regardless? We won't know for months.
But based on the evidence of some who say they're keen to do so, it isn't for any reasons this transformative, revolutionary candidate would endorse.