Sen. Bernie Sanders said “we have a right to be suspect” there may be a racial component to how the Trump administration is responding to the devastation in Puerto Rico left by Hurricane Maria versus the responses in Texas and Florida just weeks earlier.
“Well, look, given the president’s history on race, given the fact that he, a few months ago, told us that there were good people on both sides, when neo-Nazis were marching in Charlottesville, yeah, I think we have a right to be suspect, that he is treating the people of Puerto Rico in a different way than he has treated the people of Texas or Florida,” Sanders, I-Vt., told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Trump has been criticized for his response to the storm, with many people criticizing how slowly some federal resources have been deployed to the Caribbean island.
Sanders was also critical of Trump’s plans for tax reform.
Just minutes before on the same show, White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney said people speculating about the full effects of the tax plan were “lying to you” because the full details of the plan still had yet to take shape.
“For Trump to go on television and say, ‘Oh, this doesn’t benefit the wealthy,’ is absolutely outrageous,” Sanders said.
“Of course it benefits the wealthy and of course it benefits large, multinational corporations. Right now, we are living in a moment of massive income and wealth inequality. The very, very rich are getting rich and middle class are shrinking. What this tax proposal does is not only give huge tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations, it cuts Medicare by $450 billion.”
The Vermont senator made only the slightest of concessions about the plan.
“It is possible that some people, you know, depending on the standard deduction and depending on the earned income tax credit and how many children you have in your family, it is possible that some middle-class families may make some gains,” Sanders began.
“But when you have a nonpartisan group telling us that at the end of ten years, 80 percent of the benefits go to … the top 1 percent, when there are massive cuts in healthcare and in education and programs desperately needed by the working people of this country, no, the framework of this proposal is not something we can support.”
