Bernie Sanders had teased supporters via email, “This is something you’ll want to watch”—referring to his Wednesday night speech and book talk with columnist E.J. Dionne at George Washington University. Less predictably, Sanders tore into the Democratic National Committee with a fire he’d held back while supporting the Clinton campaign—concluding, in conversation with Dionne, that the Democratic party should not “anoint” candidates.
“To say the very least, the DNC was not a neutral force in the campaign,” Sanders told Dionne and an adoring crowd. His campaign, he added, was up against too great an opposition: battling not just the Republicans, but the Democrats too. As a result of DNC’s active preference for Hillary Clinton, a bias which Wikileaks’ publication of hacked emails made known, “We had to take on virtually the entire Democratic establishment.”
How could the party’s failure have been avoided? Given a fair primary contest, for starters, “Maybe I would have been elected president of the United States,” he said. Here, in a fittingly Trumpian streak of candor, Sanders seemed to say just what everyone was thinking.
His talk otherwise hewed to the public position he’s kept post-election: that Trump will help the working class if he keeps his word and if “our revolution” keeps an eye on him. (Sanders’s Twitter feed and a New York Times op-ed he penned say roughly the same.) Hold him to his word, Sanders told a brimming auditorium of mainly college kids. “If those promises turn out to be hollow,” he said of his Democratic colleagues, “we will expose that hypocrisy.”
Trump’s policies, if he keeps his promises, are “not enough” by the socialist’s standards “but a start”—they’re better than nothing. So much better in fact that keyed-up Sandnernistas cheered for a Trump policy.
“Trump said he wants six weeks of paid maternity leave,” Sanders said, ticking off a list of the president-elect’s most acceptable plans—and the crowd went wild. Sanders went on, “Every other country on earth has, I think, at least twelve weeks of paid family leave and medical leave. This is a start, this is a start.” But the deed was done: He’d brought a teeming hall full of emotionally raked-over progressive millennials to clap and “woo” for a plan proposed by man they deplore, a president they claim to reject.
Whether he’ll take another crack at the presidency in four years, Sanders wouldn’t answer. But still the crowd roared. And, as a buzzing audience filed out into the night, one bro could be heard remarking to another, “Dude, I think he might have a shot at running again.” Come 2020, Bernie Sanders will be 79—and President Trump will be just 74.
