Even though President Trump is currently facing removal from the presidency — and is busy meeting with foreign leaders in Switzerland — he still has time to mix things up on social media.
Trump fired out more than a dozen tweets and retweets on Twitter early Wednesday morning, covering every subject from the U.S. economy to the “impeachment charade” to the Iowa caucuses.
Then he tossed out a Molotov cocktail.
“They are taking the nomination away from Bernie for a second time. Rigged!” Trump wrote.
The latest CNN poll shows Sen. Bernie Sanders atop the heap at 27%, with former Vice President Joe Biden at 24% and Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 14%. Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg stands at 11%, but all other candidates are in single digits, including former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at just 5%.
And in a Boston Globe poll, Sanders leads Biden in New Hampshire, 16% to 15%. But Biden leads Sanders in Iowa 24% to Sanders’ 14%. Warren comes in between the two at 18%, with Buttigieg at 16%.
But The New York Times on Sunday weighed in on the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, endorsing Warren and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is barely a blip on the polls. And few bigtime Democratic leaders have endorsed Sanders for the nomination.
Hillary Clinton even went out of her way to throw shade at Sanders.
“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary says in a new documentary about Sanders.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Tuesday, Clinton was asked if she would endorse Sanders and campaign for him if he wins the nomination. “I’m not going to go there yet,” she said. “We’re still in a very vigorous primary season.”
Then she returned to bashing the Vermont democratic socialist.
“I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him,” Clinton said. “It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.”
Trump’s charge that Democrats took the nomination away from Sanders in 2016 is supported by none other than the former interim chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
“If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead,” Donna Brazile wrote in November 2016, days after the election.
“This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity,” she wrote in her book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House.” Brazile added that while it may not have been illegal, “it sure looked unethical.”
Brazile said she found a memo that gave Clinton virtual control of the DNC to Clinton. The memo “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
But there was more. Everything from the primary and debate schedule to the excessive power of super-delegates helped Clinton secure the nomination, even though Sanders was drawing far larger crowds and had massive support from all wings of the party. Even Brazile, for all her honesty about what happened to Bernie, helped her longtime friend Hillary: At one point, the former CNN contributor delivered the network’s prepared questions to Clinton’s campaign just before a crucial primary debate.
So Trump might just be on to something.