Sen. Bernie Sanders tore into President Donald Trump on Thursday, delivering an indictment of the president’s recent comments that doubted the integrity of the November election and portraying him as an imminent threat to democracy.
“It is terribly important that we actually listen to and take seriously what Donald Trump is saying,” Sanders said in an address at George Washington University in Washington.
The Vermont independent then went on to catalog all of Trump’s recent public statements about the election, including several weeks ago when the president claimed that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election” and his repeated jibes about serving more than the two
Despite Trump’s constant complaints about supposed mass voter fraud in elections, Sanders pointed to several studies — including the conclusion of Trump’s own White House commission on the matter — that have found voter fraud to be exceedingly rare.
He also assailed Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in voting ahead of an election that is expected to see unprecedented levels of votes cast by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Sanders pointed to an interview in which the president appeared to admit that his opposition to including funding for the U.S. Postal Service in a coronavirus relief bill stemmed from his desire to thwart Democratic efforts to expand mail-in voting, and to Trump’s floating a delay in the election over mail-in voting.
He also noted that Trump himself appeared to encourage voter fraud earlier this month when he urged North Carolina voters to attempt to vote twice as a test of mail-in voting systems.
But Sanders pegged a large portion of his speech to more recent events.“Just last night Donald Trump went even further down the path of authoritarianism,” he said, referring to the president’s refusal on Wednesday to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose reelection.
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