The thumbs of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump were poised to tweet his sense of moral outrage as Bernie Sanders walked on stage in Philadelphia.
Trump wants you to know that he is deeply concerned about Sanders and his treatment by the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton. His empathy for Bernie and his bros knows no bounds. The system is rigged against socialists and Trump feels as bad about that as the Russians feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Or he could just be faking it, in a naked attempt to hoodwink Sanders supporters into thinking that he cares about the 99 per cent. On the face of it, Trump and Sanders share something beyond the unlikely journey they took through the primaries. They both stunned the political establishment with their insurgent campaigns. They both railed against trade deals and the media. They both liked to brag about their polling and voting numbers, after bringing new voters into the primaries. And they both channeled post-recession anger into the passion of their fan base. That passion was clear in the extended ovation for Sanders as he walked into the convention hall in Philadelphia on Monday.
But the similarities with Trump ended just as soon as Sanders finished bragging, once again, about the number of voters and delegates he’d won. Amid the tears of his supporters on the convention floor, Sanders detailed the economic decline of the middle class, the grotesque wealth of the 1 per cent, and the Republican role in Wall Street’s recklessness. Then he made the kind of pivot that the Republicans singularly failed to engineer in Cleveland last week. Trump himself expressed no generosity about the politicians he had vanquished, and his defeated rivals could barely show up at his convention. Those who did show up, like Ted Cruz, struggled to say his name.
Yet, for all his bitterness towards the Hillary Clinton campaign, Sanders went far beyond the mere act of showing up in Philadelphia. He embraced Hillary’s nomination even as his supporters cried and jeered through his first references to her name.
“We need leadership in this country, which will improve the lives of working families, the children, the elderly, the sick and the poor,” he explained. “We need leadership that brings our people together and makes us stronger — not leadership that insults Latinos and Mexicans, insults Muslims, women, African-Americans, Sikhs and veterans, and divides us up. By these measures, any objective observer will conclude that — based on her ideas and her leadership — Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States.”
At which point, Sanders united an otherwise fractious party in the second longest cheer of the night. Where the defeated GOP contenders were jockeying for their starting positions in the 2020 primaries, Sanders made it clear he wanted his supporters to vote for Hillary. “If you don’t believe that this election is important, if you think you can sit it out, take a moment to think about the Supreme Court justices that Donald Trump would nominate,” Sanders said to resounding boos. “And what that would mean to civil liberties, equal rights and the future of our country.”
The long and patient diplomacy between the Sanders and Hillary camps clearly paid off in what was nevertheless a boisterous convention hall. At the heart of the Sanders-Hillary detente was the haggling over the Democratic platform. Where Team Trump cared little about the GOP platform — except for the weakening of language on Ukraine’s independence from Russia — Team Hillary succeeded in using the platform to unite the party.
“It is no secret that Hillary Clinton and I disagree on a number of issues. That is what this campaign has been about. That is what democracy is about,” Sanders told the convention. “But I am happy to tell you that at the Democratic platform committee, there was a significant coming together between the two campaigns and we produced, by far, the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic party ... Our job now is to see that strong Democratic platform implemented by a Democratic-controlled Senate, by a Democratic House and a Hillary Clinton presidency — and I am going to do everything I can to make that happen.”
This was as strong a bear-hug of the nominee as anyone in Clintonville could hope for. “Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand with her here tonight,” Sanders concluded. The challenge for Sanders — and Hillary — is that his campaign stoked resentment and conspiracies as soon as the nomination began to slip away from the Vermont senator. He wasn’t just losing primaries and the popular vote; there was something rigged about the party. He wasn’t just lagging in pledged delegates; the superdelegates were corrupting the entire system.
Now the strategically-timed leak of DNC emails, thanks, purportedly, to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army of hackers, has revived that burning sense of injustice. But back in 2008, Hillary’s own supporters were just as resentful and prone to conspiracies, even without Russian mischief-making. Some of her closest friends and donors told me they would never forgive Barack Obama, even as Hillary herself released all her delegates to her rival. They were sure there was something weak and corrupt about Obama, who would surely lose to John McCain.
Those feelings subsided dramatically as the 2008 Democratic convention rolled on and the Clintons fully embraced Obama. Eight years later, the first night of the 2016 Democratic convention served as a pressure valve for Sanders’ hard core fans. Despite his angry tone, Sanders himself directed his anger towards an unjust economy and towards Trump, who clearly should have been paying more attention to Sanders’ speech than to his latest 140 characters or less. “Sad to watch Bernie Sanders abandon his revolution,” tweeted the luxury-loving real-estate developer. “We welcome all voters who want to fix our rigged system and bring back our jobs.”
As he attacked his keyboard, Trump missed Sanders demolishing his own opposition to raising the minimum wage. It would be a strange Sanders supporter who ignores the Sanders policies and switches to Trump. And by the end of the speech, even Trump seemed to understand that. “All of that work, energy and money, and nothing to show for it! Waste of time,” he tweeted. He was talking about the Sanders campaign, but he might as well have been talking about his own trolling of the Democratic party! As the orange one puts it so eloquently, so often, on Twitter: Sad!
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist, as well as chief digital and marketing officer at Global Citizen, a non-profit organisation dedicated to ending extreme poverty.
