MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recently sat down with democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and posed a series of questions regarding his campaign and how his potential opponent from the other side of the aisle, Donald Trump, has begun to tarnish America’s image regarding a laundry list of issues, including fear-mongering, hatred, racism, and more than a few instances of misogyny as well.
Since the beginning of The Donald’s presidential run, he’s been taking potshots at the Mexican and Muslim populations in this country and proposing some delusional solutions to rectify immigration reform and the war on terror. In the beginning of the interview, Maddow touches upon the recent mayoral election in London, England, where the people overwhelmingly elected Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim to ever hold that position in the nation’s history. It was a grueling contest, as Khan’s opponent took a few pages out of the Donald Trump playbook in an attempt to win the people over, but to no avail.
Maddow goes onto say that under Trump’s proposed policy of denying all Muslims access into the US; mayor-elect Sadiq Khan would not be allowed to set foot on American soil. Seeing as how Great Britain is one of America’s closest long-time allies, this scenario would present a huge problem. Both Sanders and Maddow chuckled a little, and then the Vermont senator got serious and went on to say that Trump is besmirching America’s image, “by virtue of the fact that the Republican Party picked him” as their presumptive nominee.
Sanders continued: “Trump is not going to get elected president. My campaign is running, in the latest poll, sixteen points ahead of Trump. And as a United States Senator I will do everything in my power to make sure that that absurd, hateful proposal never happens. What your question is really asking is all over the world, people are looking at America, anywhere with a Muslim population – it’s a worldwide religion – and they’re asking what is going on in the United States? Why do they hate us?…he is managing to antagonize large populations of the world against the United States, and that is unacceptable.”
Trump has also found a brilliant non-solution to settling things with México by building a wall at the US-Mexican border and then proposing that the Mexican government pay for it. This brings us back to the days of George W. Bush and the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and the idea of deporting over 10 million undocumented immigrants, neither of which panned out. But what these acts of shamefulness did accomplish was tarnishing America’s image around the world and shooting democracy in its foot.
All in all, the idea of having Donald Trump as Commander in Chief may mark the beginning of America’s downfall and the onset of an authoritarian regime. His penchant for settling personal vendettas and circumventing the judicial process is just another way of saying that he’ll likely use the power of executive orders to fulfill his agenda when congress doesn’t agree with him. These practices alone are enough drag America back into the Bush years when the rest of the free world looked at America with a big question mark. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, would more-than-likely employ a more common sense approach in terms of handing world affairs while protecting an image that took nearly eight years to restore.