Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the reelection of former President Trump would be the “end of democracy” in an interview released Saturday by The Guardian.

“It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” Sanders said in the interview.

The Vermont senator also said in the interview that he thinks that another round of Trump as the president will be a lot more extreme than the first.

“He’s made that clear,” Sanders said. “There’s a lot of personal bitterness, he’s a bitter man, having gone through four indictments, humiliated, he’s going to take it out on his enemies. We’ve got to explain to the American people what that means to them — what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us.”

Sanders’s words echo those President Biden made in a recent campaign speech during which he said that Trump’s return to the presidency would risk American democracy. The president highlighted the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in an attempt to cement a point about Trump and other Republicans espousing a kind of extremism that was seen by the world on that day.

  • asg101@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The U.S. was never a democracy to begin with. The Constitution decreed that only rich white males had the vote. Excluding a majority of the population makes it an oligarchy, not a democracy.

    • TechyDad@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’d call it a “flawed democracy.” The ideals behind it were sound, but the execution left much to be improved upon. And we’ve made many improvements (though we still have a ways to go).

      Still, even a flawed democracy is preferable to Dictator Trump.

    • derphurr@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Really they intended land owning men to elect a handful of people to go to the capitol and get together and elect a leader, hopefully respecting the votes of those back home.

      So not really oligarchy. Citizens United and Bush v Gore means this system is a joke and the rich and powerful decide who leads, luckily Trump is neither.

      If Trump had any influence he could have launched a single successful recount challenge or court case with ANY evidence of fraud or election misconduct. He couldn’t, so he relies completely on a fervent cult-like group of followers.

      • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Yeah but he’s planning to purge the people that stopped him from winning his challenges.

        Came down to Mike Pence. He refused to get into the car with the Secret Service because they were planning to kidnap him. He refused to adjourn the session after the putsch. He said “clean the shit off the walls, turn those machines back on, bring those people back in here, and let’s start the transition.” Then he stepped over that foolish dead girl and reconvened the session, and obviously if he wasn’t going to go along with it neither was the Senate, not in that moment.

        Without that, we’d have been fucked. The Joint Chiefs letter was a week later and it voted the certification as grounds to remove Trump from the Whire House on January 20 if he didn’t go willingly. He already says he regrets leaving and that he should have had his supporters literally fight the military.

        Without that, statehouses would have been demanding to send new slates of electors.

        They had a whole plan to seize the Supreme Court and State Department. That was only thwarted because the Capitol Police refused to let the crowd into the mall without metal detector screening, despite Trump’s orders.

        Next time, Trump isn’t going to have a VP who refuses orders. That’s kind of the whole thing with fascists and cults.

    • Uglyhead@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Never a democracy

      I hear this more and more all over the place. Promoted everywhere seemingly to say it doesn’t matter if everything gets torn down and the US Constitution ripped up— because it’s all BS anyways, right?

      The US is a Democratic Republic. Simple As.