Donnie vs. Bernie 2020: Two Visions of America
As a follow-up to my recent couple of posts related to Bernie Sanders’ surge, or momentum, or momentous surge, or whatever we are supposed to call it — I call it yet more evidence of the truth of everything I argued in The Case Against Public Education — I think it may be valuable to take a look at the real clash of visions that a Trump-Sanders election would represent. That is, I believe those Americans trying to make a reasonable decision about which of these two despotic munchkins is the least horrifying — I have already offered my own answer to that question — would be well-served by a simple side-by-side comparison of their conflicting political philosophies.
What follows, then, is my first shot (the first of many, I presume) at analyzing the 2020 election with a focus on the minds and sensibilities of the two candidates, should it actually turn out to be Donnie vs. Bernie.
Sanders the Commie: Admired and represented the interests of Soviet Russia in Washington.
Trump the Businessman: Admires and represents the interests of Putin’s Russia in Washington.
Sanders the Commie: Praises late communist tyrant Fidel Castro as a great and beloved leader.
Trump the Businessman: Praises current communist tyrant Kim Jong Un as a great and beloved leader.
Sanders the Commie: Defends and praises the Sandinista leaders in Nicaragua.
Trump the Businessman: Defends and praises the Communist Party leaders in China.
Sanders the Commie: Openly favors universal socialized healthcare, and believes it might be achievable in America today.
Trump the Businessman: Openly favors universal socialized healthcare, but believes it might not “work” in America today. (Look it up, cultists. I’ve written about this and quoted him on the topic often. He is the only national Republican to proudly declare the superiority of single-payer healthcare, to claim it works better than the American system in other countries, and to argue on a GOP debate stage that it could have worked in America in some unspecified past; he only backed away from it as a practical goal during the 2015-16 primaries, when he discovered it would not fly — yet — with his establishment masters.)
Sanders the Commie: Opposes free trade and wants to replace existing trade deals with protectionism for “workers” and Democrat-manufactured provisos and conditions on international trade.
Trump the Businessman: Been there, done that, having renegotiated and replaced the “worst deal in history,” NAFTA, with a watered down version of the same deal, but with the words “Free Trade” removed from the name, and a bunch of new Democratic pet projects inserted at the last minute for that final progressive-protectionist touch.
