‘At least he’s true to what he believes…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump recently slammed presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders as a “communist.”
Sanders dismissed Trump’s comments last week, but back in 1972, when the U.S. was at the height of the Cold War, he admitted that had no problem being associated with communism.
“I don’t mind people coming up and calling me a communist,” Sanders, then a gubernatorial protest candidate for the socialist Liberty Union Party, said during a campaign pitch in Vermont.
Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which he helped co-found with Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., have been tied to far-left political parties that have endorsed communist-like platforms.
In 1980 and 1984, Sanders endorsed Socialist Workers Party presidential candidates Andrew Pulley and Mel Mason, who advocated for dismantling the entire U.S. military and nationalizing entire industries. Sanders was even investigated by the FBI at one point for his ties to SWP, but charges were never brought, according to the Washington Examiner.
And in 1983, Soviet Embassy First Secretary Vadim Kuznetsov congratulated Sanders on his reelection as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, according to The Washington Post.
In 1989, Sanders traveled to Cuba hoping to meet communist dictator Fidel Castro, and returned to the U.S. defending parts of Castro’s regime. The Cuban revolution was “far deeper and more profound than I had understood it to be,” Sanders claimed, according to the Miami Herald.
Trump reminded voters of Sanders’s past during a recent pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
“I think he’s a communist. I mean, you know, look, I think of communism when I think of Bernie,” Trump said. “Now, you could say socialist, but didn’t he get married in Moscow?”
Hannity interjected and reminded Trump that Sanders had only honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
“I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist but far beyond a socialist,” Trump continued. “At least he’s true to what he believes.”
Sanders’s campaign has argued that Sanders, who identifies as a democratic socialist, has done the most to sound the alarm against growing authoritarianism, and how authoritarianism feeds off of corruption, inequality and oligarchy—not just of any of the candidates, but of any American leader period.”