Eric Levitz's New York Magazine story after the quintet of northeast primaries this week, seems to indicate that Trump will fight Clinton for the Bernie supporters-- or, at least, use some of the populist Bernie messaging to clobber her and her and her cronies' corporate instincts. His racism, sexism, xenophobia and penchant for fascism isn't going to play well among any of the Bernie supporters I know. Other than that though, he's ready to take her on in the battle of the evil of two lessers shaping up for November. "[T]he Donald," writes Levitz, "plans to read up on this democratic socialist all the kids are talking about." After winning all the GOP primaries Tuesday, Trump told the Morning Joe audience that "Bernie Sanders has a message that's interesting. I'm going to be taking a lot of the things Bernie said and using them. I can reread some of his speeches and get some very good material." Most of what Trump said was nonsense, perfect for Morning Joe but Clinton's got to be worried that if she's facing Trump, he's going to be hitting her from the left (as well as from the right.) Will it work? Levitz doesn't think so.
But no matter how well Trump apes Sanders's critiques of trade deals, the Iraq War, and Goldman speeches, he's going to have a hard time defeating Clinton, for reasons he deftly illustrated later in the interview. Asked about the former secretary of State's strength on women's issues, the presumptive Republican nominee replied, "Well, I haven't quite recovered, it's early in the morning, from her shouting that message. And I know a lot of people would say, 'You can't say that about a woman,' because of course a woman doesn't shout. But the way she shouted that message was... oof... that was the way she said it. And I guess I'll have to get used to a lot of that over the next five or six months."Finally, Trump said he was probably okay with the president's decision to send more troops to Syria, but he had a big problem with Obama informing the American people of what he was doing in their name."I can live with it, but [what] I don't like doing is sending them in so-- I mean, with such fanfare," Trump said. "Let them go in, go in quietly. Be unpredictable, but I just-- from my standpoint, I find it very, very hard every time we do something we announce it for publicity reasons, and I think that's very negative. I think it's a bad thing."Some would argue that a president should inform the American public of his decision to escalate a foreign war less for "publicity" than for democratic legitimacy (which is already, arguably, undermined by the executive's expansive war powers). But Donald Trump is not one of those people.
Clinton's ugly corporate campaign has been fuming that Bernie is mounting such a powerful canpaign against her instead of just acting as a passive sparring partner. Now they're demanding he cut it out-- for real, not the way she told her bankster buddies on Wall Street to cut it out-- and hand over his supporters to her hideous machine. "We will unify the party to win this election and build an America where we can all rise together," she bellowed at her Philly victory rally Tuesday night, "an America where we lift each other up instead of tearing each other down... I applaud Senator Sanders and his millions of supporters for challenging us to get unaccountable money out of our politics and giving greater emphasis to closing the gap of inequality, and I know together we will get that done because whether you support Senator Sanders or you support me, there’s much more that unites us than divides us." Ehhh... Hillary has some basics in common with progressives but her vision for a future of this country isn't remotely acceptable to many Bernie supporters. How many and how powerfully they cling to that may determine who the next president will be.
