Mainstream Media Considers Sanders Worse Than Trump

As B ernie Sanders emerged as a threat to Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination in 2016, media began liberally tossing around articles equating Sanders and Donald Trump. These typically acknowledged that the comparison seemed far-fetched, but pointed in their defense to some version of a “remarkable amount of policy convergence” — which included shared positions like opposition to trade agreements, protecting Social Security, opposing big money in politics, and opposing foreign military intervention — or to the two candidates’ reliance on “angry white men” for their base of support. No journalist in their right mind would attempt an argument about a policy convergence between Sanders and Trump today, given Trump’s reversal on virtually every one of those original populist stances. And as for those “angry white men,” polls have shown that Sanders’s supporters are more female and less white than those of any other Democratic candidate — and much more so than Trump supporters. If they were an absurd stretch in 2016, then, efforts to make a Sanders/Trump equivalence today are even more desperate and disingenuous. And yet they are experiencing a renaissance, as Sanders creeps toward the top of Read Full Article »