Minutes after President Donald Trump tweeted an attack on Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” proposal yesterday, the Vermont senator, in an interview with me on SiriusXM Progress, fired back, slamming the president’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and his recent decision to end protections for immigrant youth.
“Where can we begin on that?” Sanders asked rhetorically. “Mr. President, let me tell you what a curse on the American people is, and that is your support for legislation that would throw 23 million people off the health care they currently have, and then provide huge tax breaks for the rich and large corporations.”
“Providing health care to every man, woman, and child in this country ― that’s not a curse. That is what every other major country on earth does and that is exactly what we should be doing,” he added.
Sanders also called Trump “the most destructive president” in modern history regarding his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. A decision that puts around 800,000 immigrant youth at risk of deportation.
But Sanders also held out hope that the president would realize the mistake he made, as Trump was possibly seeking a deal with Democrats on protecting “dreamers.”
“Of all of the terrible things that he has done and proposes to do, the cruelest and most ugly action was the doing away with the legal status of 800,000 young people under the DACA program,” the senator said.
“To my mind we have got to do everything we can to restore legal status to those young people,” Sanders said. “We’ve got to move forward to protect not only them but their parents. I would hope ― I would hope ― that maybe Trump understands the revulsion that’s taking place all across this country, whether you’re Democrat, Republican or independent, at what he did. And maybe he’s trying to find a way out of it. And if that’s the case, that’s a good thing.”
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