Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for using over-the-top, hateful rhetoric during campaign speeches, reported the Washington Post.
While speaking at a campaign event in Iowa on Friday, Sanders blasted Trump for “using racism and demagoguery” to talk about immigration issues. Sanders has become a legitimate contender for the Democratic nomination, closing in on frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Sanders’ words against Trump are scathing:
You would think that an honest political discussion would say, “How do we address those issues?” But what certain candidates like Trump are trying to do is to say to Americans, “We have problems, do you know who the cause of the problems is? It’s all the immigrants.”
Well, to the best of my knowledge, undocumented people did not cause the greed and the illegal behavior on Wall Street, which destroyed this economy. To the best of my knowledge, undocumented people in this country did not cause the fact that we have not raised the minimum wage. … So what they are doing, are using, in this case, Latinos, as simply a whipping boy to deflect attention from the real issues facing America.
Press correspondents from Trump’s camp refused to comment on Sanders’ remark.
Trump has announced an immigration plan to end birthright citizenship and build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. However, Trump remains silent, or clueless, about how he’d implement such an ambitious plan.
Sanders seems to be the only candidate willing to have an intelligent discussion about the issues, including immigration, while Trump simply yells and beats his chest.
“We can have a debate in this country about immigration reform, and people can have different points of view, but it is absolutely unacceptable for presidential candidates like Donald Trump to be using racism and demagoguery against a group of people,” Sanders said. “This is unacceptable. This is the year 2015, and I would have hoped that in this country we would have gone beyond this type of racism.”
Watch Thom Hartmann’s take on this very issue:
