With the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in full swing at this point well before 2020 has even started, candidates including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are taking on incumbent President Donald Trump directly. In a video his campaign posted to Instagram along with a fundraising call, Sanders is edited into a clip from a March 2016 Trump rally to make it look like he himself is startling the eventual president. In the real-life incident, a man attempted to make it up to Trump on the stage but was stopped by the Secret Service.
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The original incident has been widely meme’d, with a variety of figures edited into the position the original man occupied and made to look like they were getting at the wildly unpopular Donald Trump. This particular Sanders version doesn’t even seem to be a Sanders campaign creation, with them instead repurposing an already circulating internet message for their own purposes. The video went up on June 30, the last day of the fundraising quarter in which Sanders and other Democratic hopefuls have been angling to make a dent in the financial lead Trump’s campaign holds. In the year’s first quarter, Trump finished with a larger fundraising haul than the top two Democratic candidates including Sanders combined. Numbers for the second quarter aren’t immediately available, but the race has been shaken up numerous times by high-profile events like debates and the official entrance of frontrunner and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Sanders has already taken on Trump directly, even as he has a long way to go if he hopes to actually face him in the 2020 general election. During the recently held first debates in the Democratic presidential race, Sanders asserted that he would take a message to the campaign trail of exposing Trump as the “phony” he is in an effort to turn Trump’s favored style of direct confrontation against him. He and his team have also brought forward assertions like that it’s ironic for Trump to rail against even the semblance of socialism inherent in policy proposals like Medicare for all because they claim that in reality, Trump stands for socialism that benefits the upper classes.
It is definitely true that Trump’s tax policy signed into law in late 2017 as the first major legislative accomplishment of his presidency majorly benefited the upper classes while not doing much of anything for lower income Americans. At least one Democratic presidential candidate — California Senator Kamala Harris — has already promised to repeal that tax reform on her first day in office.
She is definitely in the top rung of candidates and following her rousing confrontation of frontrunner Biden’s shaky at-best past approach to race relations has seen her support in polls spike significantly into the double digits in the crowded field.
The “best” Trump has got in response to Sanders has been some of his familiar penchant for nicknames, deriding the leading candidate as “Crazy Bernie.” Sanders has polled well against Trump in hypothetical general election match-ups, managing as much as a ten percent lead.
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