Is Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank secretly working for the Trump 2020 campaign? The question has to be asked because Milbank is currently doing all he can to completely alienate Bernie Sanders supporters from the Democrat party and making it more likely that they won't be voting for Joe Biden, if he is the nominee, in November. So how is Milbank accomplishing this result? By severely castigating Bernie Sanders and labeling him a "spoiler."
Milbank performed this favor for the Trump campaign on Wednesday by whining, "The Bernie Sanders spoiler campaign begins." Milbank even went so far as to rub salt in the Democrat wound by promising a new Bernie supporters alienation guarantee feature called the "Spoiler Watch."
Barring Joe Biden forgetting his own name or being made into a hamburger by anti-dairy activists, Sanders has no credible chance after another primary-night trouncing on Tuesday. What Sanders did in Burlington, Vt., on Wednesday, therefore, was not a continuation of his presidential campaign but the beginning of a new campaign: that of spoiler.
And so today, I begin a new feature: the Spoiler Watch. It will track the campaign of vanity and self-aggrandizement the once-idealistic Sanders candidacy has now become. Everything Sanders does from this point on — until he eventually (hopefully) throws his support to Biden — will be to the benefit of a grateful President Trump.
Milbank then proceeds to worry about the very outcome that his "Spoiler Watch" seems designed to accomplish, writing, "Trump won the presidency, in part, because disaffected Sanders voters never embraced Hillary Clinton after the Vermont independent’s scorched-earth campaign in the 2016 primary. Now, he’s poised to do it again. He must not be allowed to succeed."
And now Milbank makes those same disaffected Sanders supporters even more disaffected by slamming them:
Sanders could have declared victory Wednesday and dropped out of the race. He has succeeded in pushing the Democratic Party to the left, and his differences with Biden are less about ends than means. As Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a Sanders supporter, said this week: “Bernie Sanders won the idea primary.”
Yet Sanders, instead, extends the fight. Only ugliness this way lies.
There will be more of the suggestions from Sanders’s supporters that the gaffe-prone Biden is senile. There will be more conspiracy theories about the hidden hand of the establishment — not actual voters — powering Biden’s victory. And there will be more of what Elizabeth Warren called the “organized nastiness” from Sanders’s supporters.
...Khanna and others who endorsed Sanders now risk being enablers of his spoiler campaign....Every day Sanders delays the party’s healing is a contribution-in-kind to Trump.
Can we consider your "Spoiler Watch" feature a contribution-in-kind to Trump, Dana?
