“It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” Sanders said in an interview released Saturday by The Guardian, The Hill reported.
The Vermont senator also said in the interview that he thinks that another round of Trump as the president will be a lot more extreme than the first.
“He’s made that clear,” Sanders said. “There’s a lot of personal bitterness, he’s a bitter man, having gone through four indictments, humiliated, he’s going to take it out on his enemies. We’ve got to explain to the American people what that means to them — what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us.”
Sanders’s words echo those US President Joe Biden made in a recent campaign speech during which he said that Trump’s return to the presidency would risk American democracy. The president highlighted the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in an attempt to cement a point about Trump and other Republicans espousing a kind of extremism that was seen by the world on that day.
“Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice democracy to put himself in power,” Biden said in the speech that took place near Valley Forge and on the day before the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack.
Biden also said that Trump’s false claims about “the 2020 election never could stand up in court.”
“The legal path just took Trump back to the truth. That I’d won the election and he was a loser,” Biden said.
“Trump lost 60 court cases — 60. Trump lost the Republican-controlled states, Trump lost before a Trump-appointed judge and then judges. And Trump lost before the United States Supreme Court. All of them. He lost. Trump lost recount after recount after recount and state after state,” he said.