Reacting to President Donald Trump’s dictator-like insistence that Democrats who didn’t applaud during his State of the Union address are “treasonous” and “un-American,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argued in a video on Tuesday that Trump’s remarks and behavior demonstrate that the “great political issue now facing our country” is “democracy versus authoritarianism.”
“Yesterday Trump suggested that members of Congress who don’t mindlessly stand and applaud his every word are guilty of ‘treason,'” Sanders said. “Our job now is to remind Trump and his allies what democracy is all about. By our grassroots activism we will defend President Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg, when he stated, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. Our job: stand up, fight back, get involved.”