My campaign was over. With the completion of the DC primary on June 14, 2016, the Democratic presidential primary process had finally come to an end. Starting from nowhere, with a relatively unknown senator from a small state, our campaign had taken on virtually the entire Democratic establishment, shocked the political world, and helped transform American politics.
The opening paragraph of the book begins with the end. Or, at least, the end of what was to that point the singular defining moment of Bernie Sanders’ careers relative to American interest and knowledge. The subtitle of the book foreshadows how the campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination for President will be the centerpiece of this memoir. The Table of Contents cements that premise. Each chapter not only gets its own subtitle, but its own particular date. The book commences with the opening chapter from this passage is excerpted, “Meeting with Hillary Clinton” and the date associated is June 14, 2016. The final chapter is dated February 19, 2019 and is titled “I Hope You Will Join Me” but really the books concludes on August 25, 2018 with the chapter titled “Reforming the Democratic Party.” This is not a memoir of a life, but a memoir of what may be the most intense period of that life.
“one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.”
In a book that is filled with criticism of the policies, behavior, agenda, psychology, philosophy, ideology and personality of Donald Trump, it may be surprising that one of the single strongest statements made against him comes not from progressive icon Bernie Sanders, but conservative icon John McCain. The death of John McCain became also the death knell of open criticism from his own party toward Donald Trump. Never again would any sitting Senator openly make such a stinging critique of Donald Trump, a remarkable achievement considering that many of his actions in the wake of McCain’s death were worse than that what McCain lived to see. It is quite telling that two men situated on opposite sides along such a deeply entrenched division of ideological could align in such positive agreement upon just one aspect of American politics: the comprehensive unfitness for the office of the President of Donald J. Trump.
Police officers spend far, far more hours learning how to use their weapon than learning de-escalation tactics or how to deal with mentally ill people acting out. That has got to change.
One of the amazing things is how much of the book is devoted to topics that became truly hot button subjects as the 2020 Presidential election heated up. Four years after he had run for the Democratic nomination and lost and four years after Donald Trump had backed into the Oval Office by winning the process of counting votes rather than actually winning the process of casting votes and a full year and a half after the book itself was published, the very same issues that were major issues had become even bigger issues in 2016. It was as if absolutely no improvement were made in the intervening four years. It is almost as if instead of making America great, somehow Donald Trump had managed to make things even worse.
For instance, the issue of excessive police force, the call for widespread police reform and the general realization among the public during the summer of 2020 that everything that minorities had been insisting was true about systemic racism and psychopathy in law enforcement in America actually was true. The white majority just had refused to believe it until it was suddenly presented to them in a way that could no longer be denied. Except, of course, by some of those with the actual power to do something about it. Sanders’ assertion that things have got to change had not yet come to fruition by that summer of 2020, but he remains prescient all the same. Things did start to change.
What is increasingly apparent, and extremely distressing, is the degree to which a frightened Republican majority in Congress has abdicated its responsibility in maintaining an independent branch of government. Their fear of Trump and “his base” prevents them from opposing the president on almost any issue, even when he embarrasses the country and undermines fundamental American values. This goes beyond a Democrat-Republican debate. This is about our constitutional form of government, and the role that Congress must play.
What Sanders is alluding to here is the manner in which the behavior of the entire GOP-controlled Congress in the first two years of the Trump Presidency and the Senate in the second two years following the transfer of power to the Democrats in the House of Representatives following the 2018 election has altered the fundamental structure of the separation of powers in American government. The Congress has traditionally acted upon their Constitutional imperative as a co-equal branch of government to check the executive branch from overreaching and abuse of the limitations of their own power.
That dynamic underwent a potentially dangerous alteration during the Trump administration as first as the Democrat-controlled House was openly obstructed from carrying out their oversight responsibilities by the White House in complicit partnership with the Senate. Amazingly, the Senate under the stewardship of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell even went so far as to willingly sacrifice its own unique power to the will of the Executive Branch. This epochal shift in which Congress has been both forcibly and willingly given away its powers raises the genuine threat of a constitutional crisis in which the Executive branch is no longer co-equal, but a superior branch of government to which the Congress will be expected to submit.
