MANCHESTER, N.H. – U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a scathing rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday night to a standing ovation at the Currier Museum of Art.
Sanders spent just over 20 minutes on his response, which began with an assault on Trump’s message of a strong economy.
The Vermont Senator told the audience that under Trump’s administration, while the economy has improved for Trump and other billionaires, many Americans continue to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle with college debt or healthcare costs.
Sanders added that Trump lied in his pledge that his tax cuts would help the middle class rather than wealthy Americans and referred to losses of 170,000 jobs in the Midwest as the start of a manufacturing recession.
“This is what Trump means when we have a booming economy,” said Sanders.
However, that wasn’t the only lie Sanders accused Trump of telling, questioning Trump’s insistence on protecting the healthcare and Social Security of Americans when his supporters in Congress came one vote away from stripping insurance from Americans with pre-existing conditions and proposed cuts to social security and Medicare.
Sanders also saw a lack of discussion about climate change and action on stopping mass shootings in Trump’s speech as glaring omissions, inferring that Trump was subservient to the NRA and was turning his back on future generations.
Not all of Sanders’ response focused on Trump. If elected, Sanders said he would fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, prohibit any companies that outsource jobs from getting government contracts, provide equal pay for equal work regardless of gender, create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, legalize marijuana, make it easier to join unions and put a tax on Wall Street speculation to provide free college tuition and cancel all student debt.
“This is an unprecedented moment in history, let us go forward together,” he said.
