Vermont senator Bernie Sanders warned that America is in the midst of a “very dangerous moment” during a Wednesday interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
When asked about President Trump and Elon Musk‘s government cuts and the White House’s insistence that the latter is not the administrator of the DOGE operation, Sanders said, “The issue is not who’s technically the administrator, who has the title. Elon Musk is clearly running the show.” Sanders confessed that he does not feel like he has any oversight over Musk and spoke frankly about the current state of the U.S. federal government and America at large.
“This country is moving very rapidly under Trump into an authoritarian form of society,” Sanders observed. “The Founding Fathers way back in the 1770s — these were nobody’s fools. They had fought the king of England, an autocrat, [who] had all the power, and they said, ‘You know what? We don’t want that in the new country. We’re going to set up three separate, equal branches of government.”
“Every kid in the sixth grade knows who they are, but Trump does not,” the senator told Collins. “What Trump is doing now is trying every day to usurp the powers of Congress … It is a very dangerous moment.”
Sanders added that it’ll be up to the American people to put a stop to Trump and Musk. “The struggle against Trump, the struggle against oligarchy, which is led by Elon Musk, the struggle against authoritarianism, the fight to make sure that the working class of this country gets a fair shake, that’s not going to be won here on Capitol Hill,” he explained. “It’s going to be won by millions of people all over this country standing up and saying, ‘You know what? We fought and died for democracy. We’re not going to move toward authoritarianism. We fought to create a country that works for all. Not just the billionaire class.’”
While Sanders acknowledged that the government is far from “perfect,” the senator said he doesn’t believe Trump and Musk actually care about government spending but rather securing more money for the already rich and working toward the “the privatization of every important government agency.” “Let us be clear what these guys really want to do. Do you think that Elon Musk is staying up at night just worrying about excessive spending in the CDC? I don’t think so,” he commented. “At the end of the day, what these guys want and what Trump wants is to cut programs that working class people need.”
Collins then noted that Trump stated during his campaign that he didn’t plan on touching one social program in particular, Social Security, to which Sanders responded, “I think the president has many attributes, but credibility and honesty are not one of them.” He elaborated, “I’m not saying they’re going to go after Social Security tomorrow. They’re not. But this is the groundwork. I mean, this is what you do. You destroy the credibility of programs and programs that are complicated, programs that [aid] tens of millions of people.”
