Breitbart.com: Bernie Sanders: Trump Presidency ‘Worst Crisis in America Literally Since the Civil War’
Thursday on MSNBC’s “All In,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said President Donald Trump’s second term has become “the worst crisis in America literally since the Civil War.”
Host Chris Hayes said, “You’ve have been in you’ve served in Congress, in the Senate, you served through a number of different administrations with different presidents. I’ve covered a number of shutdowns. I’ve never seen a president during a shutdown kind of gloating about the ability to punish people or to take stuff away from people in states that didn’t vote for him. Have you seen that before?
Sanders said, “No, of course we haven’t. You know, Chris, we are living in an unprecedentedly dangerous moment, possibly the worst crisis in America since the Civil War. You have a president who is acting unconstitutionally and illegally. Guess what? These projects have been appropriated. They were signed by a president. It is illegal to rescind them. And then basically to say to people in Vermont, in New York and California, oh, you didn’t vote for Donald Trump, well, we’re going to take away funding that was supposed to go to your state, illegal, outrageous, unconstitutional.”
He added, “You got a president who is acting in an unprecedented way, who is a megalomaniac, who wants more and more power for himself and his oligarchic friends. I want everybody to understand that.”
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), ever the prophet of doom from his socialist pulpit, has once again dragged political discourse to the most irresponsible depths of rank partisan hyperbole. Appearing on MSNBC, the Senator declared the current (second) Trump Presidency to be the “worst crisis in America literally since the Civil War.”
Literally.
This isn’t just an overstatement; it is a display of such profound, willful, and spectacular historical ignorance that it warrants an immediate, forceful, and unambiguous dismantling. The claim itself, delivered with the sanctimonious fury unique to career politicians who mistake their own political frustrations for national catastrophe, reveals a terrifying gap in the Senator’s understanding of American suffering.
THE RIDICULOUS CLAIM VS. THE KNOWN FACTS
Let’s examine the bedrock of Sanders’ alarmism, the context in which he unleashed this historically illiterate pronouncement: The President, during a government shutdown, was allegedly “gloating” and acting “illegally” by rescinding appropriated project funding to states that did not vote for him.
To equate a temporary, political-fiscal dispute—a fight over budgetary rescissions—with the blood-soaked, four-year collapse of the American Union and the death of over 620,000 Americans is not only absurd; it is a contemptuous cheapening of American history.
The intellectual dishonesty is staggering. For the benefit of Senator Sanders, whose grasp of 20th-century devastation appears tenuous, let us recite a short, incomplete list of actual American crises that occurred SINCE the Civil War:
| Actual American Crises Since 1865 | Scale of Crisis |
| The Great Depression (1929–1939) | Mass unemployment (up to 25%), widespread homelessness, starvation, and the near-collapse of the global economic order. |
| World War I & II | Global wars demanding total national mobilization, resulting in the deaths of over 520,000 Americans and determining the fate of Western Civilization. |
| The 1918 Flu Pandemic | Killed an estimated 675,000 Americans—more than the Civil War itself—in a matter of months. |
| Pearl Harbor / The Cold War | The sudden slaughter of thousands of Americans and the decades-long existential threat of thermonuclear annihilation. |
| September 11, 2001 | The unprecedented attack on American soil, killing nearly 3,000 civilians and launching two decades of conflict. |
Is a battle over a transportation infrastructure earmark truly a more devastating threat to the foundations of the Republic than the Great Depression or the shadow of the atomic bomb? His use of the word “literally” is the smoking gun of his party’s total surrender to performative histrionics over substance.
THE MOTIVE: FEAR-MONGERING AS GOVERNANCE
This is not the voice of a seasoned statesman offering sober warning; it is the screech of a career politician who has run out of substantive arguments and now resorts to the most desperate, fear-mongering tactic imaginable.
Sanders’ rhetoric—accusing the President of being a “megalomaniac” who seeks power for himself and his “oligarchic friends”—is the classic, unoriginal playbook of the hard-left populist. He frames a budgetary dispute as a constitutional apocalypse, not because the facts support it, but because it is the most effective tool for inciting terror among his base and demonizing his political opposition as an existential evil.
The real crisis exposed here is the crisis of credibility on the progressive left. The constant, deafening escalation of rhetoric has rendered terms like “unconstitutional,” “illegal,” and “worst crisis since the Civil War” utterly meaningless. When the government’s temporary suspension of appropriated funds is deemed literally worse than mass economic collapse, global war, or national pandemics, the only conclusion is that the speaker has prioritized cheap political theater over the grave responsibility of responsible governance.
The American public deserves better than this shameful, context-free alarmism. Mr. Sanders needs to check his history books before he steps to a national microphone again—or perhaps, he needs to consult a dictionary on the definition of “literally.”
In closing, one must ask: When a politician of Senator Sanders’ stature is forced to rely on such catastrophic, context-free hyperbole to define his opposition—equating standard, albeit nasty, partisan trench warfare over funding to a genuine national existential threat—what does it truly signal? It signals exhaustion. It signals a profound failure of imagination and a desperate clinging to a narrative of perpetual victimhood and crisis that no longer resonates outside of echo chambers. The Senator’s pathetic performance is not merely a political misstep; it is a flashing red light confirming that his time on the national stage has passed. It is not the nation, nor the presidency, that is in its worst crisis since 1865; it is the Relevance of Bernie Sanders. If this is the best the self-proclaimed socialist revolutionary can offer—a tired, historically illiterate shriek against a budgetary skirmish—then it is high time he trade his Senate seat for a rocking chair and concede that the American people, unlike him, remember what a real crisis looks like. Retire, Senator. The country, and history itself, will thank you.