Trump mocks ‘fake news’ for running ‘Russian Sympathizer Bernie’ smear, but doesn’t miss a chance to score points

It seems Donald Trump is yet to decide whether he would rather lampoon left-wing media for adding Democrat frontrunner Bernie Sanders to Team Russia or take the opportunity to mock his potential rival in the November poll.

Just a day apart, two steaming-hot scoops landed in the US media cycle. First, the New York Times said Russia was helping Donald Trump to get reelected. Then the Washington Post claimed Russia was helping Bernie Sanders’s campaign. All based on anonymous sources, innuendos, and other traits with which even casual followers of the ‘Russiagate’ saga are all too familiar.

One of the principals, the incumbent US president, took to Twitter to ridicule both the idea and the coverage. The “Fake Media have now added Crazy Bernie to the list of Russian Sympathizers,” he posted – a list which already contains potential Democratic nominee Tulsi Gabbard and the Green Party’s 2016 candidate Jill Stein.

“But now they report President Putin wants Bernie (or me) to win. The reason for this is that the Do Nothing Democrats, using disinformation Hoax number 7, don’t want Bernie Sanders to get the Democrat Nomination, and they figure this would be very bad for his chances,” he added. “It’s all rigged, again, against Crazy Bernie Sanders!”

Well, Trump has a good excuse for believing this. The DNC, after all, was joined at the hip with the campaign of Hillary Clinton, who personally accused Gabbard and Stein of being Russian assets.

Meanwhile, Sanders is indeed approaching the Nevada Democratic caucuses as a clear frontrunner and is projected to end up with multiple pledged delegates at the Milwaukee convention. So his billionaire rival Mike Bloomberg is reportedly pouring his considerable resources into poaching delegates from other candidates, hoping to get the nomination in a second ballot.

But Trump wouldn’t be Trump if he didn’t see the merits of a red-baiting attack on the democratic socialist from Vermont. So he retweeted conservative radio host Buck Sexton, who said: “Let’s be honest: if you’re Putin, you probably do want to sit across the negotiating table from a guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, saw the breadlines – and came back saying only the nicest things about them”.

Trump is not the only one. The Bloomberg campaign seems to have embraced this tactic too, posting a version of Sanders’s 2016 campaign slogan translated into Russian. At least we can be sure they are not backed by the Kremlin – no native Russian speaker would have used such garbled language.

The US public, meanwhile, is yet to receive an explanation as to exactly how the almighty Russia is meddling in the presidential race.

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