Bernie Sanders just shamed Donald Trump with his own tweet on the Senate floor
The floor of the United States Senate is a place for serious business. A place where laws are made and passed, and where the sausage that is American democracy is made. A place where a senator can troll the president-elect with a giant cardboard cutout of a two-year-old tweet.
On Wednesday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders strode to the Senate rostrum and proudly displayed a print-out of a message from May 7, 2015, in which President-elect Donald Trump proudly declared that he “was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid.”
The point, Sanders explained, was that Republican efforts to repeal the President Obama’s Affordable Care Act would, in fact, do just that—cut the very entitlements Trump himself boasted of being the “first and only” to defend.
While Sanders’ point was an important one, it did manage to get a laugh from at least one of his Senate colleagues, Ted Cruz, who, according to Sanders’ communications director, cracked up as the comically large Tweet was carried into the building.
And yes, as you probably could have guessed, people are already meme-ing the hell out of it.
Oh snap, now Bernie’s coming with the Arthur memes @fivefifths pic.twitter.com/tkqrnhS6sm
— Zachary Fedell (@zatchry) January 4, 2017
This is not, in fact, Sanders’ only dalliance with that particular Trump tweet. Earlier in the day, Bernie cited the tweet during a press conference on the ACA repeal efforts, explained he was going to “quote somebody who I suspect I will not often be quoting.”
“Either Donald Trump simply lied to the elderly and working people of this country, and just made campaign promises that he had no intention of keeping,” Sanders told reporters, “Or there is another reality, and that is right now before congress wastes an enormous amount of time, Donald Trump has got to come forward—maybe through his tweets—and say clearly that Donald Trump will veto any legislation that cuts medicare, cuts medicate, or cuts social security.”