At a "Fight Oligarchy Tour' event in Salt Lake City, Utah on Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) accused President Trump of undermining the Constitution and separation of powers.
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00:00But brothers and sisters, we're not just fighting oligarchy, we're fighting a
00:08president who undermines our Constitution every day, who threatens our freedom of
00:20speech and assembly, and whose agents are rounding up innocent people off the
00:27streets, throwing them into unmarked vans, and bringing them to detention centers in
00:39this country and abroad. That is what takes place in dictatorships, not in
00:51America. We will not allow them to continue to do that.
01:07The founding, you know, I find myself trying to remember my history lessons. Should have done better in history.
01:16But I think back to the founding of this country. And let me tell you, the
01:23founding fathers of this country were no dummies. They remember, I remember the history,
01:31talking about the 1780s. They had just fought a war, an impossibly difficult war, where they defeated the King of England, the most powerful person on the planet.
01:42Let's hear it for George Washington.
01:50But anyhow, these guys had taken on an autocrat. And they sat and they sit around and they said, all right, what do we want in our new country? What do we want?
01:57And what they said is, we don't want any one person to have all of that power. So they dealt, you know, they dealt with the federalist papers and all that stuff. And they came up with this kind of brilliant idea of a separation of powers.
02:12All right. They said, we're going to have a legislative branch, Congress, House and Senate. We are going to have a executive branch, the president, we're going to have a judiciary, the federal courts. And each one will have check on each other.
02:33And what I want to tell you, and I don't need to tell you, I think you're seeing it every single day. You have a president who is working overtime to take power away from the Congress.
02:54You got a president who is working overtime to take power away from the federal courts.
03:07Now, it is unprecedented. You know, no president, no member of Congress wants to see a Supreme Court or any court rule against him or her. We don't like to see that. I will tell you that we have seen in the last 20 years with the Roberts court horrendous decisions on Citizens United and Roe versus Wade. Terrible decisions.
03:37But we understand that we live in a rule of law.
03:46What Trump and his friends are doing now is they're saying, oh, a judge ruled against us. A judge said we can't do something which is unconstitutional. Let us get rid of that judge. Let us impeach that judge.
04:03So, in other words, you take power away from Congress. You take power away from the judiciary. And also, you got a president who really does not like to be criticized.
04:21So, he is sued. I mean, this is, again, unprecedented. He has sued ABC, CBS, Meta, the Des Moines Register. The Des Moines Register did a poll he didn't like. They are suing him.
04:40They are investigating right now, PBS and NPR.
04:47So, you add it all together. And what I would say to Trump, if you cannot take criticism, get out of the political process.
05:04This is a democracy. And criticism is an essential part of that democracy.
05:16And I'll tell you something. And again, this is scary stuff.
05:23What Trump has done is gone after major law firms. You're familiar with this. He's gone after major law firms who had opposed him in the past, opposed him or his friends.
05:41And what is really disgraceful is that a number of these law firms whose job it is to defend the rule of law, they have caved in to Trump in order to get their millions and millions of dollars in government contracts.
05:59And he is going after universities. The function of a higher university, when education in general, is the pursuit of truth, wherever that takes us.
06:24And we are now seeing, really sadly, major universities changing their curriculum in order to appease Trump and hang on to their federal grants.
06:40We are now seeing, really, major universities.
06:44Founding fathers of our country waged a war for democracy. We believe in democracy. We are not going to let Trump take us into an authoritarian society.