In a blistering takedown that no MAGA adherent could abide, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) warned Americans that the country has reached a perilous moment, contending that how the nation’s citizens respond to the Trump 2.0 presidency will impact generations of Americans and the health of the planet itself.
In his 23-minute response to President Trump’s address to Congress — a State of the Union speech in all but name — on Tuesday, Sanders called out what he characterized unequivocally as a litany of lies that President Trump has foisted upon the American people. Sanders said Trump’s goal was to create a “parallel universe for his supporters” that had “no basis in reality.”
Sanders accused the president of using these lies — to “say something that is grossly false and say it over and over again…until people actually believe it” — to undermine truth in general, and to substitute a distorted version of unreality in which only what he says is true.
Revisiting the “big lie” in which Trump claims he won the 2020 election, and also narrative reversals such as Trump’s claims that January 6 was a “day of love” and that Ukraine started the war with Russia, the Senator cited a specific example from Trump’s speech on Tuesday.
Musk says there’s massive waste & fraud in Social Security. Not true.
Musk says Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Not true.
What is the goal of this disinformation campaign? To privatize the most successful government program in history and give it over to Wall Street.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 2, 2025
“Tonight, just tonight,” Sanders said, “Trump claimed that millions of dead people between the ages of 100 and 360, I guess, were collecting social security checks — and that is an outrageous lie intended to lay the groundwork for cuts to social security and dismantling the most successful and popular government program in history. So let’s be clear about that.”
LIVE: President Trump’s Congressional Address needs a response. Here’s mine. https://t.co/O9yN04isIw
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 5, 2025
One commenter watching Sanders’s speech on Twitter quoted the late anti-fascist scholar Hannah Arendt in response, as Arendt described the political uses of distortion:
“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
The response to Sanders’s read of the Trump strategy differs depending on the platform it’s viewed on. On YouTube, where the politically androgynous Forbes media outlet posted the Senator’s speech, responses were largely positive.
On X, Sanders faced more vehement dissenters in the comments, with a barrage of MAGA adherents castigating Sanders with insults unrelated to the content of his speech and the common accusation that he is trying to foment a socialist revolution.