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Trump is lending Sanders a hand in the grievance game, hoping the whisper of unfairness will rile up his troops. The only one putting a finger on the scale of the Democratic National Committee selection process here is Trump.

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Trump is also obsessed with knocking out Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sanders’s primary rival on the left wing of the party. Warren has been getting praise for her detailed policy positions and was a star at the She the People gathering last week (where Sanders was booed). So out of the blue, Trump tries again to lend Sanders’s campaign a hand.

He told attendees at his rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, “I think Pocahontas, she’s finished. She’s out. She’s gone. When it was found that I had more Indian blood in me than she did, and then it was determined I had none, but I still had more, that was the end of her 32-year scam.” There was no “scam,” of course, because there is no evidence that Warren profited from her claim of Native American ancestry, but that’s not the point. Trump wants Warren out and to remind voters he has already bested her.

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One can chalk this up to misogyny or to racism. Far more likely, Trump’s boosting Sanders again. As Politico reported:

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The battle between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic left is ratcheting up. Unlike in 2016, when Sanders didn’t have to sweat his left flank, Warren has managed to steal the spotlight from him on several issues. At times, she’s simply been the first to roll out a detailed policy proposal on an issue she and Sanders agree on. At others, she’s gone where Sanders has been unwilling to, like proposing to eliminate the filibuster and Electoral College.

Like the Russians pushing Jill Stein in 2016, Trump is more than happy to meddle in the other party’s primary and encourage its weakest candidate.

Well, isn’t Warren a weak contender for Democrats to put up against Trump? Not as weak as Sanders, who has done Trump’s work for him by slapping the socialist label on himself. Sanders is also the only Democrats who looks older than Trump, and the one least likely to attack him for retreat and retrenchment on foreign policy. Given the choice between the whip-smart and self-identified capitalist Warren, with facts, figures and proposals at her fingertips, and the grouchy socialist whose last campaign was fraught with claims of gender harassment and discrimination, there is little doubt that Trump would prefer the latter.

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Democrats should pay attention. They need not agree with Trump’s assessment, but they should listen to the attacks he’s prepared to mount (and is already spouting) against Sanders. Trump delights in comparing dictator Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela to American socialists (“The socialists have done in Venezuela all of the same things that socialists, communists, totalitarians have done everywhere that they’ve had a chance to rule. The results have been catastrophic,” he said in February), and it only helps him pin the extremist label on Sanders when the latter shies away from an outright condemnation of Maduro. (Warren calls Maduro a dictator.)

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In short, there are reasons Trump wants to clear the left lane for Sanders in the Democratic primary. Sanders remains the Democrat most easily mocked and demonized by the right. It’s why you don’t hear Trump figuring out how to juice support for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), former vice president Joe Biden or more than a dozen other contenders.