The Vermont senator ends his campaign -- after pushing Democrats even farther to the Left.

After extracting major policy concessions from Democrats, Marxist grandstander Bernie Sanders finally ended his primary campaign and endorsed his rival Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

The endorsement, which New York Times columnist Andrew Rosenthal promptly labeled “uninspiring,” sounded perfunctory.

Bernie’s heart wasn’t in it.

“Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that,” Sanders said, avoiding discussions of war and peace and Clinton’s time at the State Department.

The Vermont senator “went off for a month to contemplate life after the revolution, and this was the best he could come up with?” wrote Rosenthal.

“If his primary aim is to keep alive his cult of personality, perhaps all Sanders can do is accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,” Rosenthal added. “I’m not sure that will get his supporters to vote in November.”

Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump tweeted after news of the endorsement spread that “Bernie Sanders endorsing Crooked Hillary Clinton is like Occupy Wall Street endorsing Goldman Sachs.”

Trump is clearly in the ballpark.

The fact that someone as radical as Sanders, who speaks with undisguised contempt for the principles and free institutions that made America great, got as close as he did to the White House ought to give all patriotic Americans pause. With his Occupy Wall Street-style sensibilities and carnival barker oratorical style that, oddly enough, gave him authenticity in the eyes of the Democratic Party’s increasingly radical, anti-American base, Sanders’ presence in the race undoubtedly moved Democrats leftward.

Democrats have taken a “sharp left turn,” William A. Galston of the liberal Brookings Institution writes in the Wall Street Journal.

“The party that Hillary Clinton will lead into battle this fall is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. In important respects it is not even Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. It is a party animated by the frustrations of the Obama years and reshaped by waves of economic and social activism.”

The fact that Sanders kept his campaign apparatus active for so long helped his allies drive the already radical party platform even farther to the left.

This is “the Democrats’ most progressive platform ever,” crowed Center for American Progress house organ Think Progress about the new platform that is weighted down with extreme economy- and freedom-killing redistributionist programs.

“Despite losing the nomination to Clinton more than a month ago, Sanders withheld his endorsement until this week. He focused in that time on rallying his supporters to pressure the Democrats’ Platform Committee to draft a blueprint for the party that embraces the ideas he ran on: raising wages, expanding access to health care and higher education, and reining in Wall Street’s biggest and riskiest actors.”

DNC platform drafters approved planks advocating the “public option” for healthcare, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, banning fracking where states and localities oppose it, and legalizing marijuana. The new platform reportedly calls for killing all tax breaks and subsidies for hydrocarbon-based energy companies, an offshore drilling moratorium, a huge infrastructure program, a speculation tax, paid family and medical leave, an expanded earned income tax credit, and overturning the Citizens United decision.

Sanders was able to accomplish the platform coup because Democratic voters have become increasingly comfortable with radical ideas that might have gotten them painted as traitors just decades ago.

Depending on which metrics you use, the Democratic Party is now the farthest left it has ever been. Last year the DNC officially endorsed Black Lives Matter, whose supporters chant, “What do we want? Dead cops,” at rallies.

Nary a Democrat or a left-winger raised a voice in protest after the grotesque, undignified, un-presidential atrocity of a speech President Obama gave in Dallas on Tuesday. Obama could not put his radical political goals on pause even for a memorial service for the five cops murdered there last week by a Black Power activist. Figuratively trampling over the dead bodies of policemen, Obama insisted on lecturing Americans, even in a setting meant for healing, about how racist Americans are, particularly cops.

Although from a conservative point of view Bernie Sanders isn’t significantly more ideologically objectionable than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, Sanders speaks more bluntly and candidly. The fact that his unvarnished, explicit embrace of socialism and anti-Americanism makes him beloved by a large swath of the voting public as a kind of “conscience” of the Democratic Party ought to worry anyone who loves America.

People can be forgiven for being tricked by silver-tongued Obama or even by pathological liar Clinton, but anyone who listens to Sanders and still supports this Bolshevik from Burlington is openly, unreservedly cheering for the downfall of America.

In terms of political ideology, Sanders is an America-hating communist, not the “democratic socialist” he claims to be.

During the Cold War, Sanders was a Soviet Union booster who was close to the Communist Party USA. He didn’t join that party but largely agreed with its platform which made him what some call a small-c communist. As Accuracy in Media reported, in the 1980s he “collaborated with Soviet and East German ‘peace committees’” whose objective was “to stop President Reagan’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe.” Indeed, he “openly joined the Soviets’ ‘nuclear freeze’ campaign to undercut Reagan’s military build-up.”

In 1988 Sanders honeymooned in the USSR. He reached out to Soviet allies. He travelled to Communist Cuba in the 1980s where he enjoyed a friendly meeting with Havana’s mayor. In 1985 he visited Nicaragua to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the ascent to power of Daniel Ortega and his Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government.

Sanders wrote an open letter to the people of Nicaragua attacking the Reagan administration, which he claimed was a puppet of corporate interests, for its anti-Communist activities. “In the long run, I am certain that you will win, and that your heroic revolution against the [Anastasio] Somoza dictatorship will be maintained and strengthened,” he said.

In 2013 he underlined his dogmatic leftism by declaring that “global warming is a far more serious problem than al-Qaeda.”

He has embraced the extremely violent Occupy Wall Street movement and the cultish Black Lives Matter movement that calls for the murder of police officers.

Sanders is fine with political violence as long as it advances left-wing goals. When Sanders denounces violence, don’t be impressed: it is a tactic. Nothing more, nothing less.

Sanders is following the Saul Alinsky playbook. As an aide to the Rules for Radicals author wrote, while Alinsky was shying away from praising violence in public and sounding “the trumpet blast for democracy,” in private “he would say that violence has its uses.” Saying you support politically motivated violence implies you don’t support democracy – so Bernie lies.

Sanders refused to apologize for – or even criticize – the actions of his rambunctious supporters at the Nevada Democrat convention in May. Like many leftist radicals, Sanders is skilled at bouncing between phony reverence for nonviolent action and refusing to condemn violent left-wing activism, which is a slippery way of endorsing violent left-wing activism. From time to time he offers a milquetoast, perfunctory, blanket condemnation of violence in general, the kind of thing any competent left-wing politician could do sleepwalking.

The Sanders supporters who now routinely beat up Trump supporters draw their inspiration from Sanders himself. The Vermont senator vocally supports unrepentant Marxist terrorist Oscar López Rivera whom he describes as “one of the longest-serving political prisoners in history — 34 years, longer than Nelson Mandela.”

And like Barack Obama, Sanders pals around with terrorists and their backers. In March he met with the Florida chapter of the Muslim terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sanders strongly supports the Apollo Alliance, a left-wing enviro-pork barrel group that wants the government to take over America’s energy industry and one of whose leaders is Weather Underground terrorist Jeff Jones.

That Sanders had such a strong performance in the Democrat primaries is testament to how far America has fallen in recent years.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump appears to be shrinking after FBI Director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch weaseled out of prosecuting the former secretary of state over the use of her private email servers and apparent violations of the Espionage Act by mishandling classified information.

In recent weeks Clinton’s lead over Trump has slipped from a high of 8 percentage points down to just 3 percentage points.

Clinton now leads Trump 47 to 44 percent, according to the latest NBC News/Survey Monkey tracking poll cited Tuesday by the New York Post. Last week the same poll had Clinton at 48 percent and Trump at 43 percent. Two weeks ago the poll had support levels at 49 percent for Clinton and 41 percent for Trump.

As all of this was happening Democrats have been scheming to disrupt the Republican nominating convention that officially begins Monday in Cleveland. Democrats will use gimmicks and stunts at the convention to raise the specter of a “Trumpocalypse,” whatever that means. A 22-page “Counter Convention Plan Sketch” outlining the mischievous $800,000 operation the DNC plans for behind GOP lines was published by The Smoking Gun.

Left-wing activist groups are also gearing up for mayhem in the Buckeye State. Remember that left-wing anarchists tried to fire-bomb the Republican convention in Minneapolis in 2008. The plan was undermined with the assistance of former community organizer turned patriot Brandon Darby, who saved lives at great personal risk.

This time in Cleveland it will be Bernie Sanders supporters throwing the Molotov cocktails. And they may do it the following week at the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia as well.