The Day Trump and Bernie Supporters United Against Hillary with a Hashtag

It was a typical day in the election cycle, until suddenly it wasn’t.

When President Obama was first elected in 2008, a good number of voters were on Twitter and Facebook but their presence on social media was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is today. Now, millions more politically fervent people have flooded onto these sites and others, in an effort to wrestle and steer the hive mind that shapes public opinion. The hive was mostly of one mind when Obama first took to Twitter and truly revolutionized how a campaign could be run — by taking the message straight to the people. It was an intoxicating rush to be a part of all that. The exhilaration was still there in 2012, when the hive mind was largely in sync once again against Romney. Democrats were firmly united against him, even if many of them — those who would later coalesce around Bernie — had begun to abandon their progressive savior when he could not work all the miracles they expected. Republicans were united in hate against President Obama. That was all they knew. Romney was to be their chosen redeemer. Back then, Donald Trump was making noise on the far right flank, leading the birther movement. He was trying to sound like a real Republican because that’s what he thought would best serve his purpose as self-appointed rabble-rouser.

Despite conservative forces online becoming better organized, Obama won a second term in 2012. But progressives weren’t satisfied. Disillusioned, they failed to show up at the mid-terms and that apathy gave us the most radically right-wing Congress we’ve seen in recent memory. The extreme faction known as the “freedom caucus” were such extremists they even drove away John Boehner. With Congress in a choke-hold, they became so powerful they didn’t even deign to look at President Obama’s annual budget proposals.

It looked as though the GOP might be on the verge of seizing the federal government as their own, to do with it what they have long wanted to do. They had the Supreme Court. They had Congress. All they needed now was the presidency.

Their plans might have gone fine if two things hadn’t happened. Bernie Sanders decided to launch a presidential bid, and Justice Scalia died. When Sanders got into the race, he struck a chord with a great many people — young people mostly, many of them first-time voters, who responded to simply-worded truth bombs about the state of our government. Sanders’ speeches, all on YouTube, have been slowly building a fan base for the senator for several years, as the next idealistic wave of progressives began to form around Elizabeth Warren and Sanders. Soon, by these new standards, not even Obama was pure enough for them anymore.

Trump undoubtedly noticed how Sanders was striking a nerve because when he decided to run, he used the same tactic. He, too, recited starkly-worded slogans and brash basic phrases simple enough to sound like kernels of “truth.” And it worked the same way for him as it did for Bernie. Trump took aim and hit the bulls-eye with rural whites and facilitating Independents who feel betrayed by Republican and hate the way our government has been run aground. Most of these disaffected voters bristle at any talk of gun control, blame free trade for how little they earn, and suspect immigrants are coming for whatever they have left.

Trump’s problem in the beginning was that people thought he was ridiculous. He seemed a ridiculous sideshow because he never had access to a broad national platform to say what he really thought about government, to connect with people beyond his reality TV audience. The same could be said for Senator Sanders, who was also not accustomed to being heard on such a massive scale. But now, all at once, for the first time in 74 years, when he stands before a crowd it’s like the Beatles coming to America for the first time. You could see the newfound idolatry reflected on Bernie’s glowing face. You could see it at the end of each debate when he would proudly glide over to his throngs of worshipers at the edge of the stage, reaching with their hands out to touch the hem of his garment. Wow, what it must have felt like — what it still must feel like — for Bernie Sanders, after decades of languishing among the most dismissed and least powerful members of the Senate.

As for Trump, he might almost have been laughed out of the election before he ever gained traction. But instead the opposite happened, once he unleashed his real self, while adopting many of the stage techniques that were making Bernie’s campaign hum. Trump said much of the same stuff Bernie was saying but he did it without the stain of socialism and hand-outs — he did it in the guise of a successful millionaire, a raging unapologetic capitalist. Wouldn’t you know, he found his own winning formula, one that clicked with people fascinated by the lives of the rich and famous. He started actually winning. Trump was winning. Trump dispatched with ease his 16 opponents in Republican primary field, utilizing schoolyard bullying tactics each and every time. Giving people a sticky nicknames that any 12-year-old could remember, like Little Marco or Lyin’ Ted. He sneered about Rand Paul’s height or Carly Fiorina’s face like an insult comic. He was like that intimidating kid on the playground whose only real strength is his glib capacity for callous cruelty.

So there we have it. Two old white men shaking their fists, drawing throngs of dissident worshipers, each group viciously attacking anyone who dared oppose their fearless leaders. It became so bad, so brutal, so pervasive, so horribly amplified, there soon was really no telling a Trump supporter from a Bernie supporter online.

Throughout all the seething rancor on either side of her, Hillary Clinton calmly went about winning more votes than either of these men. They are outmatched by her experience, outclassed by her resilience, and, importantly, outmaneuvered by the team of seasoned professionals she brought with her. Hers is a high tech, brilliantly run campaign that doesn’t do things like hold rallies in New York City without having organized voter registration drives to follow through. She stays focused instead of flying off to the Vatican on an expensive ego-trip, only to have the Pope publicly distance himself. Where Sanders and Trump specialize on rallying white middle-class voters, Clinton is busy looking out for everyone else — and collecting their votes.

Then things started to turn nasty. Once it became clear that Bernie Sanders was leading a shallow revolution that had failed to impress black voters in the hard-won South, and after Trump had recklessly offended close to 90% of America’s Latino vote, then all they had left were large mobs of increasingly angry, spiteful and very entitled white men. Sure, without doubt, there are women and minority supporters on the Sanders side, but let’s face it, there’s only one demographic group that both these male candidates depend on to have edge over Clinton: the white male voter.

Things went extraordinarily well for Bernie at first. No one expected the millennials to fall so hard for the Bernie brand but they did, wearing the symbolism proudly — the slogans that promised “free college for all,” and “single payer health care,” and “billionaires can’t buy Bernie!” When the votes came in the demographics were clear — he was cutting a large slice of the youth vote. Always happy to find a hook on which to hang headlines, the press was bedazzled by this. It was an electrifying moment. Could Bernie Sanders actually bring more Americans into the process? For that matter, could Trump? Both seemed to be drawing out people who had never really voted before. Both seem poised to revolutionize their parties by bringing more people to the polls.

While Trump was tossing off one weak opponent after another, the Sanders campaign began to take a darker turn. As Bernie’s delegate count stalled and Hillary’s climbed — due in large part to her massive landslides in the South, in states that Sanders chose to neglect — his staffers and surrogates saw their only path to victory as one that would have to plow directly into Hillary Clinton. The Senator had once won hearts when he said he wasn’t going to go after Hillary personally. Imagine that! One politician in Washington not going after her. They’d worked together in the Senate. They were supposedly friends. Still, Bernie, who had spent nearly twenty years in Congress, now had to watch the former First Lady go from upstart wife who shouldn’t be meddling with universal health care, to become a respected and successful senator, who accomplished more in her 8 years than Bernie ever did in his 26, since 1990. He then watched her become Secretary of State and next make her first run for president. That’s a lot of ambition and a list of extraordinary accomplishments for one person. All Bernie Sanders really had was his rep for plain-spoken integrity, built up from giving speech after speech in Congress — speeches that for decades were mostly ignored, even by his associates tasked with the job of sitting through them.

Meanwhile, Hillary was winning. She was winning where she wasn’t expected to win. Her delegate tally rose steadily, as did her raw vote totals. Whenever she did lose a state — in every case except Hawaii — it became apparent that most of those states topped the charts of the whitest states in the country. The more minority voters in a state, the better she did. The states where Hillary won by the largest margins look like the kind of America that the Democratic party has appealed to for over half a century. They’re the states that send Democrats to the White House.

While Sanders’ surrogates, like Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Sarah Silverman, Rosario Dawson and Michael Moore began to go after Hillary Clinton relentlessly, the Senator himself did not. Until he did.

The legacy of the great Bernie Sanders died the moment he decided to act like any other ruthless politician and not only go after Hillary Clinton, but play the misogynist card by calling her unfit, untrustworthy and dishonest. All the worst stereotypical attacks to level at a woman. He took the talking points from the GOP’s decades-long attacks on Hillary and sharpened them for his own gain. This abrupt disrespect seemed to uncork something ugly within his movement that now not only threatens to damage the Senator’s legacy but, worse, risks weakening any chance the Democrats had of retaining the presidency, to protect all the gains Obama has achieved.

It isn’t often that we have to witness the spectacle of a member of the Democratic party launching an attack against the two-term Democrat president leaving office. It isn’t often that a stubborn faction of Democrats rise up to demand sweeping changes against their own party in the middle of a crucial election year. But Bernie Sanders has done just that. It’s broken so we have to burn it down, is his thinking. Burn it down.

Then it all led to this. Just another day in a contentious election cycle, until suddenly it wasn’t. So it was into this environment that the hashtag #DropOutHillary sprung into being. Never mind whose stupid column inspired the hashtag. That doesn’t matter. It might have been nothing more than a last gasp of desperation from a losing team of terrible people seeing their illusions unravel and surrendering to their worst instincts. But what matters more is that at last the Trump supporters and the Bernie supporters have become one. On Twitter. On May 4th, 2016. The hashtag trending, last time I checked, was clocking in at around 400 thousand. So hate-filled and vile, you’d think no one — certainly no one on the left — would ever want to be associated with it. And yet, here’s Dr. Jill Stein — the squeaky-clean Green Party candidate — hoping to use this nonsense to woo voters to turn to her.

But it gets worse. Here are some more examples — see if you can tell which ones are Bernie supporters and which ones are Trump supporters: