Donald Trump, Sanders said, "knows that the media is not so interested in the serious issues facing this country." | Getty Bernie Sanders: 'Trump is very smart' for manipulating the media

Donald Trump is “very smart,” Bernie Sanders said during an interview that aired Thursday, because the Manhattan mogul and former star of NBC’s “The Apprentice” franchise knows how to play the media.

In a discussion on CNN’s “New Day” with Chris Cuomo, Sanders addressed why he thinks the Republican candidate’s poll numbers keep rising and why he appears to be solidifying support among the party’s base a little more than a month before voters head to the polls in the first primary and caucus states.


“Well Chris, you’re going to have to ask the media precisely why. I mean, Trump is a media guy,” Sanders said, before dropping in a reference to the annual Tyndall Report on news coverage, which found that “ABC World News Tonight” featured 81 minutes of Trump and just 20 seconds of him in the same time frame.

“Now you tell me why,” Sanders continued. “And I think it has to do with the fact that Trump is very smart.”

Trump, he said, “knows that the media is not so interested in the serious issues facing this country.”

“They love, you know, bombastic remarks, they love silly remarks,” he explained, alluding to the coverage of Trump’s mockery of a rival candidate’s sweating as an example. “So I think this is more of an indictment of the media, actually, than it is of Trump.”

Cuomo defended media coverage of Trump, pointing to the tycoon’s standing in the polls and growing influence on political rhetoric in the U.S. and abroad. In response, Sanders alluded to Trump’s frequent boasts that he does not have to pay for advertising because the media will put him on “all of the time.”

“Explain to me, and I know CNN may be different here, and you have been very generous with me,” Sanders said to Cuomo in the conversation taped during a break from campaigning in Council Bluffs, Iowa. ”But you explain to me how a major network on the evening news has 81 minutes of Trump, 20 seconds of Bernie Sanders. Does that make sense to anybody?”

Sanders visited Chicago on Wednesday and is scheduled to return to Iowa, this time to the eastern half of the state, for the last three days of 2015. His campaign’s itinerary includes five town hall meetings, a meet-and-greet, and a New Year’s Eve celebration at a downtown Des Moines hotel. “We’re, I think, closing in here in Iowa, and your poll seems to indicate that we have national momentum,” Sanders told Cuomo.

As for Trump, Sanders said the billionaire Republican candidate is “very effectively playing to the fears and anxieties that millions of people in this country have and have legitimately so. We’re all concerned about the possibility of a terrorist attack against this country. We’re all concerned about ISIS.”

“We’re all concerned about a disappearing middle class,” he continued, launching into a detailed explanation of the complex factors affecting Americans’ mindset in 2015, adding that Trump uses minorities such as immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims as scapegoats. Complicated policy debates, Sanders said, often cannot be done justice with a six-second soundbite.

“These are the kinds of debates that we have to have,” he said. “And I would urge and beg the media to allow us to have that debate and not just pick up on Trump’s one-liners.”