As the results of the Iowa caucuses continue to be counted, Sen. Bernie Sanders shifted his focus off the campaign trail Wednesday.

“The reason I’m wearing a tie is that I’m going to be on a plane in a few minutes going to Washington, D.C. to vote for the impeachment of President Trump,” Sanders said during a town hall in Derry, New Hampshire.

The Vermont senator, who typically doesn’t mention President Donald Trump in his campaign stump speech, still went through the usual progressive policy items that are a hallmark of his Democratic primary campaign: a $15-an-hour minimum wage, universal childcare, tuition-free college, Medicare-for-All, and — last but not least — taking action to address climate change.


And as much as he would have preferred to have spent the last several weeks on the campaign trail talking about those issues, Sanders said the impeachment trial vote — and expected acquittal of Trump — in the Senate was a rarity of “enormous consequence” that goes “beyond policy issues.”

“I happen to disagree with Donald Trump on almost everything, but this impeachment vote is not about a difference in policy,” he told a crowd of 390 people at the Derry Opera House. “This is about abuse of power. This is about a president who withheld, in my view, almost $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, a country at war with Russia, in order to extract out of them an investigation into one of his political opponents.”

While a majority of senators has expressed disapproval of Trump’s conduct, the Republican president appears all but certain to be acquitted by the GOP-controlled chamber Wednesday afternoon.

Sanders — like the three other Democratic senators running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination — affirmed Wednesday morning that he plans to vote to remove Trump from office. And by not doing so as a body, he expressed “fear” about the precedent the Senate would set.

In addition to using the office to pressure foreign countries for political favors, Sanders suggested that Trump’s acquittal would open the door to a domestic version of extortion.


“If the Republicans say what he did was OK, what it sets is a standard for Trump … and for future presidents to say, ‘It doesn’t matter what the law is. Hey New Hampshire, you want a certain amount of road money, infrastructure money? Hey governor, you gotta come to my office and tell the world what a great president I am, or you’re not getting your fair share. Your money is going to Tennessee instead.’ That’s the danger there. That’s what abuse of power is about,” Sanders said.

Before delving back into his own stump speech, Sanders went on to provide perhaps a preview of the approach he would take to running against Trump in the general election. He called the president a “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” “xenophobe,” and “a religious bigot,” as well as a “pathological liar,” citing the thousands of documented falsehoods or misleading claims Trump has made in office.

“He probably doesn’t know the difference between the truth and lies,” Sanders said.

Somewhat ironically, as Sanders began his speech dialing in on Trump, the Democratic primary candidate who has made running against the divisive president most central to his campaign, Joe Biden, was 40 miles away dialing in on Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, the two leading candidates coming out of Iowa. Biden, who is on track to come in a distant fourth place there, called the caucuses a “gut punch” at an event in Somersworth, but argued that nominating Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, or Buttigieg, a former small-city mayor, would be a “risk.”


During the Derry town hall, Sanders’s wife, Jane Sanders, made that case that his values and consistency would make him harder for Trump to attack.

“Bernie’s a candidate who Trump will not be able to vilify as inauthentic or hypocritical, ands that’s a huge advantage for us,” she said before Sanders spoke.

During his speech, Sanders himself only briefly mentioned the Iowa results, which had still only been 71 percent reported Wednesday due to a technical glitch. While Sanders had received more raw votes, Buttigieg retained a slight lead in the state delegate count.

As Sanders noted Wednesday, if the results held, both candidates would come out of the “complicated” process in Iowa with an equal number of delegates for the nominating convention this summer.

“I assume that one of these years that vote count will be completed,” he joked.