últimas notícias

At Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren sounded a bit like Donald Trump in 2016.

She criticized Trump plenty, and noted that every candidate on stage could do a better job as president. Yet she distinguished herself from the pack in one way that was similar to what Trump did in the last presidential election. Much like him, she called for big changes, not just random tinkering at the edges.

Her core message sounded like his in rhetoric, and she even used some of the same words he did.

“Rigged system” was a common refrain for Trump in 2016. When former FBI Director James Comey recommended against bringing charges against Hillary Clinton in her private email server investigation, Trump tweeted, “The system is rigged….Very, very unfair.”

When speaking to ordinary people on the campaign trail, Trump railed that the system was rigged against them by Washington and the coastal elites, promising that his brand of disruptive politics would end business as usual, and corruption as usual.

When discussing the possibility that he could lose against Hillary Clinton, he frequently complained that that the election itself was going to be rigged against him by “a small handful of global special interests” that supported her.

When criticizing the Democratic primaries in 2016, he repeatedly accused the Democratic National Committee of rigging the system to thwart Sen. Bernie Sanders’s candidacy against “Crooked Hillary.”

Unlike Trump, Warren is not all over the place when referring to a rigged system. Indeed, she is very specific about what she means: a system that caters to the wealthy and big corporations and screws the little guys. She is even more specific that Trump has made such a rigged system worse.

Yet, as Trump did in 2016, Warren is fashioning herself as the candidate who is not afraid to think big and pursue bold results. Like him, she is also suggesting that timidity was for the weaker souls, namely her more moderate opponents.

Not surprisingly, another candidate has something to say on this topic. After all, Sanders was actually the actual victim of a rigged system in 2016. He said on Tuesday:

As far as he is concerned, he is the man with big ideas such as “Medicare for all,” and he is the one who proudly calls himself a socialist.

Trump calls him “Crazy Bernie,” as Republicans and moderate Democrats label his political views extreme. Crazy or not, Sanders does not wish to cede ground to Warren as the candidate who will do big things.

Win or lose, Warren and Sanders were far more interesting than all their debate opponents combined on Tuesday night.

Ying Ma is the author of “Chinese Girl in the Ghetto,” which was released in audiobook in 2018. During the 2016 election, she served as the deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a pro-Trump super PAC, and the deputy policy director and deputy communications director of the Ben Carson presidential campaign. Follow her on Twitter: @GZtoGhetto.