With everyone trying to move on to the Big Show in November, the Bernie Sanders campaign is desperate for any gimmick that will earn them attention. And if they get free airtime out of it, so much the better! (And it’s working, look, I’m writing about it!)
So Bernie über-supporter Cenk Uygur was the first to suggest the gimmick to end all gimmicks. Let’s call it the Mother Of All Gimmicks:
Jill Stein wanted in! Because if this horror show was going to happen, every fringe candidate needed to be in on it. Then, this happened:
Whoa. Gimmick successful! I mean, we could all imagine what would happen—Trump would be all nice and defferential and tsk tsk all the horrors that Bernie has had to endure like “voters” and them “choosing someone else.” Fight, Bernie, Fight!” he’d urge, maybe “go independent!” The word “rigged” would get thrown out dozens of times. But hey, with Donnie involved, this would be the show of the century. And how could you not watch? We’re genetically wired to gawk at car wrecks.
Ultimately, it turned out that Young Turks had nothing to do with the supposed Trump-Sanders debate. It was actually Jimmy Kimmel.
Appearing on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" Wednesday night, Trump said he would be willing to spar with Sanders in lieu of likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, joking, "How much is he going to pay me?"
"If I debated him, we should have such high ratings, and I think I should give -- take that money and give it to some worthy charity, OK?" he said.
"That could happen, I've been saying that should happen anyway," he added. "If he paid a nice sum for charity, I would love to do that."
That’s what the Sanders tweet above was all about, it was a near-instantaneous “game on” reaction to Trump’s acceptance. But alas, Sanders fell into the trap everyone falls into (and I mean everyone) when they assume that Trump means anything he says. Remember, the stuff out of his mouth are just “suggestions.” So when he said “I’ve been saying that should happen,” he actually didn’t mean that he’d been saying that it should happen. He was merely suggesting that he’d been saying that. Because today, Sanders’ hopes and dreams were dashed.
Ouch. But Bernie, don’t lose hope! Remember, these are all just “suggestions!” If Trump says “it will never happen,” he is just suggesting it will never happen. Give the Donnster 10 minutes and who knows, he might make another “suggestion” completely contradicting this “suggestion.” See? This is complicated and convoluted, but no one claimed that Don has a clearheaded and organized mind. (Well, except maybe The Donaldo himself.)
But given that his entire campaign at this point is “get the superdelegates to undemocratically nullify the will of the Democratic primary electorate, because fuck democracy,” let’s take stock of how many superdelegates were impressed by this stunt:
Zero.
Update: CNN reports:
But the whole proposal appears to have been orchestrated by the Sanders campaign.
Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, said that Kimmel allowed the Sanders campaign to submit a question to Trump to be asked during the taping -- so they asked about a potential debate.