It has become increasingly clear to me that Bernie Sanders exhibits two extremely undesirable traits: hubris (excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance) and chutzpah (shameless audacity; impudence). He is not a Democrat. He registered as one only recently for the sole purpose of trying to capture the Democratic nomination for President, rather than start his own movement in pursuit of his political revolution.
His hubris and chutzpah are evident every time he speaks these days. He has increasingly been lashing out at the Democratic Party leadership who have built and sustained the party and he is vowing to take his fight to the convention floor even though Hillary will likely have enough delegates to win the nomination in a month and he has no chance of winning the nomination. Bernie has made promises that even left liberal economists, healthcare experts, and educators have repeatedly concluded cannot be realized in the manner Sanders is suggesting. Most notably, they have documented that he has repeatedly underestimated the costs of his programs and the revenues needed to pay for them. He constantly invokes the principle of democracy in condemning the Democratic Party nominating process, including the role of Super Delegates, but he refuses to acknowledge that very small percentages of the eligible electorate actually vote in primaries and even smaller percentages in caucuses. Let the people decide? To Bernie, that seems to mean the 5% who turn out for caucuses. Perhaps he conceives of them as the vanguard of his political revolution. Even then, Hillary has actually won more votes in this nominating process than Sanders, but Bernie has “answers” for that as well, at one point making light of the Southern states in which Hillary did very well.
It appears that, over the years, Bernie has on occasion run and railed against Democrats, and, despite some of his comments suggesting otherwise, in his most recent bombast he appears ready, and perhaps even eager, to try to take down the Democrats this time around. Just as some Republicans think it would be better to lose than to win with Trump, I am sure that Sanders can convince himself, and may already have done so, that a Trump victory and Hillary defeat in November would actually serve his ambitions more than a Hillary victory by, with Trump as President, inflaming his followers' passions even more than at present, thereby, in his fantasies, bringing about the political revolution he imagines.
Of course, if Trump wins, Sanders' youthful supporters will be hurt most, or as much as other Trump victims. Trump will stack the U.S. Supreme Court, and lower courts, with conservative judges who will preside for a generation; he will press for a tax cut for the richest; he will utterly fail to bring jobs back to the United States; he will oppose meaningful immigration reform and seek to build his Wall; he will undermine Obamacare with no suitable alternatives; he will destabilize the world by conceivably pushing allies and others to build their own nuclear arsenals; and those actions will only have been for starters.
