What if it has been Sanders vs Trump

While I always thought Clinton would beat Trump (and was wrong) I did also say that if Sanders had won the nomination I thought Trump would beat him as he is too left wing to be electable.

My theory was that his socialist agenda would unite the entire right behind Trump from establishment GOP to business lobbies to the Tea Party.

It seems my theory had some merit.  Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek has details of what the Republicans were going to hit Sanders with if he was the candidate:

So what would have happened when Sanders hit a real opponent, someone who did not care about alienating the young college voters in his base? I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Yep there is an explanation but explaining is losing.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s

Amazing. He was basically unemployed until he was almost 40 when he became a Mayor. He was the ultimate stererotypical hippie railing against injustice from his parent’s basement.

and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills

Yep he couldn’t pay his bills as he wasn’t working so he just stole it from a neighbour!

and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

If only they had done the same research on Trump!

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs.

Whoops, but the best is yet to come:

Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

Trump would have slaughtered him. Any of the Republican candidates would have.