Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders says he wants to stop President Donald Trump's vision to "Make America Great Again."
"Today we say to Donald Trump _ We are not going back to more bigotry, discrimination and division," Sanders told a South Carolina audience Monday at an event marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
"Instead of bringing us together as Americans, he has purposely and aggressively attempted to divide us up by the color of our skin, by our gender, by our nationality, by our religion and by our sexual orientation."
Sanders made headlines shortly before the midterms when he laid into the president as "the most racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted president in history." He repeated part of that claim Monday.
"We, today, have a president who is a racist," Sanders, 77, said.
Democrats old and young seem to have reached that conclusion. Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, said earlier this month that calling the president a bigot is a no-brainer.
"Yeah, yeah, no question," the New Yorker said during a CBS "60 Minutes" interview after being asked that question. Among the examples she cited were Trump calling Nazi sympathizers in the 2017 Unite the Right ralley in Charlottesville, Va., riots "good people."
"The president certainly didn't invent racism," Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, "but he's certainly given a voice to it and expanded it and created a platform for those things."
Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a longtime civil right activist who was beaten in the 1965 protests in Selma, Ala., told ABC "This Week" that he, too, thought Trump was a bigot following the president's alleged remarks indicating nonwhite nations were "s---holes."
"I think he is a racist," Lewis said.
After spending last year's MLK Day at his private Mar-a-Lago country club in Florida, the president this year placed a wreath before a King memorial in D.C. on Monday, where he and Vice President Mike Pence spent two minutes.
"Today, it was my great honor to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial with Mike Pence," he tweeted.
Trump has disputed accusations that he is a bigot on several occasions.
"I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed, that I can tell you," he told reporters in January 2018.
