WASHINGTON _ With the Democratic Party lost in the postelection wilderness, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is aggressively reasserting himself, offering his vision for the path out as he takes on a leadership role in his caucus as the chairman of outreach.
In a wide-ranging conversation Thursday with reporters, Sanders _ who plans to continue to serve as an independent, not a Democrat _ offered a preview for where his progressive wing wants to take the Democratic Party. He also had some choice words about President-elect Donald Trump, particularly when the conversation turned to his threat to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
"It would be almost beyond comprehension," Sanders said at an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. "This is the United States of America. We do not prosecute our political opponents and try to throw them in jail. It would completely divide this country. It would be an outrage."
Sanders' plan for a Democratic comeback, though, doesn't involve battling every Trump initiative. His colleagues, he said, would be better served by picking their fights selectively after Trump co-opted the Democratic agenda with a populist pitch. Here's where Sanders wants Democrats to go now:
Work with Trump on trade.
Sanders finds many of Trump's campaign promises disturbing, but said Democrats would be foolish to resist an argument at the core of Trump's economic agenda: that international trade deals should be renegotiated.
As other lawmakers bristle at Trump's vows to tear apart the North American Free Trade Agreement and smack tariffs on U.S.companies that move factories abroad, Sanders wants to hold Trump to those promises to send a clear signal to displaced Rust Belt workers that the Democratic Party can deliver for them.
"It is high time corporate America understands they cannot get the benefits of being American corporations while at the same time turning their backs on the American working class," Sanders said.
Although he doubts Trump will crack down on companies as promised, Sanders said Democrats should work with him "to tell corporate America you cannot keep running all over the world ... searching for cheap labor while you destroy the working class of this country."
Don't sugarcoat the Obama years.
Democrats talk about how much the economy has improved under President Barack Obama, and Sanders said it's a fair point considering the mess Obama inherited. But he said pressing that case overlooks the reality that the middle class is shrinking rapidly. Displaced workers who once earned good livings in now-shuttered factories and mines are only going to be repelled by the argument that everything was bad before and it is good now.
"Democrats too often have ignored that over a 40-year period ... the middle class of this country has been shrinking," Sanders said. "Real wages for American workers have gone down. Inequality has gone up."
Keep equality and justice front and center.
Callers have flooded Sanders' phone lines, urging him to keep pressuring for the dismissal of Stephen Bannon, the right-wing media executive and white-nationalist favorite named Trump's chief White House strategist. It's a reflection, Sanders said, of how far outside the mainstream of American opinion Trump is.
"I will not compromise with racism. And I will not compromise with sexism. And I will not compromise with homophobia. And I will not compromise with Islamophobia," Sanders said. "There are areas I would have hoped that in 2016 we would have put behind us."
To that effect, Sanders said Democrats need to redouble efforts to forge ties with the minority groups that have traditionally supported them but just are not coming out to vote in the numbers Democrats need to win. "We've got to build on the current base," he said.
Hit climate change hard.
Democrats call climate change an existential crisis, yet hardly discussed it in the general election. Sanders suggested that is a mistake. Now the White House will be inhabited by a president who has labeled climate change a hoax and who wants to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency.
"We have got to focus much more attention on this," Sanders said. "The future of this planet is at stake. We have got to bring together people to demand Mr. Trump listen to the scientists."
He said that Trump will be walking into a political hornet's nest if he pursues his plans to scrap every federal climate change program, and that Democrats should start putting more focus there now.
