Trump, Sanders ‘insurgents’ to US political system: Analyst

A deepening political fragmentation in US politics that stems from an ongoing war between different social classes in the country has given rise to “insurgent” presidential candidates like Republican front-runner Donald Trump and Democratic contender Bernie Sanders, says an author and political analyst in Virginia.

Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, made the comments in an interview with Press TV while commenting over Trump’s remarks who earlier on Wednesday said Clinton was not popular among American women despite playing the woman card.

Preston agreed with Trump to some extent but said Trump himself was not doing too well either.

“She certainly has the advantage of promoting herself as the one who can potentially be the first woman president; the United States has never had a female president before,” Preston said.

“She also is popular with a certain constituency and the left-of-center end of the political spectrum who do regard her as sort of a personification of a successful 1970s model American feminist. She does kind of personify that in many ways,” the analyst added.

He also doubled down on Trump’s point of view, asserting that Clinton is unpopular nationwide.

However, he argued that all of the current contenders for the November elections suffer from that issue, something that is clearly seen in the polls.

“What polls tend to show in the United States is that none of these presidential candidates are particularly popular; there is not a one – not [Vermont Senator] Sanders, not Trump, not [Texas Senator] Ted Cruz, not Hillary Clinton, not [Ohio Governor] John Kasich—that have a majority approval among the American public as a whole,” Preston argued.

He said both Trump and Clinton have negative approval ratings among women and each of them enjoys more support among certain groups of voters, indicating that “American politics has become rather fragmented.”

“We have the divisions that exists between the two major parties—the Democrats and the Republicans—and then the different political ideologies they represent and the different cultural and ethnic and racial and political groups they represent,” he explained.

 He also pointed to the “class conflict” that has flared between different social classes in the US, giving rise to “maverick” presidential candidates like Trump and Sanders.

He said neither Trump nor Sanders believe in their respective parties’ values and have only joined them to be able to run for presidency.

“What these two guys represent is a insurgency that is taking place on a class level,” he noted.

“We could say that Donald Trump represents the right-wing of the proletariat—that is the traditional working to middle-class white Americans, whereas Sanders represents the left-wing of the proletariat which is predominantly college students and persons of more ‘liberal social values,’” he continued.

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