Liberal Host Cenk Uygur on Letting Donald Trump Win: ‘I’ve Been to Too Many Holocaust Museums’

While many were glued to cable news coverage of Hillary Clinton‘s overwhelming victory over Bernie Sanders in the New York Democratic presidential primary Thursday night, there were also a whole lot of folks watching Cenk Uygur‘s pioneering online news show The Young Turks for its live coverage, and those viewers were treated to a welcome, if painful, dose of reality.

The TYT Network has long been one of the most fortified Bernie bunkers on the political web, and as such, is an important bellwether/influencer of Bernie Sanders supporters’ behavior. For example, you have folks worried about the #BernieOrBust crowd letting Donald Trump win, like TYT’s Jimmy Dore, who was still calling Hillary Clinton a “fascist” Thursday night, and theorizing that a Trump victory would benefit progressives:

On the other side of the ledger, though, were the rest of the co-hosts, led by Cenk Uygur, who explained the risks of allowing Trump to win out of disappointment in Bernie’s defeat:

I’ve been to too many Holocaust museums. You read the history of it, and they didn’t start by saying “Hey, I’m going to do gas chambers.” If they’d said gas chambers, they wouldn’t have won. Instead, what they said is “Oh, yeah, yeah, I hate the Jews,” and what does Trump say? “I hate the Muslims. I hate the Mexicans. Yeah, yeah, I hate ’em. I hate ’em. Now, I mean, I’m not gonna do violence, but if people did violence on my behalf, I would understand.” I mean, it’s nearly identical.

Uygur also closed out the show by almost conceding that the Democratic primary is over, even beginning to refer to Bernie in the past tense, before pulling back a little and saying that if Bernie wins Pennsylvania, he still has a narrow chance:

The true test will come Wednesday, when Cenk checks his inbox to see how many Bernie Sanders supporters have decided that he’s a corporate media sellout who has obviously been bought off by the Clinton machine. This is an encouraging sign, though, that maybe a good chunk of Sanders’ most enthusiastic supporters can be talked out of the bunker and into reality.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.