It was only a matter of time.

First there was “Low-Energy Jeb” Bush. Then there was “Crooked Hillary” Clinton. Now, at long last, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has landed on a nickname for Vermont’s junior senator: “Crazy Bernie” Sanders.

Trump, who has made it a mission to generate reductive, insulting monikers for each of his foes, first employed “Crazy Bernie” Wednesday morning on Twitter after he — and Sanders — prevailed in Tuesday’s West Virginia primaries: 


After, presumably, rolling over in his gold-plated bed, Trump then tweeted:

In a recent interview with the New York Times’ — otherwise known as “the failing New York Times” — Mark Leibovich, Trump explained that he comes up with his nicknames on his own.

“I feel it,” he said. “It’s an instinct.”

Here’s more:

He does not seek suggestions or spitball ideas with his staff, though sometimes he’ll test-drive a name at a campaign rally and see how it goes over. If he mentions say, the name Ted Cruz, and a “Lyin’ Ted” chant erupts, he smells victory. “The whole place would be going ‘Lyin’ Ted, Lyin’ Ted,’ ” Trump says, “thousands of people, 25,000 people.”
“Crazy Bernie” is hardly the first nickname Sanders has earned. For years, the late Seven Days columnist Peter Freyne referred to the senator in print as “Ol’ Bernardo.” And long before there were “Bernie Bros,” his acolytes were known in these parts as “Sanderistas.”

A Sanders spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But when he does, we imagine he’ll thank us for focusing on the substantive issues of our time.

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Paul Heintz was part of the Seven Days news team from 2012 to 2020. He served as political editor and wrote the "Fair Game" political column before becoming a staff writer.

4 replies on “Bernie Bits: Trump Dubs Sanders ‘Crazy Bernie’”

  4. Sanders isn’t crazy nor is he stupid. He was an abject failure in his younger days and came to realize that extreme left wing politics could be his golden goose. Does he believe all the nonsense he spouts? Probably not but he’s got a great instinct about what the Sanderistas want and what he’s able to tell them he will do to without actually doing anything. Ole Bernardo is able to keep his very emotionally driven acolytes whipped into a frenzy with vague promises of the U.S. becoming a left wing Utopia where everyones needs are met from cradle to grave and we are all trudging off to work everyday for wages that we happily and thoughtlessly contribute to the government in order to feed the needs of an ever more expectant, demanding and entitled populace. The reality is that Trump and Sanders have crafted their speils for the same type of emotional crowd, both just opportunists feeding their overwhelming egos, both just opposite sides of the same coin.

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