Bernie Sanders focuses on Donald Trump in San Bernardino, no mention of terrorist attacks

Bernie Sanders delivered a blistering denunciation of Donald Trump’s candidacy at the outset of a raucous rally in San Bernardino on Tuesday night, insisting the billionaire businessman will be doomed this fall.

“Donald Trump will not become president of the United States,” Sanders said. “The American people are not going to support a candidate who insults Latinos ... who insults Muslims, who insults women.”

Applause erupted among the roughly 5,000 supporters gathered in an events center here.

Sanders, who trails Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in the popular vote and the delegate tally, has barnstormed throughout California in the run-up to the June 7 primary. The rally on Tuesday night followed events during the day in Anaheim and Riverside.

Sanders has largely avoided overtly criticizing Clinton and focused on Trump, assailing him and Republicans as out of touch with the American people.

Still, citing a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that showed him beating Trump in a head-to-head matchup, Sanders insisted that he’s the best candidate to defeat the New York real estate mogul.

“If the Democratic Party wants a candidate to defeat Trump and defeat him bad, we are that campaign,” he said.

Noticeably absent from Sanders’ hourlong address was the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino in which 14 people were shot to death by a married couple inspired by Islamic State extremists. During debates this spring and on the campaign trail, Clinton asserted that Sanders lacked experience in foreign policy and national security.

Sanders’ supporters remain committed to his underdog campaign.

Among them is Arthur Moore, a 61-year-old retiree.

“I’ll write his name in if he’s not the nominee,” Moore said outside the events center before the rally. “I’m done with the Clintons.”

Hillary Clinton has been campaigning like it’s already the general election, aiming her barbs at presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and all but ignoring her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders.

But with California’s June 7 primary approaching, Sanders supporters aren’t about to let her forget that the Democratic race isn’t over yet.

Dozens of student activists protested outside a Clinton rally at UC Riverside on Tuesday. Many said they back Sanders.

“We don’t think she represents the future of the Democratic Party,” said Beatrice Bermudez, a 23-year-old political science major, who held a sign that said, “War is not feminism.”

Bermudez said she thinks Sanders can win the Democratic nomination -- despite the fact that he trails Clinton significantly in pledged delegates -- and said she would not back Clinton if Sanders loses.

“She gets so much money from Wall Street,” said Bermudez, adding that she would vote for a Green Party candidate instead. “Those interests don’t align with my interests.”

It is that kind of sentiment that scares Democratic Party leaders. Sanders has energized millions of young and independent voters with his pledge to take on Wall Street and what he calls a corrupt campaign finance system. But there are lingering questions about what will happen to his supporters if he loses the nomination.

Clinton campaign surrogate Jason George, an actor best-known for his role on “Grey’s Anatomy,” made a call for Democratic unity at the beginning of the Riverside rally.

“When this is done, when Hillary is officially the nominee, I need you to make sure we reunite so we can stand against ... Donald Trump,” George said.

But about halfway through Clinton’s speech, she was interrupted by several Latino student protesters who chanted: “Go home!”

The students, who were escorted out of the rally by security officers, said they were not linked to the Sanders campaign. They said were protesting because Clinton “doesn’t represent minority communities.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti denounced Donald Trump as a bigoted demagogue and “con man” Tuesday morning as the presumed Republican presidential nominee prepared for his latest visit to Southern California.

During a conference call with reporters and Orange County Democratic Party Chairman Henry Vandermeir, Garcetti said Democrats “simply can’t afford to give [Trump] a free pass” for his incendiary rhetoric targeting women and ethnic groups such as Latinos and Muslims.

“What we cannot do with Donald Trump is normalize him as a candidate,” Garcetti said. “He’s a racist. He’s a bigot. He’s sexist.… He can’t just turn into a normal candidate who says some kind of crazy things.”

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Bernie Sanders, darting across Southern California on Tuesday, used Disney, a company renowned for evoking happiness, to rail against a decidedly bleak topic: economic inequality.

The Vermont senator accused the Fortune 500 business of underpaying its employees.

“Anybody make a living wage working for Disney?” Sanders asked hundreds of supporters packed into a ballroom at the Anaheim Convention Center, which is directly across a busy thoughfare from Disneyland, billed as the “Happiest Place on Earth.”

“It’s an example of what we’re talking about when we talk about a rigged economy,” said Sanders, eliciting boos from the supporters. “Disney pays its workers wages that are so low that many of them are forced to live in motels because they cannot afford a decent place to live.”

For years, Disney employees, through the support of unions, have called on the company to increase wages.

Sanders went on to attack Disney, which made a record $2.9 billion in the first quarter of this year, for sending jobs overseas, noting that some Disney products are made in places like China.

“It would be very nice of the Disney corporation to start building factories in the United States,” he shouted.

In a statement, Disney dismissed Sanders, saying he “doesn’t have his facts right,” and noted that it is the largest employer in the Anaheim area.

During a later campaign appearance in Riverside, Sanders made only passing reference to Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. In recent days, Sanders has toned down his rhetoric against Clinton, only offering strong criticism of the former secretary of State for backing out of a debate.

He also steered away from directly jabbing Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, instead opting to focus on his populist message and sounding optimistic about California’s June 7 primary.

“This campaign is listening to people who are not often listened to,” he said. “What we need is a political revolution.”

Updated: 6:59 p.m. -- This post was updated with a comment from Disney.

Hillary Clinton is running against Bernie Sanders in California’s June 7 Democratic presidential primary. But you wouldn’t know that from her speech at a union hall in a working-class suburb of Los Angeles on Tuesday.

On issues of the economy, foreign policy and gender equality, Clinton’s target was not Sanders but another outsider candidate with populist appeal: Donald Trump, whom she has increasingly focused on since he became the presumptive GOP nominee.

Attacking him as a “loose cannon” who would put the nation’s security and economic future at risk, Clinton suggested she isn’t feeling much threatened by Sanders, who is trailing Clinton badly in delegates but who hopes to make a strong last stand in California.

Clinton portrayed Trump as greedy and out of touch, criticizing the real estate developer for his personal business decisions and his tax plan, which she said would benefit the wealthiest Americans.

“Donald Trump’s tax plan was written by a billionaire for a billionaire. as far as I can tell,” Clinton said, drawing boos from union members gathered at the Commerce headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 11.

Clinton also slammed Trump for comments he made a few years before the 2008 economic crisis that a housing market crash would be a good thing for him.

“He actually said he was hoping for the crash,” Clinton said. “All because he thought he could ... make some money for himself.”

Calling into question Trump’s self-touted business acumen, Clinton reminded the crowd that several of Trump’s casino and hotel businesses have filed for bankruptcy.

“I don’t know how you lose money running casinos,” Clinton said, drawing laughter.

Clinton said she was best poised to help the economy. Showing a streak of 1990s nostalgia, she talked up the economic conditions during her husband’s presidency.

“People were working. People were buying homes,” she said. “People were saving for college if that’s what they wanted to do.”

Bernie Sanders released a television ad on Tuesday that urges Californians to send a message to establishment Democrats in the state’s June 7 primary.

“What choice do Californians have in this election?” Sanders says in the 30-second ad, over footage of workers and students. “The biggest one of all. You have the power to choose a new direction for the Democratic Party.”

Sanders does not mention Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, but instead repeats his platform of overturning the campaign finance system, increasing taxes on the wealthy and making public colleges tuition-free.

Sanders’ campaign said it is spending $1.5 million to air the ad in Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco. This is not a particularly large buy in California, which includes some of the nation’s most expensive media markets.

Sanders has campaigned heavily this week in California, trying to increase his delegate tally before the Democratic National Convention in July. In recent days, he has largely avoided overtly criticizing Clinton, a shift in his message.

Clinton leads Sanders in both the popular vote and the delegate tally, and she is expected to clinch the Democratic nomination on June 7, when California and five other states hold primaries.

4:11 p.m.: This post was updated to add new information about the size of the ad purchase.

After a razor-thin loss to Hillary Clinton in Kentucky’s primary, Bernie Sanders has asked state officials to review the results.

Clinton declared victory in Kentucky after leading by less than 2,000 votes out of more than 450,000 ballots cast.

Donald Trump might have captured the imaginations of millions of Americans, but it turns out that authors are a tougher sell for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

More than 600 American writers, including Stephen King, Junot Diaz, Cheryl Strayed and Dave Eggers, have signed an “open letter to the American people” pledging their opposition to Trump’s candidacy.

The letter, posted on the website Literary Hub and credited to authors Andrew Altschul and Mark Slouka, states in no uncertain terms that Trump “deliberately appeals to the basest and most violent elements in society” and “denigrates women and minorities.”

The writers lay out a long list of reasons they’re opposed to Trump, including “because the history of dictatorship is the history of manipulation and division, demagoguery and lies” and “because neither wealth nor celebrity qualifies anyone to speak for the United States, to lead its military, to maintain its alliances, or to represent its people.”

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California, the state with a well-earned reputation for uninterest in things political, has been overrun by a vast and historic burst of new voters.

And those voters will storm the polling places, rescuing the state from its usual self-flagellation over poor turnout and determining the winner of the contested June 7 presidential primary.

Or it hasn’t. And they won’t.

The answers rely on two circumstances that were unclear as Monday’s deadline for registering to vote came and went. One is how voters are counted in this state. The other is whether those new voters, however large their cohort is, will defy tradition to show up.

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Samuel Rodriguez is the kind of Latino whom Republicans hoped they could count on in 2016.

An evangelical Christian pastor who opposes the Democratic Party’s stance on abortion and same-sex marriage, Rodriguez led a prayer onstage at the 2012 GOP national convention. This election cycle, he publicly praised Republican leaders including Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio.

Then Donald Trump became the party’s presumptive nominee. Now Rodriguez doesn’t know what to think.

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In a place normally preoccupied with drafting code and dazzling investors, suddenly everyone in Silicon Valley has an opinion about the presidential election. And it tends to be the same opinion.

The innovation economy has a serious distaste for Donald Trump. The masters of this world complain that his ignorance about their work and its relationship to the global economy is horrifying. Rank-and-file programmers are quick to call him a clown, or worse. The unity is notable in an environment where groupthink is frowned upon and nobody ever seems to color inside ideological lines.

Trump has practically written a playbook on how not to court this well-heeled group that other politicians seem desperate to shower with affection.

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