Let's Just Say It: Chris Matthews Hates Bernie Sanders

Chris Matthews, a man made of butter, has served incessantly as a talking head on the supposedly liberal network MSNBC. A lot of things get Matthews riled up, but nothing seems to particularly get his goat as much as one Bernard Sanders. To say that Matthews hates Sanders is an understatement—recently, he implied that Sanders would cheer on public executions.

Given that Sanders is surging, and Matthews is fuming, I've compiled a very brief history of just a few of the normal things Matthews has said about Sanders.

Long ago, back when Sanders launched his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, life was simpler, much like a toad having a nice picnic. Matthews got to have a few laughs—ha ha!—about Sanders and socialism. “Let Bernie Sanders, the self-styled socialist, charge up Wall Street, [Hillary is] working Main Street, promising to create equal opportunity for the rest of us,” Matthews said a few months after Sanders began his campaign in 2015.

But by the time 2016 rolled around, reporters were pointing out that Matthews was giving Clinton softball questions, while repeatedly grilling and interrupting Sanders and accusing him of lying.

Fast forward to January 2020, when Matthews said this very normal thing: “Suppose you’re lying on a road hurt … which of the candidates would stop their car and get out and help you? Which of them? Ask yourself that question.” He insisted that Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren would stop their car, but Sanders would not. Even Joe Scarborough—Joe Scarborough!—had to step in and support Sanders.

As Sanders looked like he was going to do well in Iowa, a clearly panicking Matthews compared him to that “old guy, with some old literature” that you might find at an anti-war rally. Sounds like a nice guy! But not for Matthews: “We got a problem, we’ll see. Nobody’s going to say it tonight, they’re all going to be cheering, good ol’ Bernie.” Hell yeah.

Leading up to Sanders’s win this week in New Hampshire, Matthews truly lost it, implying that Sanders would cheer on his public execution: “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro,” Matthews explained. “I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?”

Honorable mention:

Good thing that we only have to sit through, *checks watch*, one million more years of this.