Mark Cuban, Mark Hamill Crash Bernie Sanders Twitch Stream to Trash Trump
Sen. Bernie Sanders joined mega-popular Twitch streamers Pokimane and Valkyrae on the live video platform Tuesday night to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris as the 2024 election entered its final two weeks. The Vermont congressman kicked off the event by calling this election “the most consequential election in our lifetimes,” describing Donald Trump as “vulgar” and a “pathological liar,” then slammed the GOP nominee’s dismissal of the threat posed by climate change.
He also mocked Trump for recent comments at a rally about the genitalia of the late golfer Arnold Palmer. “You may have heard just the other day, he decided that one of the most important issues facing this country is the size of the late Arnold Palmer’s penis,” Sanders said.
With the presidential race coming down to the wire, both Democrats and Republicans have made a concerted effort to court young audiences via digital media, especially podcasts. Harris, for example, recently appeared on Call Her Daddy, hosted by Alexandra Cooper, to discuss abortion rights. Trump has given a Mar-a-Lago interview with streamer Adin Ross and is slated to appear on Joe Rogan‘s podcast.
Sanders emphasized how “progressive” American youth is today and his hope for “a very high turnout among younger people” in November.
Other participants on the stream included streamers AustinShow, who took up interviewing duties after Sanders’ opening remarks, and Sykkuno, who was visually represented by an animated avatar. Sykkuno asked Sanders if he knew what a “VTuber” is. The senator answered, “Nope, no.” The streamers on the call explained that VTubers are creators that appear on camera with the use of such a virtual costume. Before Sanders joined the stream, Pokimane showed off a costume of her own — donning a winter jacket and face mask to recreate the viral meme of Sanders at the 2021 inauguration of President Biden.
In the course of the interview, Sanders explained that while he believes the Biden administration has been “dead wrong” on their approach to Israel‘s bombardment of Gaza, Trump is “even worse,” and that Republicans have opposed humanitarian aid to Palestinians. Sanders also said “we should look at the rest of the industrialized world” in trying to enshrine healthcare as a human right in the U.S. He went on describe how Trump “completely ducked the question” of raising the minimum wage during a photo-op at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania on Sunday. “Trump does not believe we should raise the minimum wage,” he explained.
Star Wars legend Mark Hamill then joined the stream and talked about working at McDonald’s in his youth (as well as the fast-food chain Jack in the Box). Sanders reiterated his view that the current federal minimum wage is “horrific” and unlivable, telling Hamill, “I happen to believe the minimum wage should be at least 17 bucks an hour.” After Sanders had to log off, the streamers spoke more with Hamill, who mentioned the dangers of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and Trump’s authoritarianism. “The one main issue for me is preserving democracy, because it’s democracy versus autocracy,” Hamill said. He criticized the Electoral College but predicted that Harris would “beat [Trump] by a bigger margin than Biden did.” Trump, he argued, long ago realized that his path to power ran through “extremists” and appeals “to all the darkest elements in human nature.”
Hamill revealed, too, that he hopes to eventually quit X (formerly Twitter), ridiculing increasingly right-wing “Dark MAGA” owner Elon Musk for rebranding the social media app. “What if he bought Coca-Cola and decided to call it Flerboogoogoo?” Hamill asked. “No one would call it Flerboogoogoo, they’d call it Coke.” He finally exhorted the audience to “get out there and vote, like Bernie said!”
After Hamill left the stream, YouTuber and author Hank Green and billionaire Mark Cuban joined the conversation to discuss their support for Harris, while also joking about the youth-facing digital format they were using to do so. “I was playing Bernie in Call of Duty, and I kicked his ass, so it was time to come on,” quipped Cuban, who went on to recount his long and fractious relationship with Trump over the decades, up through the former president’s 2016 campaign, when Cuban realized he would never have faith in him as a commander-in-chief.
“The more I talked to him, the more apparent it became [that] he didn’t want to learn anything,” Cuban recounted. “When I first met him,” he said, “it appeared like he understood business.” The Shark Tank host was even somewhat hopeful that Trump, as a non-politician, could make for positive changes in Washington. “But then, as I got to know him after he ran, it was like he got dumber,” he said. “It was like he didn’t really make any effort. And I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And now he’s worse than he was then. I mean, literally, he didn’t really ramble then — he would answer a question. You could have a conversation. But now you hear his answers, it’s just ramble, ramble, ramble.”
AustinShow later said that he wished Cuban would buy X away from Musk, prompting Green to interject, “For your own mental health, do not ever buy a social media platform.” Cuban, after noting that Musk likes to “fuck with me” on X, and vice versa, said, “Look, it’s his business. He gets to run it however he wants to. He earned that right. He paid for that right. But you know, the other platforms are bigger, the other platforms have more engagement. They all have their own problems,” he admitted, but pointed out that the streamers weren’t running their own businesses there. “And there’s a reason for that,” he concluded.
In his pitch for Harris, Cuban claimed that the vice president would be better for the small corporate entitites that make up the “99 percent” of the United States’ millions of businesses — including those of internet streamers — whose corporate taxes would be “staying the same or going down” under a Harris presidency. “Donald Trump only cares about the bigger companies,” he argued. Cuban urged viewers to make their friends “understand how much better Kamala Harris will make this country than Donald Trump,” noting that “one of the reasons I wanted to be on on this chat is because young guys in particular, that dominate gaming, a lot of them like Trump.”
“You got to do that homework, educate yourself,” Cuban said. “Get out there and vote together. What can be more fun than going out there as a group of friends […] taking pictures of yourselves, yukking it up and posting it, and saying how important it was to vote. Because when you post it, that probably has as much impact as anything else.”
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