Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the country is getting “sick and tired” of tech billionaire Elon Musk and slammed Musk’s accusation that Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is a traitor for visiting Ukraine as “beyond the pale.”
“It’s disgusting,” Sanders said of Musk’s criticism of Kelly, a decorated former naval aviator.
“Kelly is a military guy who serves his country, went to Ukraine to get a sense of how the Ukrainian people are responding to [President Trump’s] betrayal of the country … and you have Musk talking about Mark Kelly as a traitor,” Sanders said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“It is really unspeakable. It really is,” he continued. “I think the American people are sick and tired of the wealthiest guy in the world running the United States government and calling, in this case, a guy who put his life on the line to defend us a traitor. That’s beyond the pale.”
Musk called Kelly “a traitor” in response to Kelly’s post on social platform X, which Musk owns, about his recent trip to Ukraine.
The Arizona Democrat posted a picture of himself standing next to a tank in Ukraine and wrote a thread about why “it’s important we stand with Ukraine.”
He warned that cutting off U.S. military aid “now risks everything so many Ukrainians have laid down their lives for.”
“And while our support hasn’t been free, we haven’t sent even half of what President Trump says,” he added.
Kelly also responded to Musk calling him a traitor in a separate post.
“Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes American great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do,” he wrote.
The back-and-forth comes as Musk has placed blame on war-torn Ukraine for a recent outage that affected thousands of X users.