During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) stated that if you don’t think President Trump will give a lot of money to battleground states, “you would be grossly underestimating the venality of this president.”

Host Bill Maher asked, “I find one of the most galling parts of this is that the president is favoring certain states over the others. Governors who are nice to him, as he calls it, get a lot of attention and all the equipment they want. To me, this is even more of an impeachable offense than what he did with Ukraine or Russia. How do you stop a president who is blatantly not the president of every state equally? How do you stop a president who sends aid to Florida, for example, because he likes the governor there, but not here to California or Illinois or Massachusetts?”

Sanders responded, “Congress has got to step up to the plate and step up big time. And I will tell you what else concerns me. The worst part of this $2 trillion stimulus package that was passed last week, and I voted for it. But the worst part of it was, $500 billion going to the president to allocate to corporate America, with nowhere near the kind of strings attached and accountability that should have been required. And now, he is saying, hey, I don’t really care about accountability at all. I’ll do what I want. And to pick up on your point, if you think that during a campaign, you’re not going to see a lot of money from the Trump administration going to battleground states, to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, you would be grossly underestimating the venality of this president.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett