All-American Headliner: Bernie Sanders

Bernie’s on the road rallying Democrats and anti-Trump/Musk independents. He started in Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin and Michigan. And he plans to keep going. His events all had big spill-over crowds— thousands of concerned citizens are coming out to be part of these happenings. AOC will be joining him on the road for future rallies. Try to imagine Hakeem Jeffries joining him— or doing his own rally. Or Chuck Schumer. Politicians like Jeffries and Schumer meet with consultants and grubby members of the donor class— not with people. That’s part of the problem. It would be a boo-fest marred by open hostility, not just a lack of enthusiasm, but outright rejection. 

That’s why characters like Jeffries and Schumer avoid unscripted public engagement and stick to the consultant-and-donor circuit. Their political survival depends on keeping the donor class happy, which often puts them at odds with the working-class concerns that animate Bernie’s rallies. By contrast, Bernie and AOC thrive in spaces where real people can express their frustrations and hopes without filtering them through a corporate-friendly lens. Their rallies aren’t just campaign events; they’re mobilizations of working people, young voters, and activists who feel alienated from mainstream Democratic leadership. The very policies that drive enthusiasm at a Bernie rally— Medicare for All, wealth taxes, breaking up monopolies— are the same ones that make figures like Jeffries and Schumer uncomfortable because they threaten the status quo they manage.

Yesterday, Steve Peoples reported that Bernie’s well-received message includes lines like “[T]he people of this country will not allow us to move toward oligarchy. They will not allow Trump to take us into authoritarianism. We’re prepared to fight. And we’re going to win.”

At 83 years old, Sanders is not running for president again. But the stooped and silver-haired democratic socialist has emerged as a leader of the resistance to Donald Trump’s second presidency. In tearing into Trump’s seizure of power and warning about the consequences of firing tens of thousands of government workers, Sanders is bucking the wishes of those who want Democrats to focus on the price of eggs or “roll over and play dead.” 

For now, at least, Sanders stands alone as the only elected progressive willing to mount a national campaign to harness the fear and anger of the sprawling anti-Trump movement.

He drew a crowd of 4,000 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Friday night. He faced another 2,600 or so the next morning a few hours away in Altoona, Wisconsin, a town of less than 10,000 residents. And his crowd of 9,000 in suburban Detroit exceeded his own team’s expectations. By design, each stop was in a swing U.S. House district represented by a Republican.

Sanders, who was just elected to his fourth Senate term from Vermont, conceded that this is not the role he expected to play at this stage of his career.

In fact, his team intentionally waited in the early weeks of the Trump presidency to launch what they are now calling his “stop oligarchy tour” to see if a high-profile Democrat would fill the leadership void. Instead, Sanders— who is not a Democrat himself despite allying with Senate Democrats and running twice for the party’s presidential nomination— has people wondering if he’s considering another White House bid.

“This is like presidential campaign rallies, isn’t it? But I’m not running for president, and this is not a campaign,” Sanders told The Associated Press. “You gotta do what you gotta do. The country’s in trouble and I want to play my role.”

Since losing the White House, Democrats across Washington have struggled to coalesce behind a consistent message or messenger to stop Trump’s aggressive moves to slash the government workforce, weaken federal oversight and empower tech titan Elon Musk to execute his vision.

There has been no centralized movement to organize the anti-Trump resistance.

“You look around— who else is doing it? No one,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), said of Sanders’ efforts. “My hope is that the dam will break in terms of Democrats going on the offense... We need to take the argument directly to the people.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a longtime Sanders ally, said she would join him on the road in the coming weeks. She’s also planning solo appearances in Republican-held congressional districts in Pennsylvania and New York— and perhaps others in places where Republicans have declined to hold in-person town halls where they might face protests.

“It’s not about whether Bernie should or shouldn’t be doing this. It’s about that we all should,” she said. “But he is unique in this country, and so long as we are blessed to have that capacity on our side, I think we should be thankful for it.”

…During last month’s congressional recess, Jeffries made two appearances to promote a children’s book about democracy. He has also traveled to support House Democrats. This past weekend, he was in Selma, Alabama, to mark the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

The truth is that few, if any, Democratic leaders have the capacity to draw such crowds on short notice or organize the related logistics on a national scale. The party’s nascent class of 2028 presidential prospects, a group that includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, have limited national profiles and they have been reluctant to step too far into the national spotlight so far.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, among the more outspoken Trump critics in Congress, said that Democrats must be better organized.

“People are desperate to be plugged into action right now. People see the threat. They are anxious and angry and motivated and they want to be sent in a direction to help,” he said.

Murphy acknowledged that Sanders still has plenty of detractors within the Democratic Party who view him and his progressive policy ideas— replacing private and job-based health insurance with a government-funded “Medicare for All” plan, free public college, and the “Green New Deal” on climate policy— as too radical.

Indeed, it was just five years ago when Democrats coalesced around Joe Biden to effectively block Sanders from winning the party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

“There still are a lot of folks who view Bernie as a danger to the party,” Murphy said, “whereas I see his message as the core of what we need to build on.”

Sanders was a staunch supporter of Biden over the last four years but criticized the Democratic Party in the aftermath of Kamala Harris’ loss last fall, declaring that Trump’s victory was possible only because Democrats had “abandoned” the working class.

United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, who introduced Sanders in Michigan, said more Democrats need to “follow his lead to focus on working-class people and working-class issues.”

“They’ve got to take a hard look in the mirror, in my opinion, and decide who the hell they want to represent,” Fain said of Democrats. “We’ve been clear as a union, if they aren’t looking out for working-class people, we’re not going to be there for them.”

The voters who packed venues across Wisconsin and Michigan over the weekend composed a diverse group, including some who did not support Sanders’ past presidential campaigns. Most said that Democratic leaders have not done enough to stop Trump.

… Sanders delivered the same fiery populist message over the weekend that he has for decades, seizing on the nation’s economic inequality to call for free health care, free public higher education and stronger social safety net programs. Sanders was especially focused on the team of billionaires Trump has appointed to serve as leaders in his administration, including Musk and a half dozen others. 

“They want to dismantle the federal government and cut programs that working people desperately need,” Sanders warned.

“Yes, the oligarchs are enormously powerful. They have endless amounts of money. They control our economy. They own much of the media, and they have enormous influence over our political system,” he continued. “But from the bottom of my heart, I believe that if we stand together, we can beat them.”

State Senator Chris Larson, whose district is north of Kenosha, was at the rally there. “Bernie,” he told us last night, “is proving the roadmap for what we should be doing: showing up in the heart of Wisconsin to sound the alarm on oligarchs taking over our country. Elon Musk is currently trying to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and is on track to spend over $20 million to do so. A friend of mine overheard the people standing next to him in the back say to their partner, ‘we really need to remember to vote in that April 1st election.’ Everyday, more people are waking up to the nightmare Trump is making of America.” 

Randy “Ironstache” Bryce was one of the opening speakers in Kenosha, which sits in the district he will probably be running in next year. He told us it was a privilege to have been given a few minutes to speak. “The energy was incredible. I saw quite a few unfamiliar faces but quite a few that I already knew. He’s still the same Bernie as the one I saw at Fighting Bob Fest right after Scott Walker dropped his bomb on Wisconsin workers. People were so fired up to be able to unleash some raw feelings. There was a lot of anger but fear too. Told the crowd we only lose when we give up. Nobody was even thinking about that. Bernie is doing what needs to be done. Wisconsin is lucky to have Rep. Mark Pocan who is having town halls near GOP districts because Republicans have been told to hide from everybody— something Paul Ryan taught his driver Bryan Steil very well.”

Punk rock star Laura Jane Grace, a trans woman who is lead singer of Florida rockers Against Me, performed at Bernie’s Kenosha rally, which made right-wing bigots angry and sad.