Anti-Trump Sanders 'Stop the Oligarchy' National Organization Vs. Democratic Party 'Support for Party Members'
Independent Senator Sanders, who started the anti-Trump movement, traveled around the country with the slogan 'Stop the Oligarchy' and organized through conversation, saying 'I'm doing my part', and showed the gap with the opposition Democratic Party's 'Support for Party Members' and 'Democracy Education'.
Bernie Sanders stood alone on the back of a pickup truck and shouted 'Stop the Oligarchy' through a bullhorn microphone while facing thousands of people gathered outside a Detroit high school on the 7th.
AP reported on the 9th that when he told the crowd, which had already been unable to enter the high school gymnasium or two full rooms, that "9,000 people gathered for the rally," the crowd screamed with joy. “What all this tells me is that it’s not just Michigan or Vermont, but the people of this country are not going to let us go into oligarchy. They’re not going to let Trump take us into authoritarianism,” he said. “We’re ready to fight. And we’re going to win.” At 83, Sanders is never running for president again. The hunched, silver-haired democratic socialist has emerged as a leader of resistance to a second term for Donald Trump. By criticizing Trump’s power grab and warning of the potential for layoffs by tens of thousands of government employees, Sanders is thwarting those who want the opposition Democratic Party to focus on egg prices or “roll over and play dead,” the AP reported. In the United States, at least for now, Sanders is the only elected progressive who is channeling the fear and anger inherent in the sprawling anti-Trump movement into a national campaign. A group backed by Trump’s Elon Musk poured money into the Wisconsin Supreme Court primary, and Trump won.
Sanderson drew a crowd of 4,000 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Musk supports the campaign, on the night of the 7th.
“He faced about 2,600 others the next morning in Altoona, Wisconsin, a town of less than 10,000 people, a few hours away,” the AP reported. “And the 9,000-strong crowd in suburban Detroit exceeded his team’s expectations. These were swing House districts that were represented by Republicans in the presidential election.”
In these districts, which were initially classified as battlegrounds but eventually won by Trump, a conservative nonprofit backed by billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk is playing a role in the race to determine the political direction of the Supreme Court in one of the most important presidential battlegrounds in the country. Musk’s heavily funded group Building America’s Future is spending $1.6 million on television ads for the Wisconsin Supreme Court primary, which will begin airing on June 6 and run for two weeks in Wisconsin’s five largest media markets.
The spending comes after Musk posted messages on his social media platform X last month to drum up interest in the race and urge a Republican victory.
The April 1 primaries in these states will be the most important since last fall, providing an early litmus test for both Republicans and Democrats after Donald Trump won every swing state.
In a battleground state where the shockwaves of the “midterm” will be felt across the country as the Trump administration’s second term begins, Musk is pouring huge amounts of money into nonprofits and the media, while Sanders is running around alone, confronting the public and building an anti-Trump front. The AP said, “The Wisconsin ruling has big stakes in the state,” and “it will determine whether the court will continue to be controlled by liberal justices or shift to a conservative majority.” The outcome will now determine the court’s decisions on abortion, union rights, election law, and congressional districting, which are the topics of the “progressive erasure” that the Trump administration has put into place.
Sanders, who was elected to the fourth Senate from Vermont, acknowledged the limits of his role at this stage in his career, the AP said, adding that the movement “was deliberately waiting for a lukewarm response from the Democratic Party in the early weeks of President Trump’s presidency to see if a prominent Democrat could fill the leadership vacuum, so that Trump’s call to “stop the oligarchy” would start to resonate.”
Instead, Sanders is not a Democrat, despite allying himself with Democrats as an independent and running twice for the Democratic nomination. When the AP asked him whether he was “considering another run for the White House,” Sanders responded, “This is not a presidential campaign or anything. But I’m not running for president, and this is not a campaign.” “You have to do what you have to do. The country is in trouble and I want to do my part,” he said.
In the early days of the Trump administration, the Democratic Party struggled to break free from its own fragmented democratic resistance.
Since losing power in the White House, Democrats across Washington have struggled to come together on a consistent message or messenger to block Trump’s aggressive moves to cut government staff, weaken federal oversight and empower tech mogul Elon Musk to implement his vision.
“There has been no centralized Democratic movement to organize the anti-Trump resistance,” the AP said.
“If you look around, who else is doing it? No one,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said of Sanders’ efforts. “My hope is that the dam will burst as Democrats go on the offensive.” “We need to get that message out there to the people,” Ocasio-Cortez, a longtime Sanders ally, told the AP. “I’ll be with him in the coming weeks,” she said, adding that Sanders’ surge “is planning solo campaigns in Republican-held House districts in Pennsylvania and New York, and in places where Republicans have refused to hold in-person town halls that could face protests.” “It’s not a question of Bernie doing this or not doing this,” Cortez said. "It's something we all have to do," he said. "But he's one of a kind in this country, and as long as we're blessed to have that ability on our side, I think we should be grateful for that."
Before Sanders' tour, angry voters had largely relied on grassroots groups like Indivisible to organize a series of local protests, a way that Democrats have done so far.
The Trump administration has targeted "grassroots coalitions" by repealing sweeping cuts to nongovernmental organizations, and these groups have been effective in putting pressure on Trump's allies.
Faced with angry questions from voters, many House Republicans briefly shifted their stance, criticizing Musk or questioning the budget cuts that were being made at the behest of his allies.
Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, who has been critical of many Democratic leaders, now praised Sanders for stepping up.
Levin said he hopes more Democrats will join the Reds to rally the majority against Musk and Project 2025. “I want to travel the country, including the Republican-leaning states,” Sanders told the AP, adding that “he surpasses Jeffries (House Democratic Leader Hakeem) in traveling the country for a children’s book tour during a constitutional crisis.” Jeffries’ local activism included two appearances last month during the House recess to promote a children’s book about “democracy.” He has also traveled to support House Democrats. Last weekend, he stopped short of a trip to Selma, Alabama, for an event commemorating the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
“The truth is that few Democratic leaders have the ability to draw such crowds in a short period of time or to organize such a plan on a national scale,” the AP said. “The early Democratic field, which includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, has limited national recognition and has so far been reluctant to step into the national spotlight.”
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, an outspoken Trump critic on Capitol Hill, told the AP that “Democrats need to get more organized.” “People are desperate to take action now. They see a threat. They’re anxious, they’re angry, they’re motivated, and they want to be sent in a direction that can help,” Murphy said.
Murphy acknowledged that Sanders and his progressive policy ideas — replacing private and job-based health insurance with a government-funded “Medicare for All” plan, free public college, a “Green New Deal” for climate policy — still have many detractors within the party who see them as too radical.
In fact, just five years ago, Democrats rallied around moderate Joe Biden, effectively blocking Sanders’ 2020 nomination.
“There are still a lot of people who see Bernie as a danger to the party,” Murphy said. “But I think his message is at the core of what we need to build.” Sanders has been a staunch Biden supporter for the past four years, but has been critical of the Democratic Party since Kamala Harris’s loss last fall, declaring that Trump’s victory was possible because the Democratic Party “abandoned” the working class.
United Auto Workers President Sean Payne, who introduced Sanders in Michigan, said more Democrats should “follow his example to focus on the working class and working class issues.”
“I think they need to take a hard look in the mirror and decide who they want to represent,” Payne warned Democrats. “We’ve made it clear as a union that if they don’t care about working class people, we’re not going to be there for them.”
Voters who packed venues across Wisconsin and Michigan over the weekend comprised a diverse group, including those who did not support Sanders’ previous presidential campaigns.
The AP reported that the rally attendees “mostly said Democratic leaders were not doing enough to stop Trump.” “I’m here because I’m scared for our country. It’s been a terrible six weeks,” Diana Schack, a 72-year-old retired lawyer who attended a Sanders rally for the first time, told the AP. “I’ve become a huge Bernie fan, especially in light of what he’s been doing around the country. These are not normal times.” The night before in Kenosha, Amber Schultz, a 50-year-old health care worker who had called on her supporters to “step up and do something,” told the AP, now changing her tune and saying, “Bernie is the only politician I trust.” “I’m worried that Trump is going to ‘dismantle the historic American norm (two terms)’ and try to stay in office beyond this term,”
Rep. Tony Gonzalez (56), an independent from Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, told the AP. “It’s a dangerous time. What Bernie has to say and what the turnout is about is important. His voice is still being heard.”
Sanders delivered a fiery populist message at mass rallies, as he has for decades, calling for free health care, free public higher education, and stronger social safety net programs, using America’s economic inequality as a catalyst.
Sanders focused particularly on the billionaire team Trump has personally appointed to lead his administration, including Musk and six others. “They want to dismantle the federal government and cut programs that working people desperately need,” Sanders said in his speech. “Yes, the oligarchs are incredibly powerful. They have endless money. They control our economy. They own a lot of the media. They have enormous influence over our political system. But deep down, I believe that if we come together, we can beat them.”
“Sanders is not expected to slow down anytime soon,” the AP reported. “He is leaning on his 2020 campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, to organize his rallies, and several former campaign aides are working as contractors.”
Shakir, who lost his bid to become the new Democratic National Committee chairman, acknowledged to the AP “strategic differences within the party” over how best to confront Trump.
Last month, veteran political strategist James Carville wrote an op-ed urging Democrats to “roll over and play dead.”
Shakir gave a positive assessment of the Sanders surge, saying, "One theory is that you can play dead and retreat strategically. Or you can play it alive, approach people and talk to them with conviction and sincerity."
In his farewell speech on January 8, President Biden said, "Today in America, an oligarchy of extreme wealth, power, and influence is forming, and it literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair chance for everyone to advance." The Democratic Party remained silent.
The New York Times reported on January 15 that Biden’s farewell speech “repeated the same warnings that President Dwight D. Eisenhower made about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address,” and that “Biden’s version mentioned the ‘techno-industrial complex,’ in which he warned about the erosion of truth itself due to unregulated social media platforms (Meta mentioned the elimination of fact-checkers this week) and artificial intelligence,” and that “he did not directly mention Trump.”
Regarding oligarchy, Wikipedia explains that “it is a form of government in which power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of members of society with assets, military power, and political influence,” and that “an oligarchy is formed when the economically superior members of the ruling class monopolize power, and it is maintained in the form of succession to the successors of the families with power.”