Half an hour before the doors opened at the Englert Theatre in downtown Iowa City on Saturday, the line of people hoping to get a seat at Sen. Bernie Sanders’ speech stretched a block-and-a-half down Washington Street, before turning the corner and continuing down Clinton Street for another block. Despite freezing cold temperatures and the dwindling chance of getting inside the theater, people continued to join the line.
Iowa City was the second stop on Sanders’ two-city “Fighting Oligarchy” speaking tour. The previous night in Omaha, organizers had to turn away 800 people because the venue was at capacity. On Saturday, they set up an overflow room nearby, where those who couldn’t get a seat at the Englert could watch a livestream of the event.
People in both cities were clearly eager to hear Sanders’ message.
“Trumpism will not be defeated by politicians inside the D.C. beltway,” Sanders declared, setting the tone early in his speech.
The four-term senator from Vermont wasn’t lamenting the ineffective response to Trumpism that Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have so far offered, or the sycophantic behavior of Republicans. He was calling on the people listening to him to action.
“It will only be defeated by millions of Americans in Iowa, in Vermont, in Nebraska, in every state in the country, who come together in a strong grassroots movement, and say no to oligarchy, no to authoritarianism, no to kleptocracy,” he continued. “No to massive cuts in programs that low-income and working Americans desperately need. No to huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country.”
According to Sanders, “under Trump our nation is facing a series of crises unprecedented in our modern history. And what we do now, in the coming days, in coming weeks and in coming months will impact not only our lives, but the lives of kids, the lives of our grandkids, and in fact, the very wellbeing of the planet in terms of climate.”
“So, if there has ever been a time in the modern history of our country to stand up and fight back, now is that time.”
Iowa City is a familiar setting for Sanders to deliver a message condemning how the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few have warped the American political system and damaged the country. It’s a message he voiced in numerous speeches in Iowa City in the months before the 2016 and 2020 Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucuses. But what is happening now is different, as Donald Trump enables Elon Musk’s chaotic, and likely illegal, slashing of government programs and agencies.
That Trump would follow a blatantly oligarchical approach to government was on clear display at his inauguration in January, Sanders said.
“Standing right behind Trump as he was being sworn in were the three wealthiest people in America: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg,” he pointed out. Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg “own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, 170 million people,” Sanders explained.
“Those are the three right behind him, and behind them were the mini-billionaires. They weren’t worth hundreds of billions. But there were 13 of those billionaires, who were nominated by Trump to be major agency heads.”
Four years ago, during the first year of the Biden administration, Sanders was on a speaking tour that stopped in Cedar Rapids. His speech in August 2021 was very different. It was focused on improvements being made to the lives of average Americans. Sanders talked about the recently passed American Rescue Plan Act, and rallied support for the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was making its way through Congress.
During an interview with Little Village after his Englert speech, Sanders reflected on how things had changed over the last four years.
“We could blame Republicans, but that would be unfair, to just blame Republicans,” he said. “The Democratic Party deserves its share of the responsibility. And at the end of the day, if you take huge sums of money from very wealthy people, if you hire consultants whose main job in life is to make huge sums of money in campaigns, and if you divorce yourselves from the pain and the reality of the lives of working-class people, people are not going to support you.”
“They understand the words don’t matter, if you’re not acting on their behalf… I think what we’ve seen is a failure of the Democratic Party to stand for the working class to create that kind of void that Trumpism has filled.”
All this comes as the wealth gap continues to grow, Sanders explained in his 45-minute speech on Saturday.
“The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. And while the very, very wealthy become wealthier, the reality facing ordinary Americans is somewhat different. Today, 60 percent of our people, in the richest country in the history of the world, are living paycheck-to-paycheck.”
Sanders spoke about the stress that comes from living paycheck-to-paycheck, something he experienced growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s.
“You add all of that up, day after day, year after year, it wrecks people’s minds, it wrecks people’s bodies, it causes them to die a lot earlier than people who do not have to worry about that economic pressure,” Sanders said. “That’s what’s going on in America today.”
America already has “one of the lowest life expectancies of any major country on Earth,” he added, but it’s even worse for working-class people who “live six- or seven-year shorter lives than the very rich.”
But the wealth gap and the damage it does have increased since the Reagan years.
“What we are also talking about is today is the oligarchs have enormous political power,” Sanders said.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 gutted campaign finance laws, some dating back a century, and allowed unlimited more from corporations and other groups to candidates. It allowed Musk to funnel over $270 million to Trump’s campaign last year.
“And his reward is that he is now arguably the most important person in government, more powerful than Trump,” Sanders said.
Musk’s staggering wealth also bought him influence in Germany’s parliamentary elections, where he tried to boost the chances of a far-right party with ties to neo-Nazis. (In the election on Saturday, the Musk-backed AfD had a strong showing, but gained less ground than recent polls suggested. The center-right CDU/CSU finished in first place, and will form the next government.) Musk has also committed to spend millions to promote a conservative, anti-abortion candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an upcoming election.
“Brothers and sisters, that is not the democracy that men and women fought and died to defend,” Sanders said.
He added, “I should point out that role of billionaires in politics, it’s not just Musk, it’s others. It’s not just Republican billionaires, it is Democratic billionaires.”
Fixing the “corruption of the two-party system” will require overturning Citizens United, Sanders said to loud applause.
“But it is not just oligarchy — as dangerous as that is — that we are fighting,” he continued. “We are also fighting what is equally dangerous, and that is Trump’s moving this country to authoritarianism.”
Sanders referenced Trump’s recent posting on social media of a spurious quote attributed to Napoleon, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
“It essentially means that Trump believes he can do anything he wants for any reason. He can ignore Congress, he can ignore the courts, he is above the law,” Sanders said. “And that’s not just talk, that is exactly how he has been behaving.”
Beyond his confused and illegal attacks on the federal agencies and civil servants, Trump is also moving to stifle “all forms of dissent, starting with the media,” he noted.
Fear of what Trump may do and a desire to buy his favor has already led to ABC and Meta agreeing to settle lawsuits Trump has brought for millions, even though those companies were likely to prevail in court. Trump is trying to force CBS into a similar settlement over a segment of 60 Minutes he disliked.
“And incredibly he has sued the Des Moines Register, your own paper here, for the crime of doing a poll whose results he disagreed with,” Sanders said. “Now his FCC is investigating PBS and NPR.”
“It is obvious what he is doing. He is attempting to intimidate the media.”
Beyond that, Trump has made the Big Lie central to his politics. He pushes lies that aren’t even close to credible — that he won the 2020 election, that the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol was “a day of love,” that climate change is a hoax, and most recently, that Ukraine actually started the war that began with Russia invading that country.
“So brothers and sisters, we have a lot on the table,” Sanders said. “We’ve got to fight oligarchy. We’ve got to fight authoritarianism. We’ve got to figure out how we deal with the Big Lie, especially when that Big Lie gets out on platforms like Musk’s Twitter, which goes out to hundreds of millions of people who read it over and over again.”
But most immediately, people need to work to stop the budget bill Republicans want to pass through a special process known as “reconciliation,” which exempts a bill from a filibuster in the Senate.
“What that bill does is at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, this legislation will provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the billionaire class and the entire 1 percent,” he said.
The money to cover those tax cuts, Sanders explained, will come from “cutting Medicaid, housing, nutrition, education and the other basic needs and programs that working families depend upon.”
“We cannot allow that legislation to pass.”
The bill must pass the House first, and the Republican majority there is so small that two Republicans breaking ranks with their leaders could stop it. Sanders chose Omaha and Iowa City as the locations for his speeches because both are progressive cities in congressional districts where Republicans won by small margins. The senator wants every constituent of Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa’s 1st who opposes the slashing of Medicare and Medicaid to call their offices and tell their representatives to vote no.
“Secondly, demand that your member of Congress hold a town hall meeting with you,” he added.
Moving towards the close of his speech, Sanders repeated his belief that Trumpism can be dangerous, but only “if we do not allow Trump and his friends to divide us up by the color of our skin or our religion or where we were born or our sexual orientation. If we stand together, we win.”
“So now is the time to go outside of our comfort zone,” he encouraged those in attendance. “Now is not the time for despair or feeling helpless. Now is the time to stand up, to fight back, to take on Trumpism, and not only to defeat Trumpism, but to create the kind of great nation we know we can become.”
Sanders exited the stage to loud applause from the packed theater. He then left the Englert and walked to the overflow location to speak with his supporters gathered there.
