Four years ago, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was in Cedar Rapids touting the benefits of Joe Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better bill to a healthy but modest crowd of Iowans, whose mostly Republican members of Congress were unlikely to back the legislation. This past weekend, Sanders was back in the Hawkeye State, just twenty-seven miles away in nearby Iowa City, to talk to them about the path forward under a second Trump presidency — and drew an audience so big, he had to do a second speech immediately afterward to an overflow crowd in a separate venue.
“I’ve done a lot of speeches in my political life,” he said as he came to the stage. “This is the first time I’ve given one right after the other because we couldn’t fit into the first venue.”
Sanders’s appearance is part of what he calls a coast-to-coast tour of the country, “especially in conservative areas,” aimed at rallying the public against Donald Trump’s agenda. One night earlier, thousands turned out, and hundreds were turned away, in Omaha, Nebraska to see the senator speak. On Saturday morning, hundreds more lined up in the cold Iowa winter to hear from the senator.
“Hope,” Erin, forty-five, said she wanted from the event.
“It’s just nice to listen to him,” said Jai, forty-four, who came from nearby Fairfield. “It’s been a tumultuous month, and a Bernie pep talk will be nice.”
That’s more or less what attendees got. Sanders fused his familiar criticisms of US oligarchy with the Trump administration’s unfolding efforts to dismantle the federal government, which have seen the White House work with billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the 2024 election’s single biggest donor, to push through mass layoffs of federal workers and blanket deregulation of corporations.
“If you want to know who’s running the US government, simply look at Trump’s inauguration,” Sanders said, referring to the presence of the three…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
