Apparently not slowing down at eighty-three years old, Sen. Bernie Sanders is barnstorming the country with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to rally opposition to Donald Trump. At one stop on the tour in North Las Vegas last Thursday, the New York Times spoke with retired sixty-five-year-old construction worker Kelly Press about why he was there. Press described his struggle to make ends meet as a retiree in the face of the cost-of-living crisis of recent years; he also described his frustration that hardly anyone seemed to be leading an opposition to Trump:
If someone got on the stage that very day, he told me, and asked the crowd to march all the way to Washington to protest against Mr. Trump, Mr. Press would take that long walk without hesitation — “I swear to God.”
“But there’s nobody like that,” he said. “There’s nobody giving anybody any kind of direction. I think everybody is really scared and lost.”
After House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries pled impotence in the face of the GOP (“What leverage do we have?”) and his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer infuriated the party base (and many fellow congress members) by agreeing to a vote on the GOP’s spending bill, which cuts domestic nonmilitary spending and gives the Trump administration significant discretion over government funding moving forward, many voters like looking for a genuine opposition to Trump are attracted to Sanders’s call to arms.
This was the context for Sanders’s interview with the Times last Wednesday, in which the Vermont senator said, “One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the Democratic Party.”
The Times…
Auteur: Nick French
