What The Hell America!

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 wealthiest men in America — Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — directly behind Trump, and what he called the thirteen “junior billionaires” with their net worths only in eleven figures, who he had tasked with running federal agencies.

But Sanders also aimed to galvanize a crowd whose participants had, before the rally, admitted feeling lost, worried, and even taking a break from the news for their own peace of mind. In a speech heavy on historical allusions, Sanders reminded the crowd that “doing something important is never easy, ” insisted that “now is the time to act” and get politically involved, and that US history is filled with accomplishments that were meant to have been impossible, but that movements of ordinary people made happen — whether expanding suffrage, abolishing slavery, or winning independence from the king of England (“an autocrat”).

“Trumpism is not going to be defeated by inside-the-Beltway politicians,” he said.

Together with the overflow crowd, it was physical proof of the dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party seen in polls and angry phone calls to congressional offices, with voters complaining about a dearth of leadership and opposition to Trump from Democratic officials, and yearning for some kind of direction. Almost everyone Jacobin spoke to at Sanders’s Iowa event was, to varying degrees, disappointed with the Democratic response to Trump’s first month.

“What response?” said Steven, forty-four, from Fairfield.

“It’s been weak,” said Cole, twenty-four, from Iowa City.

“Hakeem Jeffries is useless,” said Jim, sixty-two, who had made the trip to Iowa from the Chicago suburbs, about the Democrats’ leader in the House. “‘We can’t do anything.’ It’s pathetic.”

Republicans in Congress, in concert with Trump, are currently planning to pass a reconciliation bill that Sanders called “the Robin Hood principle in reverse,” handing the rich $1 trillion in tax cuts by making “massive cuts to programs working people desperately need.” But they only had a three-person majority in the House to do it, which meant just two of them voting “no” would kill the bill. Sanders noted that some of those Republicans were in the very districts he was visiting, and that they could be swayed by hundreds of constituents phoning their office to oppose the legislation.

“I’m in the Senate; it does matter,” Sanders stressed. While congresspeople right now only worry about what their donors think, he said, “your job is to make them worry about you.”

There are already signs that vulnerable Republicans in districts whose communities heavily depend on programs like Medicaid are feeling the heat from their constituents over the planned cuts. Trump himself has felt the need to claim, falsely, that Medicaid is not “going to be touched” and has already once had to do a high-profile walkback of his sweeping pause on federal grants after constituent outrage at the resulting Medicaid disruptions put pressure on GOP congresspeople.

For Sanders, this grassroots effort to defeat Trump’s agenda that he hopes to breathe life into is part of a long American tradition. Toward the end of his speech, he and the crowd together recited Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and its call to ensure “government of the people, by the people, for the people” survives — not, Sanders stressed, “a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”

“That is what this struggle is about — one hundred and fifty years later, same struggle,” he said.

There were signs that that struggle might be fought by a different base of support than Sanders attracted in his first presidential run a decade ago. Saturday’s was an overwhelmingly liberal crowd that cheered and applauded Sanders’s references to women’s reproductive rights and jeered mention of Trump’s cuts to the US Agency for International Development and attacks on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Jai told Jacobin that many of his nonvoting friends in Fairfield who had initially been drawn to Sanders were now fully on the Trump train. Former union worker Otis, eighty-one, who had lived in Iowa for decades and seen its partisan loyalty shift red, said many of the young people he knew now supported Trump.

But at least among some, Sanders’s speech seemed to have had its intended effect.

“I was that person who was complacent and checked out,” said Audrey, twenty-seven, who had traveled the hour or so from Wapello to see Sanders for the third time in her life. The speech had given her the specific direction she had been yearning for.

For others, like Erin, who had come looking for hope, they found it just by being among hundreds of others who felt the same: “I felt alone, and now it doesn’t feel so much like that.”