The Big Lesson From Bernie Sanders's Gangbusters Anti-Oligarchy Tour

Yahoo

15-03-2025

Unless you live in the Detroit metro area, you're probably not an avid consumer of that city's CBS station, News Channel 3. So you likely missed some reporting last week from reporter Jack Springgate, in which one area resident spoke out about a matter near and dear to their heart: President Donald Trump's decision to impose stringent spending caps at the National Institutes of Health, which will cut lifesaving medical research by billions of dollars. That didn't sit well with Elliot Stephens, who was identified as a cancer survivor. 'They're cutting children's cancer research and the NIH and also interfering with grant funding rules for medical research,' he said. 'I have a daughter with cancer, and that for me is unforgivable.'
Stephens's testimony is an important on-the-record account of Trumpian corruption and misrule. But what's equally important is how Stephens's account ended up being covered by the news at all. As TNR contributor Aaron Regunberg reported this week, this chance meeting between a local resident and a local news reporter came about because Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has lately been barnstorming some of the Rust Belt's red-district redoubts, campaigning against the oligarchic takeover of the U.S. government. Sanders has rightly been getting national attention for drawing huge crowds in these MAGA strongholds, amplifying a message that all Democrats should be sending. But there's an added benefit to his lion's den tour: It was at one such rally that this connection between Stephens and Springgate was made—putting a human face on the harms of Trumpism.
As I noted two weeks ago, Trumpism isn't working. Democrats have essentially staked their future on proving this beyond a shadow of a doubt. At the same time, they are largely locked out of meaningful policymaking in Washington, so they're stuck in the position of finding alternate means to use politics to construct a majority. What Sanders has been doing recently is highly instructive—and Democrats don't need to be die-hard enthusiasts of his particular policy portfolio to extract the key lesson and act on it: Identify the victims of Trumpism, give them a voice, and get their stories told.
One thing that Sanders seems to understand is that Democrats are, at least in part, fighting a content-creation war. Politics is being fought in a skewed information environment that favors people who can reliably feed the beast with conflict and controversy. There is probably no quicker path to good, cheap conflict than, 'President Deals and his ketamine-addled freak sidekick are screwing you over.' And Sanders is not the first liberal lawmaker to note that GOP lawmakers have been ordered to retreat from their own town halls after they got shouted down by their own voters. Expect to see more of this: As Democrat Maxwell Frost recently vowed, 'We're filling a void.'
That void exists because Republicans don't actually govern: They don't pass laws, don't earmark funds, and have given up the power of the purse to an executive branch that isn't spending money on anything besides a single Tesla for a president who doesn't drive. So when Republican electeds end up in a room full of people who can't pay their bills with whatever notches their representatives have carved into their ideological bedposts, things turn south and Republicans turn tail. Democrats can fill this vacuum by taking over these spaces. As they say, when there's blood on the street, buy property.
But once this unclaimed territory is seized, there's one other obligation that Democrats have to fulfill: finding those Elliot Stephenses in the crowd, and giving them a spotlight. If you intend to build the case that Trumpism is doing harm to people, then you must find proof of that in the form of the harmed.
Democrats have two advantages. First, in Trump and Musk, they've drawn some of the least subtle villains in human history; the damage they're doing to the country is manifold and constantly escalating. And as I've noted before, Democrats may have a paucity of parliamentary options, but they're resource-rich if they want to raise rhetorical hell: They have experts they can call on, a constellation of nonprofits and policy organizations, wealthy donors to direct funds.
Beyond that, they have an intimate awareness of the potential damage being done by every dollar that DOGE strips from the government, and the flesh-and-blood humans who are on the receiving end of every bit of punishment that Trump doles out. Today it might be families with loved ones who desperately need the fruits of cancer research. Tomorrow it might be vulnerable families who depend on the government to provide affordable housing. Next week it could be communities impacted by foodborne illnesses that arise from a decimated FDA. This is an administration that's pursuing criminal charges against Habitat for Humanity, while letting measles go untamed.
And if Democrats need help finding the victims of Trumpian chaos, there's an app for that: your news browser. At TNR, putting a human face on the policies imposed by Washington lawmakers is part of our bread and butter. In recent weeks, my colleague Grace Segers has tracked the impact of the Trump administration's policies on public health, rural economies, and food prices, to name a few. The Washington Post recently featured a story about a park ranger who, having voted for Trump after hearing him promise to make her desperately needed IVF treatments free, was fired by his administration instead.
As the Columbia Journalism Review's Lauren Watson wrote last week, some of the stories about the damage of Trump's slash-and-burn policies are finding their way into local newspapers all across the country. While the DOGE story may have taken root in the public consciousness because of 'the experiences of federal workers in and around Washington, D.C.,' she writes, 'over 80 percent of the federal workforce lives and works outside the greater DC area, doing jobs from monitoring nuclear facilities to researching plant diseases, which means that the fallout from DOGE has been a local story, too.'
In other words, this is a good time for Democrats to get outside their Capitol Hill bubble and seek out the people and the communities who have been most affected by Washington's Trump-minted chaos. Republicans are certainly doing a lot of damage close to home—and they're planning to gut the District of Columbia's budget at the same time that they're putting the local economy under strain through mass government layoffs, but there are less resilient economies beyond the Beltway that are being hit just as hard, and too many stories that too often don't get told by the national media.
There's another reason this is a ripe time for Democrats to rediscover the rest of the country: The Democratic base is getting angrier by the day at their own party's lawmakers. Polling numbers have led Split Ticket's Lakshya Jain to surmise that voters are increasingly dissatisfied with how 'relatively quiet Democrats have been in organizing public opposition' and sense a sort of 'Tea Party moment' brewing, in which the base breaks against incumbents for their lack of combativeness. The New Yorker's Jay Caspian Kang warned recently of 'radical change coming down the line in the form of 'new candidates' pulled from the ranks of 'ordinary citizens who are fed up with the feckless and do-nothing politics of the Democratic establishment.'' Some of my own sources have recently told me that the fired federal worker to pissed-off Democratic primary challenger pipeline is a very real thing.
If that kind of rage is building outside Washington, then Democrats had better make it right. And let's face it: If the base is asking for a little more combativeness against a president whom Democrats have long characterized as an existential threat to democracy—and who has, since reassuming his reign, gone wildly out of his way to demonstrate that Democrats were right to brand him in this way—then these demands are not unreasonable. The quickest way to bring the fight to Trump is to force him to face the people he's harmed.