The senator is on the road explaining exactly what happens when the richest man in the world starts buying power.
Bernie Sanders speaks during his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Iowa City, Iowa, on February 22, 2025.(Bernie Sanders / YouTube)
Iowa City—Bernie Sanders is on an urgent journey across the red states of America to deliver a crash course on how a corrupt campaign finance system rewards billionaire oligarchs who now threaten American democracy. And he is using as his touchstone a 162-year-old message from the first Republican president of the United States.
Before a hushed crowd of 1,000 mostly young people who had gathered on a Saturday morning in this eastern Iowa city to oppose Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s scheme to gut the federal government while engineering massive tax cuts for the billionaire class, the independent senator from Vermont recalled Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
“Lincoln was looking out on the fields of Gettysburg, where thousands and thousands of soldiers had died in a horribly bloody battle to end the horror of slavery,” he told the crowd. “And he looks out on that battlefield, where so many people had died just a few days before, and this is what he said: ‘We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
As Sanders spoke those words, the crowd began to echo them, with a chant rising from the back of the hall and surging throughout the room where students, young parents, public workers, and retirees had gathered to take back American politics, to take back their country, to take back their future.
“Of the people…”
“By the people…”
“For the people…”
Wild applause erupted as the senator declared, “That is what this struggle is about! One-hundred-fifty years later, it’s the same struggle… “We believe in a government of the people, by the people, for the people—not a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”
Declaring that it is “morally outrageous” when “the richest person on earth is ending health to some of the earth,” Sanders focused on the fact that Musk, a billionaire 384 times over, is dramatically expanding his wealth thanks to his status as a “special government employee” at the intersection of economic and political power. The senator quoted from a Bloomberg article on the massive uptick in Musk’s wealth after last November’s election, when a billionaire president’s first act was to make a mega-billionaire the definitional figure in his new administration. “First Tesla Inc. surged. Then SpaceX became the world’s most valuable tech startup and xAI nearly doubled its valuation before looking to do it again. Now, X is looking to join Elon Musk’s other companies in leveraging the billionaire’s unprecedented political power,” read Sanders, as he spoke to the second of a pair of crowds that he addressed Saturday, after so many people showed for his Iowa stop that a bigger room had to be opened up to handle the overflow turnout.
Ultimately, Sanders ended up speaking to more than 2,000 people in Iowa City, and to over 3,400 in Omaha, as part of a hastily scheduled yet enthusiastically welcomed “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. The tour targeted congressional swing districts held by House Republicans who, the senator said, must be convinced—whether through reasoned argument or old-fashioned constituent demands—to oppose an upcoming reconciliation bill that would pay for trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the richest by cutting Medicaid and other safety-net programs and services that are essential for working-class Americans.
That was the immediate ask, and it was an important one. But the fundamental message that Sanders is taking to the American people — Democrats and Republicans and independents, progressives and moderates and conservatives — is a broader one. He seeks to rally Americans to make the next turn in our politics, to raise a grassroots outcry against the seizure of not just economic but political power by billionaire oligarchs such as Musk.
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The Bloomberg report on Musk’s exponential accumulation of wealth provided the practical underpinning for the senator’s “of the people, by the people, for the people” argument.
“Got that: When you’ve got political power, you can double your wealth in a few weeks’ time,” said Sanders, who explained:
“When we talk about oligarchy, it’s important to understand that we’re not just talking about the incredible wealth of the people on top, we’re not just talking about the struggle of the working class in this country. We are talking about the incredible political power of the oligarchs.“Today, as all of you know, we have a corrupt campaign finance system. And, as a result of Citizens United, billionaires are able to pour unlimited [money]—hundreds of millions of dollars—into super PACs. That’s what happened in this last presidential election. The most extreme case was Musk himself, who put some $270 million into Trump’s campaign [via two super PACs that backed Trump’s candidacy and Republican campaign efforts]. And his reward for that donation is that he is now, arguably, the most powerful person in the government—more powerful than Trump himself.”
Sanders, an independent, made a point of explaining, to loud applause from the crowd, “It is not just Republicans or Musk. Let’s be clear: Democratic billionaires also put huge amounts of money into their party.”
However, the senator focused primarily on Musk as “the clearest example of this campaign finance corruption.”
How so? “I’ll give you an example of just how crazy it is. It’s one thing to be putting money into electing a president of the United States. We just learned that he is now going to get himself involved in a Supreme Court race in the state of Wisconsin.”
Noting reports that Musk-aligned groups were spending $2.6 million on efforts to elect a right-wing candidate to Wisconsin’s high court—and that the billionaire was expected to spend more, perhaps dramatically more, on the race—Sanders illustrated what’s at stake in the Wisconsin contest between Judge Susan Crawford, who is backed by advocates for fair elections, for unions and abortion rights, and Republican former attorney general Brad Schimel, an ally of anti-labor former governor Scott Walker and corporate interests in the state. If Crawford wins, the court will retain a 4–3 progressive majority; if Schimel wins, conservative judicial activists will have the majority.
“Musk, in a Supreme Court race, in a small race in one state, is getting involved,” declared Sanders. “Now, if you can get involved in a Supreme Court race in the state of Wisconsin, where can you not get involved? You can get involved in every governor’s race, every Senate race. That is their intention.”
Why? “These oligarchs are not only happy to have huge amounts of money. They want more. I know, we all know, that addiction in America—drug addiction, alcohol addiction, cigarette addiction, all that stuff, is a big deal. I’ll tell you about the most serious addiction problem we have in this country: That is the uncontrollable greed of this billionaire class.”
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The crowd roared its approval for Sanders’s message, as he argued, “They want more wealth. They want more power. And they just cannot stop themselves. So let us be clear: When we take on Trumpism, we are taking oligarchy and we are taking on the tale of two Americas: people on top doing phenomenally well, the working class struggling.”
The fight now, nationally and in states across the country, is about more than candidates and parties. It is, argued Sanders, about fundamentally different visions for America’s future. On one side stands Elon Musk and “a handful of multi-billionaires [who] not only have extraordinary wealth but unprecedented economic, media and political power…”—power bought through their exploitation of “a corrupt campaign finance system.”
On the other side, Sanders said, must stand an American majority that rejects the lies of big money and demands a new people’s politics—an engaged and impassioned voting class made up of “millions of Americans in Vermont, in Iowa, in Nebraska, in every state in this country who come together in a strong grassroots movement and say: ‘No to oligarchy!’ ‘No to authoritarianism!’ ‘No to kleptocracy!’ ‘No to massive cuts to programs that low-income and working Americans desperately need!’ ‘No to tax breaks for the wealthiest people in America!’”
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.