Channeling the rage and frustration of progressive Californians, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told tens of thousands of people in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday that the country is in a moment of “extraordinary danger.”
Clad in a blue button-down shirt and a Dodgers baseball cap, Sanders, 83, said President Trump is moving the country “rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society,” firing up a crowd that stretched out of Grand Park, onto the steps of City Hall and into the surrounding streets.
“Mr. Trump,” Sanders said, “we ain’t going there.”
The hours-long event featured Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a long lineup of progressive elected officials, labor leaders and musicians, including Neil Young, Joan Baez and singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers.
Sanders’ team said the Los Angeles rally drew 36,000 people, his largest ever.
“I don’t have to tell anyone here that this is a difficult moment in the modern history of our country,” Sanders said. “We’ve never gone through anything like this, but … despair is not an option. Giving up and hiding under the covers is not acceptable. The stakes are just too high.”
An estimated 36,000 people attend the Fighting Oligarchy rally at Gloria Molina Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Trump and his allies are watching the size of the rallies, Sanders said, and “you are scaring the hell out of them.”
With the exception of Los Angeles and Denver, Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour has mostly stopped in areas represented by Republican members of Congress that the Democrats hope to oust in the 2026 election. The tour kicked off in Omaha in late February and has also made stops in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado.
Sanders said he is hiring organizers in some of those districts, including in Iowa and Nebraska.
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Sanders hasn’t changed his talking points much since his campaigns for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. But his classic refrains about the power of “the millionaires and the billionaires” and the wealth of the 1% have found new resonance with Democrats angered by the second Trump administration.
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The Sanders rallies come as the Democratic Party’s popularity continues to sag. One CNN poll conducted in early March found that the party’s popularity is at an all-time low of 29%, down from 33% in January, a dip driven primarily by frustrated Democrats.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez waves to a cheering crowd while making the stage at the Fighting Oligarchy rally at Gloria Molina Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“Everybody has been a disappointment, even the ones we had thought wouldn’t be,” said Lisa Pitchon-Getzels, 70, of Tarzana. She and her husband, Morris Getzels, 73, wore matching black T-shirts with a red slash through Trump’s face and the slogan: “Resist hate.”
Getzels and Pitchon-Getzels, who are both retired, said they were using their free time to send emails, make phone calls, write postcards and attend marches, trying to mobilize elected officials and their neighbors.
“Trump has to be stopped, and the Democrats have got to do it, because the Supreme Court won’t,” Getzels said.
Sanders, a political independent who caucuses with the Senate Democrats, said in an interview that in the two years before Trump was reelected, Democrats held a slim majority in the House but achieved “virtually nothing.”
“In too many instances, the Democrats come across as the party of the status quo,” Sanders said. “They’re not prepared to take on the corporate system and the oligarchy which is causing so much pain in this country.”
The gathering Saturday had a festival atmosphere. Content creators pulled attendees aside for man-on-the-street video interviews, some using the tiny microphones popular on TikTok. The crowd was a gallery of T-shirts and hats from the 2016 and 2020 Bernie campaigns, classic rock bands and unions representing healthcare, Hollywood and construction workers.
Many in the audience also came to hear Ocasio-Cortez, 35, a sharp, politically savvy Democratic socialist once at the fringes of the Democratic Party who is now broadening her national appeal.
Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd that the “toxic fear and division” they felt on social media and their struggles to afford everyday expenses were the “logical, inevitable conclusion of an American political system dominated by corporate and dark money.”
“All of this is what it means, and what it feels like, to be governed by billionaires,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “This is what oligarchy feels like. And it can only get worse until we act.”
Teresa Wynne-Rose of Thousand Oaks arrived downtown at 6 a.m. to secure a spot at the front of the crowd with her 20-year-old daughter Zoe.
About 20 feet from the podium, the two women waited through hours of musical performances and speeches by prominent progressive officials, including Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) and Maxwell Frost (D-Florida), the first Gen Z member of Congress.
“Bernie has been a fighter since he first got into politics,” said Wynne-Rose, who works at Planned Parenthood. She said she’d like to see more Democrats take more visible anti-Trump actions, like that of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who broke a Senate record this month by speaking for 25 hours and five minutes in opposition to the Trump administration.
“If I eventually have kids in this hell world, I want to tell them I was here,” Zoe said.
The Sanders tour has inspired others: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has launched his own town hall series, and several California Democrats, including Khanna and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), have held events of their own in red districts.
After stops in Utah and Idaho on Sunday and Monday, Sanders returns to California Tuesday for an afternoon rally in Bakersfield and an evening event in Folsom, near Sacramento.
