As GOP Moves to Cut Taxes for the Rich, Bernie Sanders Rallies Iowans to Fight Oligarchy

The Vermont Senator plans to visit more than a dozen congressional districts narrowly won by Republicans in November as part of an effort to pressure vulnerable GOP lawmakers against advancing President Donald Trump’s tax-cut plan.

On Tuesday, February 25, Republicans in Congress approved a budget blueprint with $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit corporations and the ultra-wealthy. To help offset that deficit, the Trump administration, through Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who poured $277 million into the president’s campaign, is working to dismantle critical federal infrastructure through his Department of Government Efficiency. The Republican tax plan also tasks congressional committees to identify about $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.

“In modern times, we no longer have the divine right of kings,” Sanders said in a video announcing the tour. “What we now have is an ideology being pushed by the oligarchs, which says that as very, very wealthy people, often self-made, often as the masters of revolutionary new technology, it is their absolute right to rule.”

Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have a combined wealth of nearly $900 billion—more than the bottom 50% of Americans combined. At the same time, as Sanders observed in his announcement, 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, 85 million are uninsured or under-insured, and 25% of seniors are surviving on $15,000 a year or less.

In Iowa, the doors are scheduled to open at 10:30 a.m., but people begin arriving shortly before 8 a.m. By 10 a.m., the line to see Sanders is stretched around the block and numbered over 750 people. Waiting and shivering, they find distraction and warmth in conversations with their neighbors, occasionally asking others to hold their spots so they could dip inside a nearby coffee shop to warm their toes. The energy is palpable.

Braving the winter cold

Like Vermont, Iowa is a mostly rural state, and people come to Johnson County to see Sanders from surrounding counties, some hours away. For a rally focused on threats to democracy, attendees are surprisingly exuberant, expressing joy at finding camaraderie with those who share their concern about the concentration of power into the hands of the wealthy and its effects on everyday people.

Some in line speak about family members who were federal employees weeks ago, but had recently lost their jobs. Others worry about what tariffs and cuts to social and regulatory programs will mean for their communities.

Kelli McCreary, 65, a recently retired nurse from Toledo, Iowa, worries if her family’s Century Farm in Tama County will continue to be profitable, given increasing costs due to unstable markets and threats of tariffs. To supplement the farm’s operations, she now sells eggs. “I don’t think that Donald Trump or Elon Musk have ever been to a grocery store” she says. “They don’t have any idea what it’s like. My feed prices keep going up.”

She wonders how bad it would have to get before people in her hometown engaged in something like the 1979 farm crisis protests, where thousands of farmers from across the country drove their tractors to D.C., shutting down the city. In an observation shared by others, McCreary says of her Trump-voting neighbors, “I’ve noticed there’s a lot of people that are kind of turning and changing their mind.” She hopes increasing pressure could push politicians to stop supporting policies that harm rural Iowans.

Her sentiments are echoed by Barb Coffman, 58, whose family grows corn and beans on their Century Farm near South English, Iowa, a town of fewer than 200 in Keokuk County. Her breath vaporizing in the frigid temperatures, Coffman worries whether her son, who works for the U.S Department of Agriculture in the summer and is completing a bachelor’s degree in agriculture at Iowa State University, will have the USDA job that he has been hired for when he graduates.

She wonders what it will take for people to begin voting and acting in service of their community rather than adhering to a political party. Of her friends and neighbors in South English, she says, “They’re all Trumpers. They’re all farmers. They all voted for him and now some of them are regretting this but it’s too late.”

Trump’s last presidency “hurt the farmers terribly,” she says, but the damage was then mitigated by payouts to farmers. She wonders whether such government assistance will again be forthcoming but doubts they will compensate for her farm’s input costs, which “never go down.”

Fear around agriculture and trade are not the only concerns expressed by those in line. Chance Conner, 21, made the 90-minute drive from Oelwein, in Fayette County, Iowa, with his friend Joshua Aagesen. He works for the county in conservation. The majority of Fayette County votes went to Obama in 2008 and 2012, but have flipped to the GOP since 2016. People’s economic concerns are the motivating factor, he says, adding, “People are so delusional when it comes to working-class issues. Back in 2020, a lot of people thought all the billionaires were in favor of Democrats, but when a lot of those billionaires have better seats at [Trump’s] inauguration than his own cabinet picks, that’s a telltale sign. He’s not even hiding it at this point.”

Fear and numbness mixes with hope as attendees visited with one another. One woman is here with her adult daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend. The mother, points to the daughter’s boyfriend, Raj [a pseudonym], noting he is from India on an H-1B temporary visa. Although he recently graduated as an engineer, they are worried about him being able to get a job, she says.

Others feel their fears giving way to cynicism. Kiley Schmidt, 35, a social worker, grew up on a farm near Holstein, Iowa, a town of 1,500 in Ida County. After graduating from the University of Northern Iowa, Schmidt took an internship at Stanford University before returning to her home state. “I’m looking to get more inspired and more riled up,” says Schmidt, who now lives in Iowa City. “I know MAGA wants this, but I have been pretty numb lately.”

Like Schmidt, Evelyn Flaherty, 19, comes in search of “things that will make me hopeful.” She graduated high school last year and is a freshman at the University of Iowa where she is studying English and Creative Writing. Her hometown of Shepherdsville in Bullitt County, Kentucky, is one where support for the GOP has steadily grown since the early 1990s. Flaherty says she is attending Sanders’s speech in search of “something to look forward to in the future so I’m not constantly drowning in doubt and worry.”

Iowans speak out

At 10:30 a.m., people begin entering the venue, thawing their toes and fingers. The seats fill as Childish Gambino’s, “This is America” pumps through the PA system. When the theatre is at standing-room only, those still waiting in line are directed to an overflow room at a nearby hotel.

When hundreds of people fill that overflow room, another is opened and also filled. Hundreds of people in these overflow rooms watch the event’s livestream from their phones.

Before Sanders takes the stage, a number of local speakers denounce efforts to privatize public goods and make their own calls to action.

Zach Grissom, a medical student and former Navy corpsman, says that single-payer healthcare models, like those available to veterans, work when they’re fully supported by the government. Grissom highlights a recent proposal by Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds to include work requirements for Medicaid.

“Work requirements for Medicaid aren’t just morally wrong, they’re financially wasteful,” says Grissom, to applause. He urges the audience to push Iowa officials to abandon proposed work requirements for Medicaid and pressure federal officials to implement Medicare-for-all.

Next up is Brian Gibbs, a National Park Ranger at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Harpers Ferry, Iowa, who was fired on February 14. Since then, Gibbs’s Facebook post about losing his job has gone viral. Greeted with a standing ovation. He tells the crowd, “Please, friends, stay present. Don’t avert your gaze.”

Gibbs is followed by Sandy Burkey, the produce supervisor at the local Costco who is working to unionize her colleagues through the Teamsters. “This is bigger than us,” she says, adding that Costco employees in neighboring states who have reached out asking how to unionize their stores. “It’s not just us. I want people to know that there is hope. We can stand up, we can exercise our rights. We don’t have to be scared. We are in this together.”

Pat Kearns, a registered nurse and president of Local 2547 of the American Federation of Government Employees says it is up to citizens to pressure politicians to protect public sectors. “We believe in what we do and value our work for people and not for profit,” she says. “Our union is organizing new units and people are demanding to join everyday. We will fight back and we will not allow our country to be stolen.”

What Sanders said

Sanders picks up where the Iowans left off:

We are here today because under Trump, our nation is facing a series of crises unprecedented in our modern history. What we do now, in the coming days, the coming weeks, and the coming months, will impact not only our lives, but the lives of our kids, the lives of our grandkids, and, in fact, the very well-being of the planet in terms of climate.

Sanders outlines some of the threats facing Americans today, from unprecedented wealth inequality to the GOP’s capture of the executive, congress and judicial branches of government. Citing the cuts that Musk’s DOGE is making to USAID, Sanders says, “That the richest person on earth is forcing the poorest children to go hungry and unnecessarily die is a moral outrage!”

Sanders reminds attendees that the Trump administration is targeting dissent and the media, and that Donald Trump is suing the Des Moines Register for publishing a 2024 poll he disagrees with.

The rise in an authoritarian oligarchy outlined by Sanders defies a solution that rests on politicians alone. As he tells the audience:

Trumpism will not be defeated by politicians in the D.C. Beltway. It will only be defeated by millions of Americans in Iowa, in Vermont, in Nebraska, in every state in this country by people who come together in a strong grassroots movement and say no to oligarchy, no to authoritarianism, no to kleptocracy, no to massive cuts in programs that low-income and working Americans desperately need, no to huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country.

Sanders then calls on attendees to contact Republican House Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who represents Iowa’s 1st District, and demand she vote “no” on the proposed Reconciliation Act. This Reconciliation Act, Sanders warns, threatens to give large tax breaks to the wealthiest 1%, stripping crucial supports for working class Americans. Miller-Meeks, who won her re-election bid by less than 1,000 votes in November, one of the closest contests in the country, has held fewer public forums in Iowa this year than the Senator from Vermont. Miller-Meeks has joined Trump in his suit against the Des Moines Register.

Following the speech at the Englert Theatre, Sanders, for the first time in his long political career, visits the overflow room at the nearby hotel and gave the same speech twice in one day.

Fighting Oligarchy afterglow

Kiley Schmidt, the UNI grad from Holstein, who waited in line for hours, says she left feeling revived. “There’s strength in numbers. We can do this,” she says. Asked if Sanders’ message would resonate with people in her hometown, she replies, “The things Senator Sanders talks about aren’t radical. He’s speaking to the masses. Yes, everyone in my hometown would benefit from this. Will they listen? I don’t know.”

Evelyn Flaherty, the first-year student from Kentucky, says she was “very, very, very inspired.” She was moved by Sanders’ message that the United States “is not a country for the billionaires by the billionaires.” At its best, “America has always been about the people” she says, and that its time for the people to begin “taking control of what’s actually ours.”

Barb Coffman, who lives on the Century Farm in Keokuk County, says, “People were looking for what do we do, and Bernie said, ‘Here is what you need to do.’ People are feeling helpless. Where are the other politicians who are going around and talking to people? I think that some of the Republican politicians don’t want to be confronted about the things people aren’t happy about.”

Chance Connor, the 21-year-old conservation worker from Fayette County, says, “It was invigorating to hear Bernie speak. He could have hung up his cleats a while ago, but that goes to show that he has a lot of empathy and wants the American people to feel uplifted.”

Greg WickenkampMore by this author →

Pushed out of his role as a public school teacher in Fairfield, Iowa, for his refusal to whitewash history, Greg Wickenkamp is an educator, organizer, and proud member of UE Local 896 and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. A Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Iowa, he studies state repression of social movements and works in an after-school program.