President Trump gained Utah by greater than 20 share factors within the 2024 election.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew a crowd of greater than 20,000 individuals in Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah on Sunday for the most recent cease on the progressive duo’s “Combat Oligarchy” tour, which has attracted energized audiences across the United States as public anger on the Trump administration mounts.
“We’re right here in so-called ‘conservative’ Utah, and tomorrow we’re gonna be in Idaho. As a result of we imagine that in each state of this nation, persons are ready to face up and battle,” Sanders (I-Vt.) informed the gang gathered in Salt Lake Metropolis’s Huntsman Middle.
Roughly 4,000 individuals had been within the overflow crowd outdoors the Huntsman Middle, according to the Vermont senator’s communications director. President Donald Trump gained the state of Utah by more than 20 percentage points within the 2024 election.
“We live in probably the most harmful moments within the trendy historical past of this nation,” Sanders informed the Salt Lake Metropolis viewers. “We live in a second the place a handful of billionaires management our authorities… We are not looking for a authorities of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class — we would like a authorities that represents all of us.”
Sanders’ remarks adopted a fiery speech by Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has emerged as a number one voice towards the Trump administration and outspoken critic of the Democratic leadership’s capitulation within the face of what the progressive lawmakers characterised as a rising authoritarian menace.
“We’re at a crossroads in America,” mentioned Ocasio-Cortez. “We are able to both have excessive and rising wealth inequality with the poisonous division and corruption that it requires to outlive, or we are able to have a good economic system for working individuals together with the democracy and freedoms that uphold it.”
“Oligarchy or democracy,” she added, “however we can’t have each.”
Watch the rally in full:
The Salt Lake Metropolis occasion got here after every week wherein Trump continued to wreak international havoc along with his billionaire-enriching tariff chaos and Republicans in Congress moved ahead with one other spherical of tax breaks for the rich — giveaways they need to pay for, partly, with large cuts to Medicaid and federal vitamin help.
“It doesn’t shock us that their first financial mission has been to focus on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Safety, firing our federal staff, and slicing advantages from our veterans for a whole bunch of billions of {dollars}, in order that they’ll hand that cash off to the wealthiest,” Ocasio-Cortez mentioned Sunday.
The Utah occasion got here days after Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez appeared earlier than a crowd of 36,000 in Los Angeles, which the Vermont senator described as “our greatest rally ever.”
“When Donald Trump seems to be out at this crowd — and so they take note of these items, Elon Musk does — you’re scaring the hell out of them,” Sanders mentioned on the Los Angeles rally. “As a result of they know what we all know: They’re the 1% and we’re the 99%.”
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During the last months, every government order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core a part of a technique to make the right-wing flip really feel inevitable and overwhelming. However, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to recollect in Truthout final November, “Collectively, we’re extra highly effective than Trump.”
Certainly, the Trump administration is pushing by means of government orders, however — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in authorized limbo and face court docket challenges from unions and civil rights teams. Efforts to quash anti-racist educating and DEI applications are stalled by schooling college, employees, and college students refusing to conform. And communities throughout the nation are coming collectively to lift the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and defend one another in transferring exhibits of solidarity.
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