Bernie Sanders and AOC to headline five resistance rallies in three days

Will they tell their supporters what to do next?

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the avatars of the anti-Trump resistance over the next few days as they cohost major rallies in Nevada, Arizona and Colorado.

Capping a number of solo appearances by each of them around the country, these two prominent voices in the fight back against the Trump regime will appear together in Las Vegas on Thursday afternoon, in Tempe, Ariz., on Thursday evening; in Greeley, Colo., early Friday afternoon; in Denver late Friday afternoon; and in Tucson on Saturday morning.

“Why are we doing that?” Sanders asked in a video announcing the tour. He answered:

We’re doing that because I believe that all over this country people are profoundly disgusted with what is going on here in Washington, D.C. They see our great nation moving toward an oligarchy, where Elon Musk and other billionaires are running the government. They’re seeing the Trump administration moving us toward an authoritarian form of society, usurping the constitutional responsibilities of the Congress, challenging the courts. They’re seeing Republicans in Congress proposing to give massive, massive tax breaks to billionaires, cut back on the needs of our veterans, cut back on Social Security, cut back on Medicaid, cut back on education, so that the rich can become even richer.

Sanders and AOC represent the fighting alternative to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who last week helped pass a GOP-led stopgap funding bill -- embodying the Democratic failure to stop Trump’s ravaging of the government and constitutional restraints.

The Associated Press recently reported on how Sanders has become a major resistance leader:

In tearing into Trump’s seizure of power and warning about the consequences of firing tens of thousands of government workers, Sanders is bucking the wishes of those who want Democrats to focus on the price of eggs or “roll over and play dead.”…

He drew a crowd of 4,000 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Friday night. He faced another 2,600 or so the next morning a few hours away in Altoona, Wisconsin, a town of less than 10,000 residents. And his crowd of 9,000 in suburban Detroit exceeded his own team’s expectations. By design, each stop was in a swing U.S. House district represented by a Republican.

The theme of the Sanders rallies is “Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here.” Sanders’s message, as stated in his Altoona rally on March 8, is that “how we respond together to this moment will impact not only our lives but our kids' lives and the future of this planet.”

He continued:

Look, this is a difficult moment in the history of our country. But I think we all understand that it is not the first difficult moment in the history of our country. And in this moment, despair is not an option -- can't do it. Hiding under the covers, as much as we would like to, and turning off the TV is not an option. All of you know that real change -- real change -- only occurs not from the top on down but from the bottom on up. It occurs when ordinary people stand together against wealth and power and injustice.

Sanders is optimistic that Trump and the oligarchs can be defeated. In his video, he said:

Let me just tell you this. We’re going to win this thing, not here in Washington, D.C. We’re going to win it when millions of people – Republicans, Democrats, independents – stand up and say ‘You know what? This is not the kind of government we want.” So let us go forward together, let’s stand up let’s fight back for a nation based on justice, not on greed. Let’s go forward together.

But how do you get from “standing up” to winning? What are the intermediate steps? Is it time for mass protests? What specifically should people do right now? I’d like to see Sanders and AOC address those questions more concretely.

Sanders hints about one possible next step in the middle of his stump speech. Here’s how he put it in Altoona:

If two Republicans members of the House go to their leader and say “You know what? I got a lot of constituents who are on Medicaid. I got a lot of kids who need nutrition programs. And you know what? I am not going to vote to cut Medicaid to give tax breaks to billionaires.” If two Republican congressmen say that, we have defeated their proposal. That's what we've got to do.

But how are the people listening to Sanders supposed to help with that? Do they target specific Republican House members? Which ones? And what actions do they take? Mass protest? Civil disobedience, maybe? It’s time for a clearer game plan.

Town Halls Touch Nerves

During the last congressional recess, Republican members of Congress who held town halls were routinely abused by angry constituents, such that several GOP leaders advised members to stop holding them in person.

Now Congress is in recess again, and this time only a small handful of Republicans are going ahead with in-person gatherings.

• North Carolina GOP Rep. Chuck Edwards hosted a rowdy town hall in Asheville. “Would you give me a chance to answer this question, and you can start yelling after?” Edwards asked after receiving a question about Trump’s “destructive and disastrous trade war.” At one point, Edwards asserted that “there have been no cuts to the staff at V.A.,” only to hear from angry audience members who said “I was fired! There were people at this hospital that were fired. That’s a lie.” Many clips went viral.

• Wyoming GOP Rep. Harriet Hageman cautioned a gathering in Rock Springs: “If you can’t let me answer, you yell at me, I won’t take the question.” At one point she told the crowd, “You have to shut up.” In Afton, attendees jeered “unelected billionaire” Elon Musk’s involvement in the federal government. Some residents shouted that she should reinstate fired employees in the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

• In Washington State, GOP Rep. Michael Baumgartner hosted a disruptive, angry crowd. The Spokane audience loudly cheered such questions as “What will you do to stand up to democracy?” and “Where do you draw the line in the sand?” The crowd often booed, and shouted “tax the rich!” when Baumgartner discussed the budget.

Democrats who held town halls often found themselves challenged by audience members.

• In Oregon, more than 1,000 people packed a college gym to hear Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Janelle Bynum take questions. “Everybody’s scared. Everybody’s panicked, and it’s affecting physical and mental health,” one audience member said. “My question is, what can we actually do to stop this chaos?” Wyden replied, unhelpfully: "There's so much chaos, so it's hard to start with just one item.”

• In California, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that versions of the same questions were asked over and over by the restless crowd at Rep. Mike Levin’s San Juan Capistrano town hall: “How can the average person keep the federal workforce from being slashed? What’s the best way to resist Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency? How should citizens oppose President Donald Trump?” Levin said people needed to speak up. He cited major marches in the first Trump term. “All of that happened not because anybody in Washington told them to march, it happened organically, it happened from the bottom up — and that’s what needs to happen again.”

• In Pennsylvania, Democratic Rep. Chris Deluzio told voters “I think we are in a moment of great risk to this country. I think that we have seen pretty brazen attacks on the rule of law.” “How do we know, or how can you guarantee, that we are even going to have a fair election in '26?” one voter asked. “When [Trump] refuses to follow court orders, what recourse do we have?” asked another.

In many districts where Republicans opted out of town halls, Democrats stepped into the void.

• Iowa was one of the stops for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as he toured a handful of swing districts where Republicans are not holding town halls of their own. “There's a responsibility in this time of chaos where elected officials need to hear what people are irritated about,” Walz said in Des Moines. “And I would argue that Democratic officials should hear the primal scream that's coming from America, (which) is, ‘Do something, dammit! This is wrong!’”

• In New Jersey, former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski hosted a crowded town hall in the state’s 7th congressional district because the Republican congressman, Rep. Tom Kean Jr., wouldn’t. Malinowski joked there was supposed to be a chair on stage to poke fun at Kean’s absence, but the chair was needed for attendees. The New Jersey Globe reported that the audience “expressed doubt that Democratic leaders were listening to their concerns, or that top Democrats even have a plan.”

In some districts, constituents expressed their anger over the refusal of their Republican members of Congress to hold town halls.

• In Arkansas, hundreds of protesters gathered outside GOP Rep. French Hill’s Little Rock office, demanding a town hall. Protest organizer Caroline Stevenson explained: “I got really, really upset and frustrated so I sent out about 30 to 40 text messages to people I knew. That was on Tuesday or Wednesday, and on Thursday we had 90 some odd people, which was just incredible,” she said.

• In Wisconsin, billboards are going up in Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s district, courtesy of Opportunity Wisconsin, that say “Missing” and “Have you seen our congressman?”

And editorial boards have expressed dismay at the lack of Republican town halls as well.

• In Pennsylvania, an editorial in LancasterOnllne slammed GOP Rep. Lloyd Smucker for refusing to host in-person town halls. His constituents “have some issues they’d like to discuss with him,” the editorial said. “If he’s not going to sufficiently address their concerns, another elected official should.”

• In Texas, a San Antonio Express News editorial proclaimed that “Elected Republicans need to face town hall furor they helped stoke.”

Wondering if the town hall protests make a difference? Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) told the Oregonian that constituents’ outrage aired at her town halls during the last recess prompted her to participate in rallies against Trump’s cuts. “I’ve never rallied at agencies before, but it’s what my constituents asked me to do and these are not normal times,” Bonamici said.

The Protests Continue

Protesters rallied in New York’s Times Square on Saturday to call for the release of activist Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and permanent resident who was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on March 8. Nearly 100 people protesting Khalil’s arrest were arrested Thursday inside Trump Tower.

Also in New York, a march on Saturday protesting government cutbacks ended with a mass die-in in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

Veterans across the country protested Veterans Affairs cutbacks on Friday in cities including Tallahassee, St. Louis, Tucson, St. Paul, and Washington, D.C. Here are photos from veterans protests around the nation.

Stars and Stripes reported that 92-year-old Korean veteran Don Carter rode in his son’s Chevy pickup truck “for 11 hours from Illinois to the nation’s capital to take part in a political protest for the first time in his life.” The paper also quotes one of the speakers: “Two billionaires, Trump and Musk, are gutting the VA and purging veteran employees — bankrupting war heroes while cashing in on their sacrifice.”

Tesla protests also continued around the country over the weekend. “This is probably the most consequential moment in U.S. history since, I don’t know, the civil war,” Kirsten Hassenfeld, a Tesla protester in Brooklyn, told the Guardian. “I don’t know what to liken it to, but we’re on a precipice, and so I can’t actually concentrate on anything right now except protesting.”

Lawsuits Watch

Just Security’s tracker of legal challenges to Trump administration actions now lists 129.

Four in particular are making big news:

• “A federal judge on Monday expressed skepticism at the Trump administration’s assertion that it hadn’t violated a court order by deporting dozens of alleged Venezuelan gang members whose removal he had temporarily blocked.” (Wall Street Journal)

• “Efforts by Elon Musk and his team to permanently shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development likely violated the Constitution ‘in multiple ways’ and robbed Congress of its authority to oversee the dissolution of an agency it created, a federal judge found on Tuesday.” (New York Times)

• “The Trump administration has moved to reinstate at least 24,000 federal probationary employees fired in the president’s push to shrink the government, according to filings in one of two cases in which a federal judge ruled the terminations illegal.” (Washington Post)

• “A federal judge blocked enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service on Tuesday, the latest in a string of legal setbacks for his sweeping agenda.” (Associated Press)

Endnotes

• Indivisible, the grassroots activist organization with thousands of local chapters, is calling for a national day of action on April 5, under the title Hands Off! (There’s an organizing call on Friday at 3 p.m. ET.)

• Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large of the American Prospect, is proposing that “some of the mass or semi-mass organizations that comprise the American center-left and left need to work together, across constituencies and causes, to provide a tangible, viable mass opposition to Trumpism.” He has a date in mind: April 19, the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution and its war against monarchial power. Got a better idea?

• Data hoarding as resistance? Absolutely! Read New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas’s wonderful article on the librarians and archivists who are saving government web pages and databases that are being erased by the Trump regime.

• Politico reports that “For the first time in the 140-year history of the Gridiron Club Dinner, those gathered did not offer the traditional toast to the sitting U.S. president. Instead, leading members of the Washington press corps paid tribute to the First Amendment.”

• Vanity Fair reports: “If MSNBC was ground zero for resistance media during Donald Trump’s first term, MeidasTouch is emerging as the destination for anxious and angry liberals this time around.”

• The Arizona Republic reports that latest installment of a provocative billboard on Phoenix's Grand Avenue shows Musk making a fascist salute and Trump as a marionette puppet descending from Musk's hand. The text reads: “Trump, Musk and Enablers Are Shredding the Constitution and Screwing the American People."

• When I wrote three weeks ago about ordinary heroes who had spoken up in town halls, I led with the story of Virginia Linn, who at a Georgia Republican’s town hall said, in part: “Tyranny is rising in the White House, and a man has declared himself our king. So I would like to know – rather, the people would like to know -- what you, congressman, and your fellow congressmen are going to do to rein in the megalomaniac in the White House.” Now The Verge reports that hundreds of people have uploaded clips of themselves lip-syncing Linn’s question.