What Bernie’s Largest-Ever Rally Revealed

Photographs by Philip Cheung

Liberals are fed up. Although people on the left tend to blame President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for America’s downward spiral, plenty of even lifelong blue voters are frustrated with a Democratic Party they see as complacent. This much was clear from Saturday’s “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in downtown Los Angeles, where an estimated 36,000 people joined Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in attacking apathy—even, or especially, if that meant targeting timid Democrats.

“This isn’t just about the Republican attacks on working people, L.A.; we need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us too,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd. “I want you to look at every level of office around and support Democrats who actually fight, because those are the ones who can actually defeat Republicans.”

Sanders and AOC are on the very long list of liberal politicians who are mad as hell, but on the very short list of those who aren’t going to take it anymore. A year and a half before the midterm elections, the pair is crisscrossing the country, trying to channel their rage into productive populism; they were in Utah yesterday and are scheduled to swing through Idaho, Montana, and Northern California this week.

In many ways, the Fighting Oligarchy tour is a continuation of Sanders’s first presidential campaign. He’s positioning himself not as one of the chosen few inside the Beltway but as one of many Americans rising up against creeping authoritarianism. For Sanders and AOC, that means fighting back against Trump and Musk, and recognizing that many prominent Democrats are upholding the very system that enabled Trump’s rise to power. The duo is offering voters a place to gather, scream, and feel a little less helpless, if only for a day.

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Saturday’s rally was Sanders’s largest ever, according to a spokesperson—bigger even than his presidential-campaign events in 2016 and 2020. If one primary emotion predominated, it was anger, something usually missing from former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed run against Trump last fall. Harris lives about half an hour away from the rally site, with her husband, Doug Emhoff, in affluent Brentwood. Reportedly, she’s considering a run for California governor, but on Saturday, she was nowhere in sight. Equally absent was any trace of the party’s most recent leader, former President Joe Biden, save for a rejoinder to the anti-Biden meme “Let’s Go Brandon”—a slogan on a T-shirt that read FOXTROT DELTA TANGO, code for “Fuck Donald Trump.”

If you followed the trail of floppy sun hats making their way down the hill from Walt Disney Concert Hall toward Grand Park, where the rally was held, you’d pass anti-fascism banners, Gen Zers hawking Communist newspapers, pro-Palestinian protesters, pro-Cuban activists, and various calls to revolutionary action through tinny megaphones. You could buy black-and-white screen-printed shirts with the words RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE surrounding Sanders’s face. Hasan Piker, the Twitch streamer whom many pundits have floated as the left’s answer to Joe Rogan, was among the influencers inside the park posting selfies and amplifying the event to his followers. (An entire “New Media” section had been designated for content creators.) The day had an anti-consultant ethos: nothing slick, nothing polished, not to mention nothing subtle. Near the metal detectors, several activists erected a giant photo illustration of Trump in a Klan hood with a Hitler mustache beneath block text reading MEIN TRUMPF.

Sanders, now 83, has been haranguing the 1 percent for years—Bill-ion-AIRES!—but his rhetoric has never been more resonant. Although the Fighting Oligarchy road show has the trappings of a presidential campaign, Saturday’s production was something closer to a music festival. Maggie Rogers, one of Sanders’s opening acts, called the L.A. event “Berniechella.” (Later that day, Sanders would make a surprise appearance at the actual Coachella festival a few hours away.) Another warm-up act, Joan Baez, quipped that Sanders’s gathering had “a much more meaningful goal than we had at Woodstock.” The musical headliner, Neil Young, blew his harmonica, strummed distorted riffs on electric guitar, and, as he played an extended rendition of his hit “Rockin’ in the Free World,” led the crowd in chants of “Take America back!” The afternoon sought to channel 1960s activism—Sanders spoke of attending Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and the musical nostalgia was, at times, heavy-handed. But instead of looking back on some imagined golden age, the theme of the day was about fighting for America’s small-d democratic future, and beating back autocracy. All of this, mind you, with fun.

“We’re gonna make our revolution with joy,” Sanders proclaimed.

The Harris campaign had tried a similar strategy against Trump, bringing out Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and other celebrities (including Rogers as well) at rallies. But those events were glossier, more sanitized. Last summer and fall, I watched Harris campaign in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, and none of those gatherings had the electricity of the Fighting Oligarchy tour. Sanders, more than any of his allies in the Democratic Party, has figured out an authentic populism—maybe because he’s delivered the same message for so many decades. As he took the stage, a gospel choir sang “Power to the People.” After a “Ber-nie!” chant broke out, he was quick to correct the audience: “Not ‘Bernie,’ it is YOU!”

Countless 2024 postmortems have argued that Democrats lost voters to Trumpism because they’ve become the party of elites that has lost touch with regular Americans who feel they have little stake in the system. Perhaps Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, connects with grassroots supporters because they trust that he really believes what he’s saying; his talking points do not come from a focus group. But he’s also, more simply, one of the few leaders who is filling the void of opposition. “Your presence here today is making Donald Trump and Elon Musk very nervous,” Sanders told the crowd. He scoffed at the image of the three wealthiest Americans—Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—assembled behind the president at his January inauguration. Those three tech titans, Sanders reminded everyone, have more wealth than the bottom half of society, some 170 million people, combined.

“When we talk about oligarchy, it is not just economics. I trust that all of you know that you are living under a corrupt campaign-finance system, which allows billionaires to buy elections,” Sanders said. “Don’t tell me about democracy when Musk himself can put $270 million to elect Donald Trump and then get rewarded with the most important position in government. But it’s not just Musk and Republicans, it’s the Democratic Party as well. Their billionaires tell candidates, ‘Don’t stand up to the powerful special interests,’ and too many Democrats are listening to them.”

Sanders would be 87 in 2028—almost certainly too old to run for president a third time. Many view Ocasio-Cortez, 35, as the natural heir to his movement. Before she was elected to Congress, she worked on Sanders’s first presidential campaign. Now serving as his partner on the Fighting Oligarchy tour, AOC has her own cult following: As she spoke, a hush fell over the crowd. One attendee wore a homemade replica of Ocasio-Cortez’s infamous Met Gala gown with the phrase TAX THE RICH affixed to the back. Like Sanders, the congresswoman leaned heavily into populism. “It will always be the people, the masses, who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes, who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedom,” she said. And, like Sanders, she lambasted the role of money in politics. She called Trump the “logical, inevitable conclusion of an American political system dominated by corporate and dark money,” and spoke of the shock she felt upon entering Congress and learning how beholden her peers were to special interests. “This movement is not about partisan labels or purity tests,” she said. “But it’s about class solidarity.”

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In my conversations with attendees throughout the day, I asked people to articulate the principal emotion they’ve felt throughout 2025. “Shock,” said Rochelle Dawes, a 47-year-old educator who had just moved to California from Illinois. “Frustration,” said 62-year-old Scott Logan, “that there’s no reins being put on Trump within the government, within the Senate and the House—that’s my problem.” Logan’s wife, Bonnie McFarline, said elected officials are not doing their job. “They’re cowards,” she said flatly. Sasha Treadup, a 37-year-old from San Diego who was dressed in a Statue of Liberty costume, told me that she had come to the event, and participated in the recent “Hands Off!” day of protests, to combat her own feelings of resignation. She became fed up with the Democratic Party after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer supported a Republican plan to avert a government shutdown. “I’m going to vote third party this time,” Treadup told me. “I feel like the two-party system just doesn’t represent my values anymore. It hasn’t for a long time.”

Democrats all over the country will be forced to contend with the reality that millions of working Americans whom they once regarded as their natural base have lost faith in the party. Sanders may be nearing the end of his career, but Ocasio-Cortez appears to be entering her prime. Many on the left are already hoping that she runs for president or, at the very least, stages a challenge to Schumer for his Senate seat. What Sanders and AOC are addressing is that people want a vehicle for their anger—something Trump and RFK Jr. effectively exploited in the last cycle. Above all, they want leaders who speak bluntly. “Donald Trump is a criminal,” Ocasio-Cortez said.