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Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew a crowd of more than 20,000 people in Salt Lake City, Utah on Sunday for the latest stop on the progressive duo’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour, which has attracted energized audiences across the United States as public anger at the Trump administration mounts.
“We’re here in so-called ‘conservative’ Utah, and tomorrow we’re gonna be in Idaho. Because we believe that in every state of this country, people are prepared to stand up and fight,” Sanders (I-Vt.) told the crowd gathered in Salt Lake City’s Huntsman Center.
Roughly 4,000 people were in the overflow crowd outside the Huntsman Center, according to the Vermont senator’s communications director. President Donald Trump won the state of Utah by more than 20 percentage points in the 2024 election.
“We are living in the most dangerous moments in the modern history of this country,” Sanders told the Salt Lake City audience. “We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control our government… We do not want a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class — we want a government that represents all of us.”
Sanders’ remarks followed a fiery speech by Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has emerged as a leading voice against the Trump administration and outspoken critic of the Democratic leadership’s capitulation in the face of what the progressive lawmakers characterized as a growing authoritarian threat.
“We are at a crossroads in America,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “We can either have extreme and growing wealth inequality with the toxic division and corruption that it requires to survive, or we can have a fair economy for working people along with the democracy and freedoms that uphold it.”
“Oligarchy or democracy,” she added, “but we cannot have both.”
Watch the rally in full:
The Salt Lake City event came after a week in which Trump continued to wreak global havoc with his billionaire-enriching tariff chaos and Republicans in Congress moved ahead with another round of tax breaks for the wealthy — giveaways they want to pay for, in part, with massive cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance.
“It does not surprise us that their first economic mission has been to target Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, firing our federal workers, and cutting benefits from our veterans for hundreds of billions of dollars, so that they can hand that money off to the wealthiest,” Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday.
The Utah event came days after Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez appeared before a crowd of 36,000 in Los Angeles, which the Vermont senator described as “our biggest rally ever.”
“When Donald Trump looks out at this crowd — and they pay attention to this stuff, Elon Musk does — you are scaring the hell out of them,” Sanders said at the Los Angeles rally. “Because they know what we know: They are the 1% and we are the 99%.”
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