Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Sunday responded to criticism from a fellow Democratic caucus member for using the term “oligarchy” to describe allies of the Trump administration, saying the “American people are not quite as dumb” as to not understand the term.
Sanders’ remarks come days after Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., a first-term senator who won a competitive Senate race in Michigan the same year that President Donald Trump won the presidential election there, told Politico that she thinks her party should stop using the term “oligarchy.”
Slotkin added that the term doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions.
Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., also recently criticized some Democrats for using terms like “oligarch” and “food insecurity” instead of “hungry” and “greedy billionaires.”
Neither Slotkin nor Walz mentioned Sanders in their remarks, but their comments come as Sanders and fellow progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have been traveling across the country and speaking before crowds of tens of thousands as part of their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.
On Sunday, Sanders referenced those crowds, telling NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” “Well, Jesus, we had 36,000 people out in Los Angeles, 34,000 people in Colorado. We had 30,000 people in Folsom, California, which is kind of a rural area.”
“I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are,” Sanders added.
A spokesperson for Slotkin declined to comment on Sanders’ remarks.
The Vermont senator went on to explain the core message of the “Fighting Oligarchy,” rallies, telling moderator Kristen Welker, “When the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%, when big-money interests are able to control both political parties, [Americans] are living in an oligarchy.”
The spat between Slotkin and Sanders comes as Democrats are still trying to assess how to move forward in a second Trump administration, months after they faced a devastating loss in the presidential election and in multiple Senate races.
Many Democrats in recent weeks have agreed that the party must focus on the future and what their post-Trump vision for America could look like but can’t agree on what that vision should look like.
It’s a point that Sanders made on Sunday, telling Welker, “We’re on the same page, but what Democrats lack right now is a vision for the future.”
Sanders has long been the standard bearer for progressive Democrats, ever since he launched his long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.
But Slotkin is a new rising star. In 2018, she flipped a competitive Michigan House seat in favor of the Democrats. And months after defending an open Senate seat in her home state for the Democratic Party, she was selected by party leaders to give the official Democratic response to Trump’s joint address to Congress earlier this year.
