In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, Bernie Sanders has said it is not only important to mobilize, but to have a strategy and to act on it.
“Our job is not just to raise our voices,” the once-presidential candidate said in an interview with PBS Newshour on Monday. “That’s fine. But it is to bring millions of people together around a progressive agenda.”
While the Vermont Senator has honored the results of the elections, he has been touring the country and rallying the masses against Trump’s damaging and inflammatory rhetoric in jam-packed events.
Despite Trump’s apparent appeal to the working class, Sanders has pointed out, he is nothing more than an extension of the very same political and economic establishments against which he constantly railed.
“This is a guy who’s a billionaire who doesn’t pay anything in federal income taxes, who outsources his jobs,” Sanders said in another interview with GQ on Tuesday. A guy “who has been sued time and time again by workers for not keeping up his end in contracts.”
Sanders, who is currently touring to also promote his book “Our Revolution,” in which he reflects on his campaign, has also called for more transparency and action from his supporters. At one event on Monday, he suggested self-nominated democrats and progressives alike must begin doing more to “stand up with the working class of this country,” rather than just shouting progressive slogans.
“This is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” he said while giving a speech at Boston’s Berklee University on Monday. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.”
He has also vowed that there can be “no compromise” with Trump when it comes to issues of climate change, racism, sexism and homophobia, all the issues Trump has repeatedly attacked. He nevertheless conceded to working together on working-class issues, if the president-elect committed to it.
“I think it would be counterproductive on issues that working-class Americans supported and depend upon if we did not go forward,” he told GQ.
He added that, to that effect, he and his team will be introducing various pieces of legislation covering everything from raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, to equity for women workers, to infrastructure and trade.
“So it’s not a question of us working with Trump,” he said. “It’s a question of Trump working with us.”