Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders functions in the book as a political witness whose brief interventions sharpen its central opposition between popular grievance and elite power. He is presented neither through a personal biography nor through a sustained scene, but through two statements that interpret Donald Trump’s appeal and warn about the direction of his presidency.

Diagnosis of Elite Abandonment

Sanders explains Trump’s support by pointing to people who felt forgotten by both economic and political elites. The book treats this diagnosis as an important concession: the grievances themselves are real, even though the political figure who harnessed them belongs to the billionaire Ownership Class that the book identifies as the central elite. Sanders therefore helps separate a population’s experience of abandonment from the claim that Trump represents an escape from elite rule.

That distinction is crucial to the book’s account of political deception. Donald Trump is described as a senior member of the economic elite and as a member of the 1%, yet he presents himself as an opponent of the political elite. Sanders’s explanation clarifies why that performance could succeed: anger toward people who had been ignored supplied the emotional material, while Trump redirected it toward a manufactured conflict with liberal political and media elites. The book’s broader argument is that the division between conservative and liberal elites conceals the power of the Ownership Class rather than overturning it.

Warning About Authoritarian Power

Sanders’s second intervention concerns Trump’s political endgame. He argues that Trump seeks to lead a nation that has moved substantially toward authoritarianism, with a president exercising extraordinary powers beyond those provided by the Constitution or supported by American political values. In this formulation, the danger is institutional as well as personal: the presidency itself could be enlarged while democratic restraints are weakened.

The warning also joins executive power to economic policy. Sanders states that defeating authoritarianism and defeating policies benefiting the 1% at everyone else’s expense require the same political response: massive grassroots resistance. The book consequently presents resistance not as a symbolic rejection of Trump alone, but as a necessary collective answer to the concentration of political authority and economic advantage.

Contrast With the Book’s Trump Analysis

Sanders’s interpretation stands against the book’s account of Trump as a member of both the overarching elite and the conservative political and media elite. The apparent quarrel between Trump and liberal elites is characterized as a pseudo-conflict, while the underlying class structure remains intact. Sanders’s remarks supply a restrained political vocabulary for this argument: forgotten citizens can be genuinely angry, yet their anger can still be captured by a leader whose wealth and position place him among the people’s supposed adversaries.

This contrast also clarifies why the book rejects the idea that Trump’s victory was anti-elite or revolutionary. It cites Trump’s inherited wealth, including an inheritance of around $300 million from his father, and his starting position in his father’s real-estate company in 1974, where he reportedly began with $40 million. Against that background, Sanders’s account of elite abandonment becomes a warning about misdirected resentment rather than an endorsement of Trump’s self-presentation.

Resistance and Political Possibility

The book places Sanders’s call for grassroots resistance within a larger struggle over the meaning of political action. Its argument identifies Trump’s insurgency with a return to far-right conservative rule, racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy, while treating the victory as an opportunity for the radical left to advance positive liberty, meritocracy, and social capitalism. Sanders’s appeal to organized resistance therefore supports the book’s insistence that collective action must confront both authoritarian expansion and the economic power of the 1%.

His role is consequently limited but decisive. Sanders does not resolve the book’s political conflict, and the evidence does not present a later action or outcome for him. Instead, his statements provide an interpretive hinge: they acknowledge why Trump attracted support, identify the authoritarian danger in Trump’s project, and insist that only broad popular resistance can oppose a presidency and an economic order serving the 1%.