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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Democrats are angry, disillusioned over failure to stand up to Trump, Musk

By Maeve Reston Washington Post

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. – It’s more than a year before Democrats will have a chance to find their way out of the political wilderness in the midterm elections, but voters turned out in droves Thursday to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., rail against the government-slashing policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Waiting in a line that snaked around a large North Las Vegas park, many said they came looking to the two progressive, populist leaders for direction – a strategy to push back against the Trump administration’s moves at a time when they don’t see the Democratic Party offering one.

“We want to hear what the plans are – are we just going to be sitting on our behinds, talking a lot? Or are we actually going to be doing something?” said Leanna Terrell, a 75-year-old retired Navy intelligence officer who attended Thursday’s rally with a half-dozen girlfriends whom she met while volunteering for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign last year. “I’m scared to death for my country.”

As President Donald Trump has issued rapid-fire executive orders, presided over mass firings of federal employees and mapped out potential cuts to once-untouchable programs like Social Security, Democrats have struggled to coalesce around one message.

As Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez travel across Western states on their “fighting oligarchy” tour, they are channeling the anger and frustration many Democrats feel as they watch Trump delegate enormous power to Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla who was his top donor during the 2024 campaign. Frustration with party leadership came to a head late last week when Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and eight other Democratic senators caved to GOP demands by backing Republican spending legislation to avoid a government shutdown.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, rooted his 2020 presidential campaign in his desire to dismantle a “corrupt” political system dominated by big money and the idea that “the people” should take on the powerful.

That message has found new resonance in the past two months as Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service has overseen efforts to slash government services and benefits that many lower- and middle-class Americans rely on as the GOP looks for savings to pay for Trump’s proposed tax cuts, which will predominantly benefit the wealthy.

Terrell and her friends credited Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez with being the loudest voices willing to take on the president. They offered a dismal assessment of the leadership of the Democratic Party, including Schumer.

“Confusion. Fear. Fear of making decisions,” Terrell said of the state of her party.

“They are just continuing to play like this is a regular political climate,” her friend Shaunda Necole, a 47-year-old writer, interjected. “The house is on fire and coming down. We can’t continue watching it burn. There is no business as usual.”

During the 2020 campaign, Democrats selected Joe Biden over Sanders as the party’s nominee in part because Biden was seen as someone who could unify the country and work across the aisle to get things done after the chaos and division that defined Trump’s first term.

But the mood of Democrats has shifted dramatically, especially since Trump has returned to the White House. In a recent CNN poll, 57% of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents said Democrats should mainly work to stop the Republican agenda. That marks a major shift from September 2017, when 74% said the party should work with Republicans to try to get some Democratic ideas into legislation.

In that same poll, the party’s overall favorability among Americans slipped to a record low of 29%, going back to 1992, compared with 36% for the Republican Party. Just 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents report a favorable view of their own party – a drop of 18 points from the start of Biden’s administration in 2021.

The desire for Democrats to push back at all costs was apparent in the backlash to Schumer last week after he reversed himself and said he would vote for the GOP bill to fund the government. The New York Democrat had said he feared that shuttering the federal government could lead to “DOGE on steroids” – potentially allowing the Trump administration to make even deeper cuts to services. But it infuriated many Democrats, underscoring the vacuum of leadership in the party.

That still-rippling anger was evident in the North Las Vegas crowd on Thursday when Ocasio-Cortez voiced a desire in her speech for a “Democratic Party that fights harder for us, too.”

She praised Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., who spoke earlier at the rally, and other Nevada House Democrats for voting against the Republican spending bill “that cuts billions from programs for the working class,” while “other Democrats caved.” At the mention of the bill, some in the crowd shouted for Schumer to resign.

“We need more like them with the courage to brawl for the working class,” she said of Nevada House Democrats. “I want you to look at every level of office around and support brawlers who fight, because those are the ones who can actually win against Republicans.”

Sanders acknowledged the anxiety in Las Vegas and other parts of the country about what he described as the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the federal government. But he added that “despair is not an option” and said Democrats must also offer a different vision while taking on Trump “every step of the way.”

“Real change only occurs when ordinary people at the grassroots level stand up against oppression and injustice and fight back,” Sanders said. “What I believe from the bottom of my heart is that the American people do not want to see a handful of billionaires running the country.”

Many of the voters who came to the rally said they were stunned and dispirited by the speed at which the Trump administration has been firing federal employees and cutting back government services.

Lenward Worsham, an 85-year-old Democrat who supported Biden, said the rally was the first political event that he had ever attended. But he said he trusted Sanders – and was trying to get some clarity on whether his Social Security and military disability benefits were at risk.

“I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true; there’s so much false information out there,” he said. “I’ve been voting Democrat, so I want to see where they are really coming from. Because everyone is saying the Democrats can’t make up their mind about anything.”

Roland Daniels, a 58-year-old mortgage banker, said he couldn’t understand Schumer’s decision last week and decided to attend the rally in part because he wants to see “if new leaders emerge.”

“That was the only leverage they had,” he said of the budget vote. “Now we have nothing.”

William Cox, an 80-year-old veteran and retired letter carrier wearing an “AOC” T-shirt, said he had been giving the Democratic Party recurring donations for years, but he recently switched so that his donation would go directly to Ocasio-Cortez. Schumer, he said, “acts as though there is no crisis.”

“There is a crisis,” Cox said. “I’m a student of history, and I studied how Hitler took over Germany. He was elected. Then he started issuing decrees and putting loyalists – and it really scares me that Trump might be doing the same thing.”

Melanie Clarke, a 56-year-old former social worker, and her husband, Ben, a retired fire captain, said they took “a little break” from politics after the 2024 election – and deliberately stopped watching national news. But the upheaval in recent weeks led them to turn out for Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday. Ben Clarke said he believes Democrats aren’t focusing on the most important things that Trump is doing and have gotten distracted by Musk.

“They talk about Elon Musk losing money,” he said. “Who cares? Who cares? I want to know what Trump is doing to the VA.”

“It’s strange for me to watch politics right now,” Melanie Clarke said. “I think (the Democrats) really need to motivate young people and give them hope. They need to get ahead of things and they need to make the Democratic Party feel proud and powerful about their message.”

But, she said, “they can’t get off defense.”