BERNIE SANDERS: RIDE PRIVATE JETS? I DO IT FOR THE PEOPLE. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a socialist, came in for a lot of ridicule recently when the Washington Free Beacon reported that he spent $221,723 in campaign money on private jets for his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). And that is just this year so far.
Sanders, of course, is legendary for attacking the very rich on behalf of the working people of America. “We will not accept a rigged economy where working people struggle while billionaires become richer,” he said on the tour. But, as the Washington Free Beacon reported, “Sanders has had no issue splurging on private jets far beyond the means of working people, even as he has ramped up his attacks on the rich.”
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Flying on private jets — and Sanders has spent millions of campaign dollars on private air travel during previous campaigns — is not a topic Sanders would like to talk about. But he was finally pressed for comment on the matter when he appeared Wednesday on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier.
When Baier asked how Sanders pushes back on the reports of his private plane spending, Sanders at first tried to change the subject. “When is the last time you saw Donald Trump, during a campaign mode, at National Airport?” he asked, using the old name of Washington’s Reagan National Airport. Baier responded that Trump is “not fighting the oligarchy” — in Sanders’s world, Trump is the oligarchy. And during the campaign, of course, Trump used his own plane, a Boeing 757, for political travel.
So, Sanders had to explain himself. “You run a campaign and you do three or four or five rallies in a week,” he said. “The only way you can get around to talk to 30,000 people. Think I’m going to be sitting on a waiting line at United, waiting while 30,000 people are waiting? That’s the only way you can get around. No apologies for that. That’s what campaign travel is about. We have done it in the past, and we’re going to do it in the future.”
Many super wealthy people defend their use of private planes by saying they are just so busy and have so many obligations that they simply can’t spend the time millions of Americans spend waiting at airports, going through TSA, and in general suffering as security and delays eat up hours of their time. For his part, Sanders says there are too many people depending on him at “three or four or five” rallies a week for him to get into the dreaded line at Reagan airport.
Sanders has long had a taste for private jets. In the 2016 campaign, for example, after his own campaign to win the Democratic nomination failed, he wanted a private jet when he traveled to campaign for nominee Hillary Clinton. In February 2019, as Sanders was gearing up to run again, Politico reported: “In his campaign launch video last week, Bernie Sanders singled out the fossil fuel industry for criticism, listing it among the special interests he planned to take on. But in the final months of the 2016 campaign, Sanders repeatedly requested and received the use of a carbon-spewing private jet for himself and his traveling staff when he served as a surrogate campaigner for Hillary Clinton.” And then: “In the two years following the presidential election, Sanders continued his frequent private jet travel, spending at least $342,000 on the flights.”
Sanders’s requests for private jets were so frequent that they at first irritated and then angered Clinton staffers. Later, after Clinton’s defeat, some bitterly denounced him. “I’m not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush D.C. office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe,” Zac Petkanas, the Clinton campaign’s director of rapid response, told Politico.
In the Fox News interview, Sanders spent most of his time staying relentlessly on-message. His message is basically that billionaires are destroying American democracy, and the government should take more and more of their money. “You have billionaires in both political parties determine what legislation gets to the floor and who is the candidate,” Sanders told Baier. “We have a corrupt campaign finance system. Billionaires in both political parties are calling the tunes. The American people understand that. … This is a government of the billionaire class for the billionaire class.”
And so on. By the way, billionaires do one other thing that shows they are a very special class: They fly around a lot in private jets. Just like Sanders.