Bernie Sanders warns of ‘extraordinary danger’ facing U.S. under Trump at LA rally

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told a crowd of thousands at a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday that the U.S. was facing a moment of “extraordinary danger” as he criticized the political, economic and social policies of President Donald Trump.

Sanders, who also dropped by the music festival Coachella over the weekend, has been criss-crossing the U.S. to speak out against the new Republican administration.

“We are living in a moment of extraordinary danger,” he said, “and how we respond to this moment will not only impact our lives but will impact the lives of our kids and future generations.”

On the latest stop of his national “Fight Oligarchy” tour, the lawmaker criticized what he sees as Trump’s efforts to advance the interests of billionaire businesspeople over those of the working class.

“I’m no longer talking about how we’re moving to oligarchy,” Sanders told the crowd. “I’m talking about how we are living today in an oligarchic form of society.”

The same night but on the opposite coast, Trump attended the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the Kaseya Center in Miami, where the crowd erupted in applause as he entered and shouted chants of “U.S.A.”

He told reporters on his way back to the White House that he felt validated by the reception.

“It says we’re doing a good job,” Trump said on Air Force One early Sunday morning. “If we weren’t doing a good job, we’d get the opposite.”

The tone was starkly different at Sanders’ rally earlier Saturday, which his team said was his largest yet with some 36,000 supporters in attendance. Musical icons Joan Baez and Neil Young were among the performers, in an event that lasted for over five hours.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., another leading Trump critic who has been joining Sanders on the tour, said at the rally that corporate interests and lobbyists have an outsize influence on modern American life, driving wealth inequality and making it increasingly challenging for workers to get by.

“The feeling of the water rising up to our throats, the impossibility to afford anything easily, the fear of speaking up, the deeply bitter and toxic division driven more by algorithms on social media than individual thought, the crumbling of our rights and protections,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “understand that all of this is what it means and what it feels like to be governed by billionaires.”

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez will make additional stops on the tour this week in Idaho, California and Montana.