Bernie Sanders: The Socialist Who Scammed America – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

It’s been a busy few weeks for Bernie Sanders, traveling around America on his Fighting Oligarchy tour. The message is clear: billionaires are bad, the economy is rigged, and the people must be empowered. Crowds roar, fists raised in solidarity. The same speeches. The same outrage. The same thunderous applause. The same garbage.

While Sanders decries wealth inequality and corporate greed, he zigzags across the country in the ultimate symbol of elite privilege: a private jet. Not once. Not in an emergency. Just this past quarter, his campaign spent more than $220,000 on private air travel, an expense completely at odds with the populist, working-class image he’s spent decades cultivating. (RELATED: Bernie Sanders and AOC Go Hunting for Oligarchs)

And that’s just the start.

This is the man who once made a career out of attacking “millionaires and billionaires.” Then, when he became a millionaire, he quietly dropped one of those words. Now it’s just the billionaires who are the problem. His wealth, you see, is different. It’s justified. Sanders wrote a bestselling book, after all. However, if we’re being perfectly honest here, book sales alone don’t explain the numerous houses, private jet travel, and a campaign bank account that bleeds like a hedge fund.

The man who preaches frugality lives like the system’s biggest beneficiaries. If that feels hard to square, you’re not alone. As Michael Bloomberg once remarked: “The best-known socialist in the country is a millionaire with three houses.” Sanders didn’t deny it. That’s because he couldn’t. He simply muttered something about one of the homes being a summer camp on Lake Champlain. Apparently, in Bernie’s weird world, lakefront property doesn’t count if you don’t call it a mansion.

It’s a pattern that’s become impossible to ignore. The senator from Vermont isn’t just out of touch; he has become a parody of his own populist message. The lavish lifestyle. The ever-shifting definitions of who qualifies as a threat to democracy. In 2016, the problem was anyone who was wealthy. In 2020, it was just the ultra-wealthy. In 2025, it’s everyone who can afford a lifestyle he obviously enjoys but pretends not to.

On stage, he speaks in absolutes about the need to dismantle the oligarchy. Offstage, he charters flights through firms like Cirrus Aviation, N-Jet, and Ventura Jets, spending millions in campaign funds over the years while claiming to stand in solidarity with the working class. During his current tour alone, those firms accounted for nearly 75 percent of his total transportation costs. You don’t need to be a Wall Street analyst to see what’s happening here.

Also, it’s important to remember that this is a man who also accepted donations from health insurance and pharmaceutical executives, the very industries he told voters were corrupt and should be shut out of politics. When ABC News uncovered those contributions back in 2019, Sanders called on his rivals to disavow those donors while quietly pocketing the cash himself.

What’s so infuriating is not just the hypocrisy; it’s the sanctimony. Sanders is a full-blown brand.

The oligarch he fights today is Musk; tomorrow, it’ll be someone else. But never himself. When pressed on his wealth, he gets defensive. “I don’t really give a damn about money,” he told the podcaster Lex Fridman last year, before explaining that he drives an old car, wears a solar-powered watch, and lives in “middle-class” homes. Three of them. In Vermont, D.C., and Lake Champlain. This would be laughable if it weren’t so dishonest.

Sanders sells a story of righteous poverty while living in luxury that most Americans can only dream of. And yet he continues to speak as though he’s scraping by, still the working-class kid from a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn. He’s not. Far from it.

Of course, he’s well aware of this fact. In the same interview with Fridman, Sanders even admitted, “It’s a very easy trap to fall into — you can get separated from ordinary people and their struggles.” No kidding. What the oligarch-opposing octogenarian fails to grasp, or more likely refuses to acknowledge, is that the trap isn’t just about losing touch. It’s about exploiting the idea of being in touch in the first place. The illusion that he’s still a transparent representative for the people, flying Spirit Airlines, living a humble existence, untouched by power or comfort, is exactly that: an illusion. It’s nothing more than political theater. And it’s all a lie.

When a man who preaches against excess begins to embody it, and when his followers cheer anyway, we’re witnessing a complete breakdown of political accountability. Sanders’s defenders will say the jet flights are for efficiency. The homes are not as spectacular as people with eyes and functioning brains think they are. That the donations were a mistake. That the message matters more than the messenger.

They’re wrong.

And here’s the most important point of all: Bernie Sanders is a far bigger fraud than Donald Trump ever was or ever could be. For all his bombast, the president never pretended to be poor. He didn’t hide his ambition behind moral purity. He flaunted his wealth and made no apologies for it. Sanders, on the other hand, lived and lives like a king while preaching austerity.

Trump sold success. Sanders sold virtue, and then quietly cashed in.

The left loves to accuse Trump of being a fake and a phony, but their hero is the real trickster. The revolution doesn’t fly private. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to stop pretending it does

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