‘You think I’m gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United?’ Sanders said in April
The way Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) tells it, the only way to fight the “oligarchs” is to travel like one.
The socialist senator’s campaign spent nearly $230,000 on chartered private jets during the second quarter of 2025 as the senator continued to jet-set the nation on his nationwide Fighting Oligarchy Tour, according to Federal Election Commission records released Tuesday. The campaign contracted exclusively with Ventura Jets, a New York company that specializes in providing private airfare for the same sort of corporate leaders that Sanders has demonized since launching his tour in February.
Sanders’s private jet budget during the second quarter of 2025 exceeded the nearly $222,000 his campaign spent on private airfare during the first three months of the year, and shows the Vermont senator remains unapologetic about living a millionaire’s lifestyle while propagating socialist rhetoric on the campaign trail against “oligarchs and corporate interests,” whom he’s equated to “heroin addicts” driven by greed.
“You think I’m gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United … while 30,000 people are waiting,” Sander said during a Fox News interview in May in response to a Washington Free Beacon report on his private jet spending during the first quarter of 2025. “You run a campaign, and you do three or four or five rallies in a week. [It is] the only way you can get around to talk to 30,000 people.”
“No apologies for that,” Sanders said about his private jet use. “That’s what campaign travel is about. We’ve done it in the past. We’re going to do it in the future.”
While Sanders may have skipped the waiting lines at United, it’s unclear if he afforded that same privilege to his campaign staffers. The Sanders campaign spent nearly $19,000 on United Airlines tickets during the second quarter of 2025, FEC records show.
The Sanders campaign did not return a request for comment.
Sanders has made 24 stops on his Fighting Oligarchy Tour since launching the initiative in February, with some events drawing upwards of 36,000 attendees. He’s been joined on the tour by other progressive darlings including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), whose campaign spent nearly $33,000 on commercial airfare during the second quarter of 2025, according to records released Tuesday.
Ocasio-Cortez has flown first-class to at least one stop on Sanders’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour. The New York progressive was photographed lounging in the first-class cabin on a JetBlue flight to Las Vegas on March 19, the New York Post reported. The next day, Ocasio-Cortez railed against the excesses of the “oligarchy” before she introduced Sanders during a stop on his tour in North Las Vegas.
“I don’t believe in health care, labor and human dignity because I’m a Marxist—I believe it because I was a waitress,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Because I worked double shifts to keep the lights on and because on my worst day, I know what it feels like to feel left behind. And I know that we don’t have to live like this.”
A few weeks later, on April 15, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders were pictured exiting a luxury Bombardier Challenger private jet that runs up to $15,000 per hour in Bakersfield, California, just hours before they both spoke at a “Fighting Oligarchy” event, Fox News reported.
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