‘No Apologies’: Absentee Senator From Panem Objects to Flying With Hoi Polloi

“You think I’m going to be sitting on a waiting line,” Caesar Flickerman — excuse me, Bernie Sanders — asks, “at United, while 30,000 people are waiting?” Sanders appeared on Fox News to answer questions about his Fight The Oligarchy tour, and Bret Baier honed in on the $220K-plus that Sanders has spent on private jet travel. 

Sanders appeared to flounder, even though he knew the question had to be coming. “When was the last time you saw Trump at National Airport during a campaign?” Sanders asked, prompting Baier to quip, “Trump isn’t fighting the oligarchy.” Trump also owns his own plane, bought with his own funds, although his campaigns pay for the operating costs, of course. 

Here’s the absurd argument in its entirety, coming from someone who never worked an honest day in his life before going into radical-left activism and politics. For an old socialist, Sanders really gets defensive when questioned about his luxurious lifestyle:

This is good @BretBaier asks Bernie Sanders why he spent $221k on private jet travel during his “fighting the oligarchy tour.” Bernie says he’s too important to fly commercial and wait in line like normal people. “No apologies.” pic.twitter.com/2gVIhsz7A4

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 7, 2025

That’s a pretty poor response for a story that’s three weeks old. The Free Beacon first reported this on April 17, which also notes that Sanders has spent “millions” on private jets over the last several years even apart from “fighting the oligarchy”:

The revelation is just the latest contrast between his socialist rhetoric and his millionaire lifestyle. The Vermont senator used to rail against “millionaires and billionaires” in his speeches denouncing oligarchy—until he became a millionaire himself shortly before his 2020 presidential campaign, at which point he trained his fire on “billionaires.” During that campaign, fellow candidate Michael Bloomberg mocked Sanders for amassing wealth while preaching socialism for the masses. “The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses,” Bloomberg said in a 2020 debate.

Overall, Friends of Bernie Sanders, which manages the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, contracted three firms that charter jets: Cirrus Aviation Services, N-Jet, and Ventura Jets, according to the filings. Payments to those three firms accounted for nearly 75 percent of the campaign’s total transportation costs during that period. Sanders has spent millions of dollars in campaign funds on private jet travel over the years.

Most laughably, Sanders argues that his schedule of “four to five events a week” requires private travel, paid for by either those who resent the wealthy or the wealthy themselves who don’t want any more intrusions in Panem. Does Sanders realize that business travelers accomplish this via commercial airlines thousands of times a day? 

And why in the world is a sitting US Senator doing four or five rallies a week to “fight the oligarchy,” or shave the whales, or protect the lotus-bottomed leaping lizard? Doesn’t Sanders already have a job where he supposedly can make a difference for any and all issues? If Sanders wanted to go on a perpetual campaign, he should have stepped aside for someone else to fill that seat who has more interest in using it. 

However, that has been Sanders’ lifetime pattern. He doesn’t actually do anything; he just gets a lot of people to support his lifestyle while he agitates for change. Even when being handed a seat in the US Senate, he’d rather do “four or five events a week” on the road, traveling luxuriously on other people’s money, talking rather than doing. The Bernie Sanders/AOC “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour is nothing more than a vacation tour funded by fools. What has it actually done, or even proposed, other than regurgitated progressive-socialist agenda items that Sanders won’t even bother to push on Capitol Hill? 

Ah, but you see, Bernie’s a man of the people. Except for all you stinky people at the airport, apparently.