Bernie Sanders Officially Kicks Off His 2020 Campaign With a Return to Brooklyn

Rumpled, rested, and ready to challenge “the most dangerous president in modern American history.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders arrives on stage before launching his 2020 presidential campaign in Brooklyn.Craig Ruttle/AP

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Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont kicked off his second presidential campaign at a rally Saturday just a few miles from the Brooklyn apartment where he grew up. He told the story of his family’s economic struggles and made the case that he is the candidate best suited to defeat President Donald Trump, whom he called “the most dangerous president in modern American history.”

“I want to welcome you to a campaign which says loudly and clearly that the underlying principles of our government will not be greed, hatred, and lies,” he said. “It will not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and religious bigotry. It will not be tax breaks for billionaires and efforts to throw millions off the health care that they currently have. This campaign is going to end all of that.”  

Sanders first announced his 2020 bid in a February 19 interview with Vermont Public Radio. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote then:

There was no listening tour, no exploratory committee, no “wait and see” teasing—just a bit of personal news and a very successful fundraising email.

But the aesthetics may be the only thing that haven’t changed. After a doomed but hard-fought challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016, he never really stopped running. He put out books, stumped for candidates, and watched, not impassively, as his proposal for a single-payer health care system was adopted into the Democratic mainstream. Sanders is now a meme and a movement, and he enters the presidential race as something that seemed impossible four years ago—a front-runner for the nomination

Watch the campaign kickoff below:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

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