A lot of planning goes into assembling this newspaper each week. Cover stories, in particular, may be in the works for months. Typically, half a dozen or so are being reported, shaped, written or edited at any given moment. But sometimes we feel compelled to respond to the news of the day, which is why we decided to scrap our carefully laid plans this week and put Vermont’s senior U.S. senator on the cover — again.
Since Donald Trump won the presidential election in November, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been explaining to dumbstruck Democrats and Progressives his theory of why it happened. Postelection, he was all over the airwaves. Now he’s calling out — in simple language that people can understand — what Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk are doing to dismantle U.S. government agencies.
A loud and unrelenting critic of personal and corporate greed, Sanders has been sounding the alarm about America’s growing income inequality for 50 years. In 2025, no one in politics is more entitled to say “I told you so.” Weirdly, Sanders also seems to be the only guy out there actively motivating the left to get up, dust off and resume the fight. The “millionaires and billionaires” he’s always railed against have become the “oligarchy.”
We knew he was holding rallies over the weekend in Omaha, Neb. and Iowa City, Iowa, hoping to pressure Republicans in those two Congressional districts to vote against draconian budget cuts proposed by President Trump. Reporter Kevin McCallum had planned to watch a live stream of the events and write a news story about the ways in which Vermont’s federal delegation is opposing the current administration.
But last Wednesday, after discussing Sanders’ travel schedule, we decided to put Kevin on a plane and send him to the heartland to deliver an eyewitness account. We wanted to know: Can our 83-year-old firebrand senator, who was twice a major candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 2016 and 2020, still energize crowds outside Vermont, even when he’s not running for office? How is his message landing with Midwestern voters?
Fortunately, Kevin, who typically covers the Statehouse, embraced the last-minute assignment. His “weekend” of reporting started at 4 a.m. on Friday and involved driving for hours across frozen farmland and chatting up folks in subzero temps.
After Kevin described the enthusiasm he encountered — organizers in Omaha had to switch venues to accommodate a larger-than-expected crowd of 3,000-plus — news editor Matthew Roy decided on Saturday to swap out this week’s planned cover story and replace it with Kevin’s dispatch.
Our multitalented correspondent also took the photos that illustrate the piece. It helped that Lisa Gerlach, former Vermont lieutenant governor David Zuckerman’s erstwhile chief of staff, was there, working the weekend for Sanders. She led Kevin to a spot — close enough to the stage — to get some good shots of the senior senator.
Of course, our design team got involved in the last-minute switcheroo, reviewing the images Kevin was sending from the field and rearranging the paper’s “dummy” that shows where all the stories and ads will appear.
And, as luck would have it, Kevin and Sanders wound up on the same return flight. Not one for chitchat with journalists, the senator kept his distance from our intrepid reporter but seemed happy to pose for selfies with travelers at Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Ten years ago, candidate Sanders was flying around the U.S. in a chartered plane, speaking to crowds of 20,000. Back in “economy,” this man of the people — and the podium — is no less fired up.