(CNN) President-elect Donald Trump will find himself with an unlikely ally if he makes good on his promise to be an economic populist challenging corporate America, Bernie Sanders said Thursday.

"If Mr. Trump has the guts to stand up to those corporations," said the former Democratic presidential candidate, "he will have an ally with me."

The willingness on the part of Sanders, a longtime democratic socialist, to work with Trump on a series of economic issues underscores the unorthodox and strikingly populist message that Trump used during his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton.

Sanders, speaking with reporters at a Christian Science Monitor sponsored breakfast, said he is ready to embrace Trump on a handful of campaign promises. Those include protecting Social Security and Medicare, negotiating for lower drug prices, raising the minimum wage to $10, imposing tariffs on companies that ship jobs overseas, and re-regulating Wall Street by re-establishing Glass-Steagall.

On these issues, Trump's promises put the President-elect closer to Sanders than to most Republican Party leaders. House Speaker Paul Ryan, for example, would not commit to passing Trump's tariff plan during a Sunday appearance on CNN's "State of the Union with Jake Tapper," saying that the solution is reforming the US tax code, "not tariffs, not trade wars."

Read More