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In New York, Zohran Mamdani showed how it’s done: ‘identity politics’ can win elections | Nesrine Malik
It is inevitable that too much will be laid on Zohran Mamdani’s head. So large is the vacuum on the left of politics that his victory will occupy an outsized space for progressives beyond New York City. And so, before I lay too much on his head myself, some caveats. New York is a specific place. It has a specific demographic and economic profile. And Mamdani is a man of a specific background, racial, political and religious. But with that out of the way, I think the successful practice of “identity politics” during his campaign offers some universal lessons.I put identity politics in quote marks because the term now means little that is universally agreed upon. Broadly, it has come to mean something derogatory, kind of in the same way that “wokeness” has. It increasingly has negative connotations: a political appeal to race or other markers of identity that is shallow, rooted in perpetual victimhood, focused only on representation and disconnected from material reality. Seen this way, identity politics is not about universal goals, such as lifting people out of poverty and so mobilising broad coalitions of voters, but simply about visibility.But identity politics as an organising political force has its origins in precisely the opposite idea. Coined by the Black feminist socialist organisation the Combahee River Collective in 1977, identity politics was defined as a path to a liberation that could only come about through the understanding that systems oppress many different people along the lines of their identity, and so could only be dismantled if all groups worked together. “We believe,” the collective declared, “that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity”, but that “we also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”That “simultaneous experience” is what I am talking about here. Mamdani tapped into that. He rooted his campaign solidly in the experience of being a New Yorker, and how the city needed to be made more affordable, then expanded that to include all the ways in which different groups live that experience. He released campaigning videos in Urdu, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic, and consistently made all of them about a retail economic message: rent freezes, free buses, universal childcare, making New York a place to raise your children and build small businesses. Then he threw in a bespoke little twist. In his Arabic message he quipped that something more controversial than his political message is his belief that the knafeh, an Arab dessert, is better on Steinway Street in Queens than it is in New Jersey. Talk about hitting a sweet spot.Including the languages of underrepresented identities is an exercise in enfranchisement. He quoted the Arabic phrase ana minkum wa alaikum – “I am of you and for you” – in his victory speech, and named those “forgotten by the politics of our city”, the “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties”.He combined that with being in the places that working-class people, many of whom are people of colour, occupy. Visiting those on the taxi ranks and working the late-night shifts, he forged a powerful metaphor of a city that is kept going by those who labour in the dark. And he drew that all together by bringing his own identity, as he himself put it, “into the light”. A Muslim who grew up in the shadows of Islamophobia, he suffered an outrageously racist campaign against him, but resisted the pressure to play down his identity in order to fit in, to succeed. “No longer will I live in the shadows,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThose shadows are vast and, in this moment, encompass not only Mamdani, but huge swathes of people across all identities living under a regime of fear, economic struggle, deportations, suffocation of freedom of speech and an entire political establishment that has made bullying and cruelty its modus operandi. The coalition that Mamdani built, across all ethnicities, became about closing the yawning gap between people and power. In a revealing contrast to establishment Democrat politicians, when Mamdani was heckled last week over his position on Gaza, he did not say, as Kamala Harris did when she was heckled, “I’m speaking”. Mamdani smiled and said: “I want you to be able to afford this city too, my brother.”But there is something else about Mamdani’s approach that reveals how identity done right is generative. His is a politics that is forged and defined by being on the margins, but not as a single individual who wants to escape alone. Those who see their identity as a way to become part of an establishment that can then hold them up as exemplars of inclusive politics will always have limited appeal, and therefore limited success as changemakers. To see those margins, racial, economic and political, as spaces in which a majority can be mobilised, as spaces where people don’t want to hear about victimhood but justice, is to create coalitions and escape together. It is to reveal to the voting public that the problem is not particular racisms or prejudices, but an entire system that excludes all those who don’t have capital in all its forms.That message resonates with the college-educated white parents who are struggling with childcare costs, as well as the immigrant taxi driver struggling to pay rent. But above all, ironically, Mamdani exemplified the virtues of the American “melting pot”, a nation of immigrants at the sharp end of capitalism who together increasingly recognise all the ways in which the country is failing to live up to its ideals. All the ways in which Mamdani has been fought, not only by the right but by his own party, prove that American liberal politics has long lost its way in its service to capital and its preening approach to identity. What works in New York doesn’t necessarily map perfectly on to the rest of the US and beyond, but Mamdani’s win is a reminder that the people, whatever their identities, all want one thing – leaders who are of them, and for them.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More
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Trump news at a glance: eight Democrats join Republicans to advance funding bill
The first step toward ending the US government shutdown has been made after a handful of Democrats and dozens of Republicans voted to advance legislation in the Senate.The funding bill will still need to be deliberated and passed by the Senate and approved by the House to end what has been the longest government shutdown in US history.The compromise bill received exactly the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate, with almost all Republicans voting in favor along with eight Democrats, many of whom are moderates or serving their final terms.But the measure leaves out the healthcare subsidies that Democrats had demanded for weeks, leading most Democrats to reject it.Here are the key stories at a glance:Senate advances funding bill to end longest US government shutdown in historyThe Senate on Sunday made significant progress towards ending the longest US government shutdown in history, narrowly advancing a compromise bill to reauthorize funding and undo the layoffs of some employees.But most Democratic senators rejected it, as did many of the party’s lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which will have to vote to approve it before the government can reopen.Read the full storyUS flight cancellations riseFlight cancellations and delays are set to grow as airline passengers across the US spent the weekend grappling with those issues at major airports nationwide after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated a 4% reduction in air traffic in response to the ongoing federal government shutdown.If the shutdown continues, the FAA has instructed airlines to cut 6% of flights on Tuesday – and to do the same to 10% by 14 November.Read the full storyTrump weighs giving Americans $2,000 from tariff revenuesDonald Trump on Sunday mused about giving most Americans $2,000 funded by tariff revenues collected by the president’s administration – an evident bid to rally public support on the issue.“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday. For such a plan to take effect, congressional approval would likely be required.Read the full storyTrump shares false claim about Obama Donald Trump promoted the false claim that Barack Obama has earned $40m in “royalties linked to Obamacare” in a post to his 11 million followers on Truth Social on Sunday.The fictional claim that the former US president receives royalty payments for the use of his name to refer to the Affordable Care Act, which he signed into law in 2010, has been repeatedly debunked since at least 2017.Read the full storyTrump attacks BBC after Tim Davie resignationDonald Trump on Sunday attacked the BBC after its chief resigned in a scandal over the editing of a documentary about the US president.Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and the head of BBC News resigned after a former adviser to the corporation accused it of “serious and systemic” bias in its coverage of issues including Trump, Gaza and trans rights.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that “very dishonest people” had “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election”.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, has reportedly said that she is “much, much happier” after the Trump administration transferred her to a minimum-security federal prison in Texas, according to emails obtained by NBC News.
Donald Trump became the first sitting president in nearly a half-century at a regular-season NFL game, attending the Washington Commanders’ contest against the Detroit Lions on Sunday. There were boos from large sections of fans in the stands – as well as scattered cheers.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 8 November. More - in US Politics
Senate advances funding bill to end longest US government shutdown in history
The Senate on Sunday made significant progress towards ending the longest US government shutdown in history, narrowly advancing a compromise bill to reauthorize funding and undo the layoffs of some employees.But the measure, which resulted from days of talks between a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, leaves out the healthcare subsidies that Democrats had demanded for weeks. Most Democratic senators rejected it, as did many of the party’s lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which will have to vote to approve it before the government can reopen.“This healthcare crisis is so severe, so urgent, so devastating for families back home, that I cannot in good faith support this [resolution] that fails to address the healthcare crisis,” said Democratic Senator majority leader Chuck Schumer.The bill received exactly the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate, with almost all Republicans voting in favor along with eight Democrats, many of whom are moderates or serving their final terms.“Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House, and they made clear over a period of weeks, including just this week, that this was as far as they would go as part of the shutdown talks,” said New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, a member of the group who is retiring after next year.“This was the only deal on the table.”In the 40 days since the shutdown began when the government’s funding authorization expired on 1 October, the Senate’s Republican leader John Thune held 14 votes on a bill approved on a near party line vote by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which would have extended funding through most of November.But no more than three Democrats ever voted in the affirmative, denying it the support it needed to proceed. The minority party demanded that any funding legislation also extend tax credits that lower premiums for Affordable Care Act health plans, which were created under Joe Biden and expire at the end of the year.Thune maintained that he would be willing to negotiate over those subsidies, but only once the government was reopened.“After 40 long days, I’m hopeful we can bring this shutdown to the end,” he said shortly before the vote was held on Sunday evening.“From the precarious situation we’re in with air travel to the fact that our staff have been working without pay for a full 40 days now, all of us, Republicans and Democrats who support this bill know that the time to act is now.”The compromise legislation authorizes government funding through 30 January 2026 and undoes the firings of federal workers that the White House carried out after the shutdown began. It also guarantees retroactive pay for furloughed federal workers and those who stayed on the job during the shutdown, and prevents further layoffs through January. Included in the compromise are three appropriations bill that will authorize spending through the 2026 fiscal year for the departments of agriculture and veterans affairs, among others.The compromise does not resolved the issue of the Affordable Care Act premiums, which one study forecast would jump by an average of 26% if the tax credits were allowed to expire.As part of the deal, Thune said he would allow a vote on a bill to deal with the credits by the second week of December. But even if it succeeds, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson has said he will not put such a measure on the floor.The compromise bill will now need to be approved by the House and signed by Donald Trump, which may take days. After advancing the legislation, the Senate adjourned until Monday morning, leaving the timing of further voting on the matter up in the air.Johnson has kept the House out of session since 19 September, in a bid to force Senate Democrats to vote for the GOP spending bill. Shortly after the Senate’s procedural vote on the compromise succeeded, the House told lawmakers to expect votes this week.But all signs point to a stormy reception for the bill in the chamber, particularly among Democrats.“America is far too expensive. We will not support spending legislation advanced by Senate Republicans that fails to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said. We will fight the GOP bill in the House of Representatives, where Mike Johnson will be compelled to end the seven-week Republican taxpayer-funded vacation.”Greg Casar, chair of the congressional Progressive Caucus, said: “A deal that doesn’t reduce health care costs is a betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them. Republicans want health care cuts. Accepting nothing but a pinky promise from Republicans isn’t a compromise – it’s capitulation.”Just before the Senate voted, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna called for Schumer to “be replaced”, saying he was “no longer effective”. “If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”Relegated to the minority in both chambers of Congress by voters after last year’s elections, Democrats seized on the lapse in government funding to make a stand on healthcare, long a signature issue of the party.In the more than five weeks that followed, polls showed the public believe the GOP was more to blame for the shutdown than the Democrats, and last Tuesday, the party swept off-year elections, in what Democratic leaders called a validation of their strategy in the funding fight.The weeks of unfunded government have taken a toll across the United States. More than 700,000 federal workers were furloughed, and hundreds of thousands more made to work without pay, leading to increasingly long lines at food banks and other social services nationwide as the missed paychecks piled up.At the start of November, the Trump administration moved to pause payments from the federal government’s largest food aid program for the first time ever, prompting an ongoing court fight.Transportation secretary Sean Duffy last week ordered a nationwide reduction in commercial air travel, saying air traffic controllers were facing unprecedented strain. More than 2,500 flights were canceled on Sunday, and Duffy said capacity would be slashed further on Tuesday if funding was not restored. More
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US Senate vote marks step towards ending federal shutdown
The US Senate on Sunday took a key vote on a bill that would end the record-setting federal government shutdown without extending the healthcare subsidies that Democrats have demanded.Senators began voting on Sunday night to advance House-passed stopgap funding legislation that Senate majority leader John Thune said would be amended to combine another short-term spending measure with a package of three full-year appropriations bills.The package would still have to be passed by the House of Representatives and sent to Donald Trump for his signature, a process that could take several days.Senate Democrats so far have resisted efforts to reopen the government, aiming to pressure Republicans into agreeing to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans, which expire at the end of the year. Thune said that, per the deal under consideration, the Senate would agree to hold a separate vote later on the subsidies.Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, told reporters that he would vote against the funding measure but suggested there could be enough Democratic support to pass it.“I am unwilling to accept a vague promise of a vote at some indeterminate time, on some undefined measure that extends the healthcare tax credits,” Blumenthal said.“The Senate might get a vote” on the health insurance credits, Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, said. “I’ll emphasize ‘might.’ But is Speaker Johnson gonna do anything? Is the president gonna do anything?”Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has previously said he would not hold a vote on a plan to extend the tax credits that make health insurance affordable for millions of Americans who are not insured through their employers.Two leading progressives in the Senate Democratic caucus were even more dismissive of the emerging compromise. “It’s a mistake,” Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told Punchbowl News. “It would be a policy and political disaster for Democrats to cave,” Bernie Sanders of Vermont said.Democrats in the House expressed their dismay. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, promised to fight the proposed legislation. “We will not support spending legislation advanced by Senate Republicans that fails to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We will fight the GOP bill in the House of Representatives,” Jeffries said in a statement.“A deal that doesn’t reduce health care costs is a betrayal of millions of Americans counting on Democrats to fight for them”, Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat who leads the House progressive caucus, wrote on X. “Republicans want health care cuts. Accepting nothing but a pinky promise from Republicans isn’t a compromise – it’s capitulation. Millions of families would pay the price.”“Unacceptable,” Florida congressman Maxwell Frost chimed in. “There are 189,000 people in my district who will be paying 50-300% more for the same, and in many cases worse, healthcare. I won’t do that to the people I represent. I’m a NO on this ‘deal.’”Democrats outside Washington denounced the compromise as well. “Pathetic. This isn’t a deal. It’s a surrender. Don’t bend the knee!” California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, wrote on social media.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSunday marked the 40th day of the shutdown, which has sidelined federal workers and affected food aid, parks and travel, while air traffic control staffing shortages threaten to derail travel during the busy Thanksgiving holiday season late this month. Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, said the mounting effects of the shutdown have pushed the chamber toward an agreement. He said the final piece, a new resolution that would fund government operations into late January, would also reverse at least some of the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers.“Temperatures cool, the atmospheric pressure increases outside and all of a sudden it looks like things will come together,” Tillis told reporters. Should the government remain closed for much longer, economic growth could turn negative in the fourth quarter, especially if air travel does not return to normal levels by Thanksgiving, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett warned on the CBS Face the Nation show. Thanksgiving falls on 27 November this year.Americans shopping for 2026 Obamacare health insurance plans are facing a more than doubling of monthly premiums on average, health experts estimate, with the pandemic-era subsidies due to expire at the end of the year. Republicans rejected a proposal on Friday by Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to vote to reopen the government in exchange for a one-year extension of tax credits that lower costs for plans under the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare.Adam Schiff, a Democratic California senator, said on Sunday he believed Trump’s healthcare proposal was aimed at gutting the ACA and allowing insurance companies to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.“So the same insurance companies he’s railing against in those tweets, he is saying: ‘I’m going to give you more power to cancel people’s policies and not cover them if they have a pre-existing condition,’” Schiff said on ABC’s This Week program. More
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The Democrats are riding a blue wave, but major questions remain for a divided party
All of a sudden, the Democrats seem to be on a roll.
Last week’s elections in the United States gave the party the boost it has been desperately seeking since Donald Trump recaptured the White House in 2024 and sent the party into a tailspin.
Democrats won governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, and Zohran Mamdani stormed to victory in the New York City mayor’s race in open defiance of Trump.
Perhaps most significant for the Democrats’ chances in the 2026 midterm elections, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 passed by a wide margin. This measure is intended to reconfigure the state’s electorates counterbalance Republican gerrymandering in Texas and other states.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings continue to slump in national polls amid a prolonged government shutdown.
But if a week is a long time in politics, the next US elections (due in November 2026) are an eternity away.
And there are still serious challenges ahead for the Democratic Party as it seeks not just to win back control of the House of Representatives, but to resist Trump’s attempts to recast the country in his own authoritarian and reactionary image.
Some Democrats have questioned whether Mamdani’s success in New York can be replicated on a national scale.
Alejandro Granadillo/APWhat went right for the Democrats?
Before looking at the challenges, though, it is important to understand what led to last week’s Democratic successes.
Trump governs through crisis and chaos. His pitch to supporters is an existential one, explicitly cultivating white grievance among those voters who feel they have been left behind. He argues that the US political system is so broken, only he can resolve it through extraordinary measures.
Yet, there is a significant gap between Trump’s vision of the United States, and the reality of life for Americans (including many Trump voters).
On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump promised his administration would down bring prices “starting on day one”.
But early evidence from Trump’s tariffs indicates US companies and consumers are bearing the costs. Prices have continued to rise on certain goods, such as apparel, furniture, food items and cars. A recent survey found 74% of respondents had experienced an average increase of monthly household costs by at least US$100 (A$150).
Disappointed expectations are a potent political force that has spelled doom for politicians well before Trump.
The optics couldn’t be worse at the moment, either. Hosting a Great Gatsby-themed party, a brash and boastful display of wealth, at a time when federal food aid is about to end for 42 million citizens is not exactly a public relations coup.
The Democrats that won last week came from different ends of the party’s political spectrum, but there was one thing that united them: a focus on affordability and the cost of living. And they all had a clear message: Trump’s policies are to blame.
This is adept and effective politics. Democrats are identifying the ways that Trump is failing to carry through on his promises, and have been increasingly ruthless in exposing them.
But there are limits to this strategy. To build sustainable electoral coalitions capable of not just winning office but of turning back the larger MAGA tide that swept to victory in 2024, the Democrats need to be able to construct a coherent and compelling vision of the future they want to create.
Can the Democrats unify on a national scale?
The Democrats remain deeply divided over how to respond to Trump – and more broadly, divided over what the party stands for.
The split among Senate Democrats on whether to allow a vote to reopen the government without getting the assurances on health insurance subsidies they’ve been holding out for exemplifies this.
Are the Democrats going to lean into being a moderate and centrist party? Or will they move further left and embrace more progressive positions – those championed by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Mamdani – even if these are to the left of the electorate?
Many left-leaning Democrats want the current leadership – among them, Senator Chuck Schumer – to step aside for more progressive, younger leaders.
J. Scott Applewhite/APIt is not a problem the party is having these debates. Political parties in the US have always been organisationally looser and ideologically broader than those elsewhere.
It is, however, unclear if the party has the institutional mechanisms to synthesise these strongly polarised perspectives into a consistent agenda and program that Democrats can present to a national electorate.
As some commentators have noted, it is relatively easy for Democrats to win low-turnout state and city-based elections without clarifying these matters. But winning a national election, or recapturing the US Senate, is a more difficult task.
Can the Democrats find a way to not just articulate opposition to Trump, but put forth of a common vision of America’s future embraced by these disparate wings of the party?
And how do they turn words into action?
When a political system is in crisis, it is not enough for progressives to repeat over and over what has gone wrong. They also need solutions – a positive case for what they want to achieve and a policy agenda to enact it. Then, they can build a new social coalition around a common sense of purpose.
It is all well and good to denounce Trump’s poor economic management, but will Democrats be able to implement strategies that deliver on their affordability promises?
For this to happen, the party has to agree on concrete plans to reinvigorate economic growth beyond the tech sector and ensure a fairer redistribution of the benefits of this growth. In addition, they’ll need to come together on the right balance of investment in the American people and infrastructure through government spending, and the need to reduce the US’ extraordinary debt levels.
To make things even more difficult, they’ll need to articulate how to achieve this with a Congress prone to partisan gridlock like never before in modern history. So far, the Democrats have no clear answers to these fundamental questions.
The Democrats’ challenge, therefore, is not just to repudiate Trump’s dark vision of America, but to put forward their own positive vision of what the future can be. Recent victories are encouraging, but a lack of this broader imaginative work so far is striking.
The Democrats have come closer to working out how to win – but still need an answer for an even more defining question: what do they want to win for? More
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Growth in global demand for ‘green’ office buildings slows amid Trump policies
The growth in global demand for “green” office buildings has slowed after Donald Trump’s assault on environmental protection policies caused a slump in interest in the US, according to a survey of construction industry professionals.Building occupiers and investors across North America and South America expressed significantly lower growth in demand for green commercial buildings, a shift that “seems to be in response to a change in US policy focus”, according to a survey of members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics). Reported demand across the rest of the world also fell, albeit not as sharply.Residential and commercial buildings together accounted for 34% of global carbon emissions in 2023, according to the UN Environment Programme. The majority of those emissions came from heating, cooling and powering buildings, although about a fifth came from construction.The UN said there was a “critical need for accelerated action in the buildings sector to meet global climate goals”. However, the Rics survey suggested global construction industry professionals were experiencing slower growth in demand.Green buildings can use a range of techniques to cut their environmental impact, ranging from using materials that reduce high-carbon concrete, to cutting water use, cutting heat lost through windows, and using renewable energy. Energy efficiency improvements in particular also help to cut operating costs.Nicholas Maclean, Rics’s acting president, said: “It seems to me that what we’re seeing at the moment might be a blip.“The people who are going to end up using these buildings want them to be sustainable. Everybody, frankly, knows this is the right thing to do.”He added that green office buildings tend to have a “competitive advantage” in attracting higher rents, because of demand from large-scale corporate tenants, in particular.There were still more US respondents to the survey who reported growth in interest in sustainable commercial buildings. However, the balance of building professionals across the continent reporting higher demand fell sharply, from 25% to 11%.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOutside North and South America, the balance reporting growth in demand was 40%, still down from 48% in 2021, the first year of the survey, but far above the US.Kisa Zehra, Rics’s sustainability analyst, said government policy and regulations have a “huge impact on the confidence of the market”. The Trump administration has made a concerted effort to dismantle a huge range of environmental protections put in place by Republican and Democratic predecessors, undermining confidence in green standards.Rics also highlighted a decline in the number of construction industry professionals who measured their projects’ embodied carbon, such as that emitted in making materials such as steel, glass and concrete, or in the construction process itself. Forty-six percent of construction professionals reported not measuring embodied carbon, up from 34% the year before. Only 16% of respondents said carbon measurement meaningfully informed material choices in project design. More
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Trump booed at Commanders NFL game before calling plays from Fox broadcast booth
Donald Trump became the first sitting US president in nearly 50 years to attend a regular-season NFL game when he dropped in on the Detroit Lions’ win over the Washington Commanders on Sunday.There were boos from large sections of fans, as well as scattered cheers, at the Commanders’ Northwest Stadium when Trump was shown on the screens late in the first half – and again when the president was introduced by the stadium announcer at halftime. The Washington DC area has strong Democratic support, while Trump’s cuts to the government have affected many workers in the vicinity of the Commanders’ stadium. Sunday was not the first time Trump has received a hostile reception from a Washington sports crowd: he was greeted with ‘lock him up’ chants at the Washington Nationals’ home stadium during the 2019 World Series.The jeering continued while Trump read an oath for members of the military to recite as part of an on-field ceremony during a break in the game.The president arrived at the stadium after the game had started. “I’m a little bit late,” Trump told reporters when he got off Air Force One. The plane had earlier completed a flyover of Northwest Stadium before landing.“We’re gonna have a good game. Things are going along very well. The country’s doing well. The Democrats have to open it up,” he said, a reference to the government shutdown.In the first quarter Lions receiver Amon-Ra St Brown celebrated a touchdown catch by doing the “Trump dance”, which athletes started performing last year.“I heard Trump was going to be [here],” St Brown said. “I don’t know how many times the president’s going to be at the game, so just decided to have some fun.”Lions quarterback Jared Goff said he had enjoyed seeing Air Force One’s flyover. “Awesome that he was here,” Goff said.Fox then gave the president nearly 10 minutes of airtime as he joined the broadcast booth, spoke about his high school football career and called some of the action in the third quarter. Asked how he thought the country was doing, the president answered somewhat dubiously that prices are going down for Americans. He also admitted he had not scored any touchdowns in high school, saying: “At least you realize I never tell a lie.”Trump is just the third sitting president to attend an NFL game during the regular season, according to the league, after Richard Nixon in 1969 and Jimmy Carter in 1978.According to a report by ESPN on Saturday, the White House has told the Commanders’ ownership group that Trump wants the team’s new stadium to bear his name.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They’re going to build a beautiful stadium. That’s what I’m involved in, we’re getting all the approvals and everything else,” Trump said during his Fox appearance. “And you have a wonderful owner, Josh [Harris] and his group. And you’re going to see some very good things.”Sunday’s visit was the latest in a series of high-profile appearances at sporting events by Trump, including the Ryder Cup, the Daytona 500 and the men’s final at tennis’s US Open.“We are honored to welcome President Trump to the game as we celebrate those who have served and continue to serve our country,” Commanders president Mark Clouse said. “The entire Commanders organization is proud to participate in the NFL’s league-wide Salute to Service initiative, recognizing the dedication and sacrifice of our nation’s veterans, active-duty service members, and their families this Sunday.”Trump was presumably unimpressed with the Commanders’ performance as they went down to a 44-22 defeat – he left the game early. More
