US Politics

For someone who exudes positive energy and seldom stops smiling, Zohran Mamdani certainly does provoke a lot of negative reactions.“He’s not who you think he is,” one TV ad glowered over gloomy images of the 34-year-old state assemblymember who is the clear frontrunner for New York City mayor. The ad doesn’t make clear precisely what the supposed disconnect is, but the tagline clearly is meant to give voters pause.“Never ran anything,” former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo charged, as he dissed his opponent on Fox News. “There’s no time for on-the-job training when any given morning, God forbid, you could have a mass murder or a terrorist attack.” Cuomo’s campaign yanked an ad that went further, using racist stereotypes to depict Mamdani supporters.And the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has been on an anti-Mamdani run for many weeks, churning out opinion pieces like this one from conservative columnist Peggy Noonan: “New York, You’ve Been Warned.” Or this one from Journal editorial board member Joseph Sternberg: “Sorry Republicans, There’s No Silver Lining to a Mamdani Win.”Another Murdoch-controlled newspaper, the New York Post, has not confined its views to the opinion pages but rather shouted them on its tabloid front pages. “SCAMDANI”, read one cover story, with a subheading quoting Mayor Eric Adams calling the state assemblymember a “snake oil salesman”.The pro-Trump billionaire Bill Ackman has warned New Yorkers that Mamdani’s personality is a fraud. “The whole thing is an act,” Ackman posted on X after the mayoral debate last month. “After watching him recreate his fake smile, your skin will start to crawl.” Ackman gave $1m to the anti-Mamdani effort through the Super Pac Defend NYC, while former mayor Mike Bloomberg has contributed more than that to efforts to thwart Mamdani’s rise; Bloomberg gave $1.5m to a pro-Cuomo Super Pac, after spending millions to help Cuomo in June’s primary.But if you ignore the ads, the headlines and the social media posts, another story emerges, as researchers from the Harvard Institute of Politics found when they spoke to young people during the recent early-voting period.“I think my life could really improve if he wins,” enthused one young woman, quoted in an ABC News story about the Harvard focus group. Another respondent compared him in one respect to Donald Trump: “There’s no flip-flopping.”And another approvingly described Mamdani as “badass”.The democratic socialist holds a double-digit lead in the race and right now looks like a shoo-in.It certainly feels that way to this New Yorker. I live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, an area that split its vote in the Democratic primary between Cuomo and Mamdani, and I also spend a lot of time on a university campus. What I’ve noticed is that Mamdani energizes people and while some of that reaction is skeptical, a lot of the people I encounter – from students to seniors – want to give the newcomer a chance.New York City, after all, is unaffordable for too many, so Mamdani’s relentless focus on the cost of rent and groceries has struck a nerve. Mamdani’s embrace of his Muslim faith, his advocacy for Gaza and his willingness to stand up for immigrants has solidified his appeal.There’s a clarity about it that stands in sharp contrast to most Democratic politicians, noted Astead Herndon, editorial director at Vox who wrote a recent New York Times magazine cover story titled The Improbable, Audacious and (So Far) Unstoppable Rise of Zohran Mamdani.“He works from the premise of his beliefs,” Herndon said on CNN. “A lot of Democrats … have mastered this triangulation dance … where it feels like sometimes, they’re trying to say nothing.” And what’s more, since the primary, his campaign has become more inclusive, as he reaches out to constituencies and powerful figures who have had serious doubts about him. He’s won at least some of them over.Others, of course, will never be won over, but are becoming resigned to the reality of a Mayor Mamdani.Governor Kathy Hochul, whose political instincts are well-honed and practical, endorsed Mamdani in mid-September despite significant policy differences. (At a rally in Queens, chants of “tax the rich” interrupted Hochul’s speech and the Times described the progressive crowd’s response to the centrist governor as “tepid”.)Hochul carried on, though, and got a better reaction when she praised the candidate for refusing to “get down in the gutter” with his many critics, especially those who try to weaponize his faith or ethnicity.Instead, Hochul said: “He rises up with grace and courage and grit.”Hochul is expected to run for re-election next year.She surely has calculated that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have the Democratic mayor of New York City in her corner. And there is little doubt who that will be.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist covering US media, politics and culture. More

The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide.The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap.Using Federal Reserve data from 1989 to 2022, researchers also calculated that the top 1% of households gained 101 times more wealth than the median household during that time span and 987 times the wealth of a household at the bottom 20th percentile of income. This translated to a gain of $8.35m per household for the top 1% of households, compared with $83,000 for the average household during that 33-year period.Meanwhile, over 40% of the US population, including nearly 50% of children, are considered low-income, with family earnings that are less than 200% of the national poverty line.When pitting the US against 38 other higher-income countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US has the highest rate of relative poverty, second-highest rate of child poverty and infant mortality, and the second-lowest life expectancy rate.“Inequality is a policy choice,” said Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic justice at Oxfam America. “These comparisons show us that we can make very different choices when it comes to poverty and inequality in our society.”The report outlines the way that systems in the US, including the tax code, social safety nets, and worker’s rights and protections, have been slowly dismantled, allowing concentrated wealth to turn into concentrated power.Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill”, passed by Congress in May, has been one of the “single largest transfers of wealth upwards in decades”, according to the report, by cutting tax for the wealthy and corporations.But over the last few decades, Republicans have not acted alone.“Policymakers have been choosing inequality, and those choices have had bipartisan support,” Riddell said. “Policy reforms over the last 40 years, from cuts to taxes and the social safety net, to labor issues and beyond, really had the backing of both parties.”Policy recommendations outlined in the report fall into four categories: rebalancing power through campaign finance reform and antitrust policy; using the tax system to reduce inequality through taxes on the wealthy and corporations; strengthening the social safety net; and protecting unions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThese solutions can be tricky to carry out politically because of long-term stigmatization, particularly of social safety nets and taxation. The report refers to the concept of the “welfare queen” popularized during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, while taxation has always been seen as repressive for all rather than as a tool for addressing inequality.“What’s really needed is a different kind of politics,” Riddell said. “One that’s focused on delivering for ordinary people by really rapidly reducing inequality. There are sensible, proven reforms that could go a long way to reversing the really troubling trends we see.”The report features interviews with community leaders who are actively working to reduce inequality, even as progress has seemingly stalled on the national stage. In one interview in the report, union representatives for United Workers Maryland said the current moment seems ripe with opportunity because many Americans are starting to see how the current set-up isn’t working for them, but only for the people at the very top.“I think it’s brilliant that they see this as an opportunity,” Riddell said. “I love thinking about this moment as an opportunity to look around us and realize our broader power.” More

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Donald Trump has sent mixed signals about potential US intervention in Venezuela, playing down concerns of imminent war against the South American nation but saying its leader Nicolás Maduro’s days were numbered.The president’s remarks, made during a CBS interview released on Sunday, come as the US amasses military units in the Caribbean and has conducted multiple strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels, killing dozens.Asked during the 60 Minutes program if the US was going to war against Venezuela, Trump said: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.” However, when asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, he replied: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”Maduro, who faces indictment on drug charges in the US, has accused Washington of using drug trafficking as a pretext for “imposing regime change” in Caracas to seize Venezuelan oil.More than 15 US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific have killed at least 65 people in recent weeks, with the latest taking place on Saturday, prompting criticism from governments in the region.Washington has yet to make public any evidence that its targets were smuggling narcotics or posed a threat to the US.In the same interview, Trump alleged countries including Russia and China had conducted underground nuclear tests unknown to the public, and that the US would test “like other countries do”.“Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it,” he told 60 Minutes.“I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test,” he said, adding North Korea and Pakistan to the list of nations allegedly testing their arsenals.Confusion has surrounded Trump’s order that the US begin testing, particularly if he meant conducting the country’s first nuclear explosion since 1992.Trump first made his surprise announcement in a social media post on Thursday, minutes before entering a summit with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, in South Korea, saying he had “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis”.The announcement came after Russia said it had tested a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, and a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone.Asked directly if he planned for the US to detonate a nuclear weapon for the first time in more than three decades, Trump told CBS: “I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes.”No country other than North Korea is known to have conducted a nuclear detonation for decades. Russia and China have not carried out such tests since 1990 and 1996, respectively.Pressed on the topic, Trump said: “They test way underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test. You feel a little bit of a vibration.”However, Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, on Sunday downplayed any possible tests by the US, telling Fox News on Sunday: “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests. These are not nuclear explosions.”The US has been a signatory since 1996 to the comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty, which bans all atomic test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes.Other topics addressed in the interview included:

Trump said he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats to reopen the government, making clear that he has no plans to negotiate as the government shutdown will soon enter its sixth week.

Asked to clarify whether he would try to run for a third term, which is barred by the constitution, Trump said: “I don’t even think about it,”

Trump said immigration enforcement officials hadn’t gone far enough in deporting people who were in the country without legal authorisation.
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Republicans are insisting that Donald Trump is “desperate” to end the government shutdown, which has now entered its 33rd day.The comments by the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, come as the US president delays food assistance funding for millions of low-income Americans but steams ahead with construction of his $300m gilded White House ballroom.Johnson presented Trump as a man angry and desperate to break the impasse so as to ease mounting pain for ordinary Americans. “He’s just desperate for the government to open, he’s tried everything he can,” Johnson said, adding that Trump was a “big-hearted president, he wants everybody to get their services”.Yet Trump continues to exert an iron grip on the shutdown, resisting political and even federal court pressure to ease the burden on vulnerable Americans while protesting that he has no power to end the impasse.Here are the day’s key Trump administration stories at a glance.Johnson claims ‘big-hearted’ Trump wants to reopen US governmentHouse speaker Mike Johnson’s claims that Donald Trump is desperate to reopen the US government come two days after the president hosted a lavish, Great Gatsby-themed soiree at Mar-a-Lago.Two federal court judges ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must use $5bn in contingency funds to keep paying food assistance Snap benefits for up to 42 million low-income Americans. The payments stopped on Saturday under the shutdown, posing the risk of hunger for millions of people.Read the full storyFBI fires top official amid Patel’s outrage at reports of agency jet useA top FBI official with 27 years standing has reportedly been fired by the bureau after its director, Kash Patel, became enraged by press stories revealing he had used a government jet to travel to see his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a wrestling match.Steven Palmer, who had worked at the bureau since 1998, was fired as head of the FBI’s critical incident response group, which is responsible for handling major security threats as well as overseeing the agency’s fleet of jets. He was the third head of the unit to be dismissed since Patel became FBI director in February.Read the full storyThree killed in US military strike on alleged drug vessel in CaribbeanThe US military has carried out another lethal strike on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth said.He said on Saturday the vessel was operated by a US-designated terrorist organization but did not name which group was targeted. Three people were killed in the strike, he said.It is at least the 15th such strike carried out by the US military in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific since early September.Read the full storyICE spoils celebrations in ChicagoImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Chicago mean that celebrations of Halloween, All Saints Day on 1 November and Día de los Muertos have been muted in the neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village.“Clearly it’s because of ICE,” said resident Cecilia Romero. Referring to how JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, had unsuccessfully requested that the Trump administration pause immigration enforcement operations for the Halloween weekend that began Friday, Romero added: “I think people are just scared. It’s just kind of sad that kids are not allowed to have fun on a day where they should be [kids].”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

California voters appear poised to approve a redistricting measure placed on the ballot in August by Democrats and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, who have cast it as a chance to check Trump’s power.

As the US president builds his palace, Americans are going hungry, writes David Smith.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 1 November. More

George Clooney has said he feels it was a “mistake” for Kamala Harris to replace Joe Biden in the 2024 US presidential election, adding that he had no regrets about the New York Times opinion piece in which he called on the Democrats to find a new presidential nominee.Speaking on CBS’ Sunday Morning, the actor and activist, who is a prominent financial donor to the Democratic party, said he would write his op-ed again if given the chance, and that he wished the Democrats had held a new primary to elect a presidential candidate. Instead, Harris was nominated by a virtual vote of party delegates.“We had a chance,” Clooney said. “I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary. Let’s battle-test this quickly and get it up and going. I think the mistake with it being Kamala is she had to run against her own record. It’s very hard to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person’. It’s hard to do and so she was given a very tough task.“I think it was a mistake, quite honestly. But we are where we are. We were gonna lose more House seats, they say. So I don’t know. To not do it would be to say, ‘I’m not gonna tell the truth’.”Clooney’s op-ed, headlined “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee”, was a prominent example amid a growing wave of dissent among Democrat voters about Biden’s ability to continue as US president, after he performed poorly during his first presidential debate with Donald Trump.“We are not going to win in November with this president,” Clooney wrote at the time. “On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate. This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.”In July, Biden’s son Hunter Biden gave a profanity-laced, three-hour interview to the US outlet Channel 5 in which he attacked Clooney for writing the op-ed.“Fuck him!” Hunter Biden said of Clooney. “Fuck him and everybody around him. I don’t have to be fucking nice.”He questioned why anyone listened to Clooney, saying: “What do you have to do with fucking anything? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given … his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full-page ad in the fucking New York Times.”Asked by CBS if he saw Hunter Biden’s reaction, Clooney laughed wryly and said, “Yeah, I saw it”. Asked what he made of it, he said, “I could spend a lot of time debunking many of the things he said … but the reality is, I don’t think looking backwards like that is helpful to anyone. Particularly to him. I don’t think it is helpful to the Democratic party. So I’m just going to wish him well on his ongoing recovery and I hope he does well and just leave it at that.“I have many personal opinions about it but I don’t find it to be helpful to have a public spat with him.”Since her failed presidential bid, Harris has been critical of Biden’s initial decision to run for a second term. In her book 107 Days, published in September, she wrote that she was “in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out” because “I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: don’t let the other guy win.” More

A top FBI official with 27 years standing has reportedly been fired by the bureau after its director, Kash Patel, became enraged by press stories revealing he had used a government jet to travel to see his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a wrestling match.Steven Palmer, who had worked at the bureau since 1998, was fired as head of the FBI’s critical incident response group which is responsible for handling major security threats as well as overseeing the agency’s fleet of jets. He was the third head of the unit to be dismissed since Patel became the second Trump administration’s FBI director in February.Bloomberg Law, which broke the story, said that three unnamed sources had expressed astonishment at the sacking given that Patel’s flight schedules were fully public and trackable on websites. A day after her performance, Patel himself had reposted photos showing him together with his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, on his X account.According to Bloomberg, Patel had become furious over stories published after the event about his use of the FBI jet to go on the date with Wilkins. Soon after, Palmer had been told he could resign instantly or be fired.The dismissal was made official on Friday.Flight logs publicly trackable on Flight Aware for Patel’s plane, N708JH, show that the jet landed at an airport near Penn State on 25 October. That evening Wilkins performed at a Real American Freestyle wrestling event, and the flight logs show Patel’s FBI plane later flying to Nashville.Records for the movements of the jet N708JH were blocked on Flight Aware as of Sunday. A search for the government jet generates a message saying that it is “not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator”.On Sunday, Patel posted a lengthy statement on his X account in which he said he refused to be “distracted by baseless rumors or the noise from uninformed internet anarchists and the fake news”. He said it was a “disgrace” to go after “people doing great work, my personal life, or those around me”, reserving his harshest words for what he called the “disgustingly baseless attacks against Alexis – a true patriot and the woman I’m proud to call my partner in life”.He also fueled further speculation by attacking “our supposed allies” whom he lambasted for “staying silent”, though he did not name names. “Your silence is louder than the clickbait haters,” he said.In an earlier statement his spokesperson, Ben Williamson, pointed out that the FBI director is required under government rules to pay some reimbursement for his private jet travel and claimed Patel had “significantly limited” personal trips compared with his predecessors Chris Wray and James Comey. “He’s allowed to take personal time on occasion to see family, friends or his longtime girlfriend,” the spokesman said.As the Daily Beast has noted, Patel was highly critical of Wray’s use of government jets for personal use when Wray was director of the bureau. In 2023, Patel scathingly dubbed Wray “#GovernmentGangster” and accused him of “jetting off on out (sic) tax payer dollars while dodging accountability for the implosion of the FBI on his watch”.Palmer’s dismissal makes him the third head of the FBI critical incident response group to be ditched under Patel. Wes Wheeler was fired in March, and Brian Driscoll in August.Driscoll is now suing the Trump administration for unfair dismissal claiming he was targeted for showing lack of loyalty to the president.Patel’s travel on a government jet for a date night was first spotted by Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent who has become a thorn in the side of the Trump administration. His podcast is caustically critical of the current leadership of the FBI.“We’re in the middle of government shutdown … and this guy is jetting off to hang out with his girlfriend in Nashville on our dime?” Seraphin said in a recent podcast.The government shutdown to which Seraphin alluded had entered its 32nd day.In a separate unflattering development for him, Patel is facing heat from a defense lawyer in Michigan who is objecting to the FBI director’s allegations Friday that five young men had been arrested as they planned a Halloween terror attack. The lawyer, Amir Makled, who represents one of the five individuals, said that having reviewed the case he was convinced no such terror event had been in the pipeline.Makled told Associated Press that the FBI director’s claims were “hysteria and fearmongering”. The five men were aged 16 to 20 – and were US citizens and gamers.“I don’t believe that there’s anything illegal about any of the activity they were doing,” he said. More

Top Republicans are portraying Donald Trump as a “big-hearted president” who is desperate to reopen the US government, even as he delays food assistance funding for millions of low-income Americans but steams ahead with construction of his $300m gilded White House ballroom.As the government shutdown entered its 33rd day, the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, presented Trump as a man angry and desperate to break the impasse so as to ease mounting pain for ordinary Americans. “He’s just desperate for the government to open, he’s tried everything he can,” Johnson said, adding that Trump was a “big-hearted president, he wants everybody to get their services”.The speaker’s claims, made in an interview with Fox News Sunday two days after Trump hosted a lavish, Great Gatsby-themed soiree at Mar-a-Lago, gave a slanted take on the president’s position. Trump continues to exert an iron grip on the shutdown, resisting political and even federal court pressure to ease the burden on vulnerable Americans while protesting he has no power to end the impasse.Two federal court judges ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must use $5bn in contingency funds to keep paying food assistance Snap benefits for up to 42 million low-income Americans. The payments stopped Saturday under the shutdown, posing the risk of hunger for millions of people.Despite the two court orders, it remains unclear when or whether the administration will restart the payments. Trump has said he is waiting for clarification from the federal judges on where the money should come from.The federal court orders require that partial payments of Snap start as early as Wednesday. Asked by CNN’s State of the Union whether that deadline could be met, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said: “Could be”. He said that the administration would not be appealing Friday’s rulings.Instead of authorising use of the contingency funds, Trump has instead exhorted fellow Republican senators to break the impasse by ending the Senate filibuster. The mechanism requires 60 votes in the 100-vote chamber for most kinds of legislation – including an end to the shutdown – to pass.The House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries accused Trump on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday of “weaponising hunger”. He said that the funds exist to continue food assistance benefits through November.Without mentioning by name the president’s $300m ballroom construction project, Jeffries added that Trump and his administration can find funding “for other projects, but somehow they can’t find money to make sure that Americans don’t go hungry”.As the impact of the shutdown begins to bite across the country, threatening poorer Americans and generating mounting delays at US airports, opinion polls suggest that Trump’s Republican party is facing most of the blame from citizens. An NBC News poll carried out at the end of October found that 52% of voters blamed Trump and congressional Republicans for the stalemate, with 42% blaming Democrats.The split fell along familiar partisan divisions, with those identifying as liberal, young people, Black and higher-educated voters blaming Trump – and Democrats being blamed by self-identified supporters of the president’s Make American great again (Maga) movement, white men and rural voters.So far Democrats in the Senate are holding firm with their refusal to support Republicans in reopening the government. Only three Democratic senators have broken ranks so far, with the majority insisting that any deal on the shutdown must be tied to extending healthcare tax credits to avoid steep rises in premiums in 2026 under Affordable Care Act health plans.One of the three Democrats who have joined Republican senators to vote for ending the shutdown, John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, turned on his own party on Sunday. He told CNN’s State of the Union that “Democrats really need to own the shutdown, I mean, we’re shutting it down … This is wrong, we are hurting the very people that we fight for.”Airports are starting to experience delays amid shortages of air traffic controllers who are deemed to be essential federal employees and are obliged to work – yet have ceased being paid. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said 80% of controllers did not show up for shifts in the busy New York region on Friday.At least 35 FAA facilities, including some of the largest airports in the country, are reporting staffing issues.The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, told CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday that safety would not be compromised, adding: “The real consequence is, what kind of rolling delays do you have throughout the system? I think it’s only going to get worse.”He said that as the shutdown continued, more air traffic controllers would “make the decisions of funding their families, putting food on their table, gas in their cars, versus coming into work. That’s not what I want, but I’m a realist.” More