Donald Trump

Subterms

    More stories

    • 200 Shares125 Views

      in US Politics

      Zohran Mamdani’s biggest threat is not Donald Trump, it’s the Democratic old guard | Emma Brockes

      by

      The morning after Zohran Mamdani’s startling mayoral victory in New York, the most arresting visual image was not of the mayor-elect celebrating in an applause-filled room, but the breakdown of voting patterns across the city. Street by street, practically building by building, you could index New Yorkers’ support for Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo to the probable amount of rent they were paying. A middle-income precinct on the Upper West Side, for example, showed up as a small island of Mamdani voters in a sea of Cuomo-voting wealthier neighbourhoods. Solid lower-income support for Mamdani in modest midtown gave way to the incredible banking wealth of Tribeca and its majority support of Cuomo.Allowing for large anomalies – Staten Island, a middle- to lower-income part of the city, voted heavily for Cuomo, as did lower-income Hassidic neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and Queens – the message of the huge turnout for Mamdani in the US’s most expensive city seemed to be one of affordability; even of a referendum on capitalism as we know it. And so the most pressing question became: was it a crank result from an unrepresentative city, or the beginning of a new political wave?The night’s countrywide election patterns indicated a swing away from Donald Trump to the Democrats, which, of course, doesn’t mean that Mamdani’s Democratic socialism is anything the US at large will be willing to buy. Still, the move to the left was sharp enough to return Democrats to some traditionally very Republican areas, including two Democrats voted on to a public service commission in Georgia; the first Democratic female governor voted into office in New Jersey; and a new Democratic governor elected in Virginia. In New York City itself, the swing away from Trump, a mere 12 months after his support surged during the 2024 presidential election, was significant. His endorsement of Cuomo, running as an independent, made no apparent difference whatsoever.It should be said that Cuomo was a terrible candidate, trailing sexual misconduct allegations – all of which he denies – and a record as New York’s governor that foundered horribly during the pandemic. It should also be pointed out that Mamdani didn’t simply beat Cuomo; he galvanised New Yorkers into the highest mayoral election turnout since the 1960s, indicating an electorate voting for him rather than against his opponent.How, then, does the 34-year-old look as a potential leader beyond the very particular ecosystem of New York City, where, at times, it is possible to believe that a tub of margarine promising lower rents, higher minimum wage and fairer taxes might win out over a traditional political adversary? On this question, aspects of Mamdani’s identity – exploited by Cuomo and Trump to racist effect – might actually run in his favour. Mamdani’s age and eloquence obviously flatter him in relation to Trump, but it’s his background that stands out as a decisive advantage.In his victory speech on Tuesday night, Mamdani promised working-class New Yorkers: “We will fight for you, because we are you.” This is a great piece of rhetoric, but let’s be honest: Mamdani has the social and cultural capital of someone who grew up in an affluent family in a wealthy part of Manhattan, with one parent who went to Harvard and became a successful film-maker and the other who is a professor at Columbia. And while the mayor-elect went to an academically selective state high school in the city, he attended a private liberal arts college in Maine that now charges $91,000 a year in tuition and living costs.I don’t mention any of this to be snide. Mamdani sells a political message further to the left than any successful American politician has dared to in recent memory, but he doesn’t sound like an outsider. In fact, he sounds as smooth and polished and – can we say it – arrogant as any mainstream political contender.He has neither Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s scrappy, up-from-her-bootstraps energy, nor can he be played for laughs on Saturday Night Live like Bernie Sanders – who, during the 2016 election cycle, Larry David mercilessly if affectionately skewered as a hopeless crank. Even Trump’s characterisation of Mamdani as a communist – the kind of absurd, inflationary claim the president is accustomed to throwing out and having his supporters swallow whole – withers under the slightest scrutiny.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, none of his campaign promises justify use of the word “radical” in the scaremongering sense. Mamdani’s push for a $30 minimum wage sounds like standard political aspiration. He has promised to make buses in New York free – as they were during Covid without the city falling to communism. (On which subject: when the Staten Island ferry went from fare-charging to free in 1997, New York’s commuters didn’t receive it as a communist gesture.) And his promise to increase taxes on those earning more than $1m a year is substantially more generous to affluent earners than anything Rachel Reeves – also not a communist! – is threatening in the forthcoming budget.The election results this week suggest Mamdani as an effective, inspiring force against the corruptions of Trump. But while you can imagine him, years in the future, going toe to toe with JD Vance in a televised presidential debate, his real enemies may be closer to home. To advance beyond New York politics, it’s not just the Republicans he’ll have to beat, but the Chuck Schumer- and Nancy Pelosi-era gatekeepers of the Democratic old guard – who I suspect may find him even more threatening and obnoxious than Trump.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

    • 163 Shares183 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s supreme court strategy is to redefine ‘tariffs’. Will the justices buy it?

      by

      Donald Trump faced arguably the biggest test so far of his contentious use of executive power at the US supreme court on Wednesday. The stakes could not be higher – “literally, LIFE OR DEATH” for the US, at least according to the president.Trump’s signature, globe-rattling economic policy, his sweeping tariffs regime, was in the dock – specifically, the legal mechanism his administration has used to enforce it. And the man dispatched to defend the White House put forward a somewhat puzzling argument.“These are regulatory tariffs,” D John Sauer, US solicitor general, assured the court. “They are not revenue-raising tariffs. The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental.”It was a curious, and more than a little confusing, explanation – tariffs on goods from overseas might raise revenue, but are not revenue-raising – designed to counter rulings by lower courts that set the stage for this test before the highest court in the land.A federal appeals court in Washington DC ruled in August that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law Trump invoked to impose many of his tariffs, did not grant “the power to tax” to the president.Congress is granted sole authority under the constitution to levy taxes. Trump bypassed Congress – lawfully, his aides insist – to drive through a policy estimated to equate to the largest tax hike since 1993.Thus, on Wednesday morning, the administration appeared to argue before the supreme court that these tariffs – taxes paid by myriad US companies on imported products – were not really taxes at all.Critics are not having it. “Anybody can look up in the dictionary,” Maria Cantwell, Democratic senator from Washington, told the Guardian. “Tariffs are an import tax, plain and simple. I would assume the administration understands that.”“I actually am surprised that it was so lacking,” Cantwell added, of the administration’s case.The court did not appear persuaded, either. “You want to say tariffs are not taxes,” said the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor. “But that’s exactly what they are.”Some conservatives on the bench also sounded skeptical. “The vehicle is the imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been a core power of Congress,” said the chief justice John Roberts.The administration’s argument that the fact tariffs raise money is “only incidental” might be more persuasive if the president spent less time boasting about the amount of money they raised. “My tariffs are bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump declared in a speech hours after the hearing.The president has argued – in typically binary terms – that the fate of his flagship economic strategy is aligned with that of the nation. But there are many business owners in the US, grappling with the abrupt imposition of steep tariffs, who believe the fate of their companies has been jeopardized by this regime.While official statistics (at least, those published before the government shutdown) have shown persisting inflation and a stalling jobs market, Trump continues to erroneously claim his agenda is producing stellar results. “Our Economy is BOOMING, and Costs are coming way down,” he wrote on social media during Wednesday’s hearing.It is ultimately down to voters, as some did on Tuesday, to deliver their verdict on Trump’s agenda. For now, a handful of small firms, together with a dozen states, have joined forces to challenge the way in which he has rammed it through.“We think that this case is really about executive overreach,” said Stephen Woldenberg, senior vice-president of sales at Learning Resources, a toy company based near Chicago that sued the administration to invalidate Trump’s tariffs as exceeding his authority.At the heart of this case is really a “broader issue”, according to Woldenberg, of who sets taxes – and how – across the US. “We weren’t really willing to let politicians, and really a single politician, decide our fate,” he said.That fate is now in the hands of a court Trump has shaped. The justices have pledged to fast-track their decision. On Wednesday, at least, most sounded unpersuaded by the administration’s defense. More

    • 138 Shares164 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: supreme court examines president’s global tariffs

      by

      The conservative majority of United States supreme court justices has been widely criticized for granting Donald Trump an increasing amount of leeway to wield his presidential power. On Wednesday, the court questioned one avenue of the president’s authority: his ability to impose sweeping global tariffs.Justices heard oral arguments on the legality of the tariffs, with conservative justices expressing skepticism of the strength of the Trump administration’s position.“The vehicle is the imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been a core power of Congress,” said Chief Justice John Roberts.The arguments center on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a 1977 law which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency. Trump cited the law as he slapped steep duties on imports into the US.About 40 legal briefs have been filed in opposition to the tariffs, including from the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby group in the US.US supreme court justices express skepticism over legality of Trump tariffsThe Trump administration faced tough questions at the US supreme court over the legality of its sweeping global tariff regime, as justices expressed skepticism over the law it used to slap steep duties on almost every US trading partner.Should the supreme court ultimately rule against Trump’s tariffs it will force the White House to go back to the drawing board and reconsider how to enforce an aggressive economic policy which has strained global trade ties.Read the full storyUS to cut airline traffic by 10% due to shutdown, Trump transport chief saysTransportation secretary Sean Duffy, said on Wednesday the federal government would be reducing airline traffic by 10% at 40 locations beginning on Friday if the record-breaking government shutdown does not end by then.The reductions are aimed at reducing the stress on air traffic controllers, who have been working throughout the shutdown without pay.Read the full storyTrump goes on posting frenzy a day after Democrats win key electionsDonald Trump appeared to be sharing everything on his mind all at once on Wednesday as he posted more than 30 Truth Social posts in less than two hours.Trump’s posts ranged in subject matter and included recommendations to his followers to buy books written by several of his supporters and allies. Other posts included videos of Trump appearing to read nearly verbatim from his own previously posted Truth Social text posts. They appeared to be artificially generated, but the Guardian could not independently confirm.Read the full storyDemocrats celebrate while Republicans stew over Mamdani’s winLeft-leaning Americans awoke to a rare recent moment of political celebration with Democratic victories in several elections across the country, led by the election of Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York, while Republicans breathlessly hailed the end of the country. Many Republicans’ immediate reaction was to attribute Mamdani’s win to an electorate overrepresented by immigrants, snidely implying they were not “real” Americans.Read the full storyRepublicans file lawsuit challenging California’s redistricting measureThe suit, filed by David Tangipa, a Republican assembly member, 18 California voters and the state Republican party in the US district court for the central district of California, argues that the new maps are unconstitutional because they were drawn to increase the voting power of a particular racial group. It asks the court to block the new maps from taking effect, at least temporarily.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A new sign was spotted adorning the White House this week, prompting backlash from lawmakers who have noted that Donald Trump is quite literally gilding the White House during a government shutdown.

      Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show is stepping up to help during the US federal government shutdown by opening a new center for food donations.

      Democrats set historic records on election night. Here are six of the firsts they accomplished.

      Trump voters for Mamdani and a new left coalition: political analyst Michael Lange discusses the New York City election’s trends and surprises.

      Trump ally and Fifa president Gianni Infantino announced the creation of a peace prize, which it plans to award at the draw for the World Cup on 5 December in Washington.

      A federal judge on Wednesday ordered prosecutors in the criminal case of the former FBI director James Comey to produce a trove of materials from the investigation, saying he was concerned that the justice department’s position had been to “indict first and investigate later”.

      Hopes of a composed and level-headed rightwing reaction to the Democrats’ across-the-board electoral success were unceremoniously dashed as leading Maga figures spewed unrestrained vitriol at their victorious opponents.

      Which of our warnings came true in the first year after Trump’s second election?From military-level force in cities to tens of thousands of federal workers fired by the Trump administration, effects have been felt at every level.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 4 November 2025. More

    • 200 Shares125 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump voters for Mamdani and a new left coalition: the biggest surprises from New York’s election

      by

      Two days before the New York mayoral election, Michael Lange made a big electoral prediction – not just of who would win overall, or in each borough or neighborhood, but block by block. Lange, a political analyst born and raised in New York City, has spent over a decade in progressive politics and has become something of a local celebrity this year for his deep dives into city data and polling.He published his highly detailed prediction map – which correctly forecast that Zohran Mamdani would win although failed to predict Andrew Cuomo’s strong performance – on his Substack, the Narrative War. Lange has a flair for witty coinages. He highlighted, for instance, the divide between the “commie corridor”, stretching from Park Slope to Bushwick to Astoria, where he predicted (accurately) that Mamdani would win by huge margins, and the “capitalist corridor” on Manhattan’s Upper East and Upper West Sides. There, “the Free Press and Wall Street Journal outrank the New York Times” in readership and most voters leaned toward Cuomo, who ran as a conservative-courting independent.I spoke with Lange on Wednesday morning to discuss the trends and surprises that emerged on election night.You’ve had a very busy election season. I could see you on Hell Gate’s election live stream last night, with your laptop strapped to you like a busking DJ in Washington Square Park. How was your night?I had to do that because they were dropping around 200,000 ballots into the system every few minutes! I was actually a little nervous at the beginning: Mamdani led the early vote by 12 points, but there were two big batches of ballots that came in after that and his lead went from 12 to 8%. I was worried.You know, there was a world in which yesterday went kind of poorly for Mamdani, where Cuomo was going to end up basically doubling his votes from the Democratic primary. But Mamdani added 500,000 votes to his primary coalition, and that’s a huge reason why he won. He went out and massively expanded his base from the primary.Where did Mamdani get those extra votes from?He built the coalition that the left always wanted to build: it’s multiracial, it’s young, it’s renters and it’s people squeezed by affordability. He improved considerably with Black and Hispanic voters, working- and middle-class voters, compared to the primary. Plus he further maximized his base of liberal progressives, young leftists, and Muslims and south Asians. He couldn’t have won without making those significant inroads.There were also some Trump/Mamdani voters – is that a big trend?It’s definitely a real thing, confined to working-class Latinos, south Asians and Muslims. Voters in immigrant strongholds that went for Trump last year went for Zohran this year. But I wouldn’t say he was winning over white working-class voters and Maga voters.One of the big stories of the night was the sky-high turnout. Who did that help?Both sides. Turnout was significantly higher than I had expected. I thought we might go over 2 million, but it’s closer to 2.3 million – that is a lot of darn voters. There was a decent anti-Mamdani block, who were motivated, but the Mamdani base was also motivated, and that was enough to win.You predicted he’d get over 50% of the vote. Is he on course for that?Right now you would say he’s favored to get over 50%. He’s at 50.4% but there’s still, like, probably 200,000 votes left to report [as of Wednesday morning]. So I don’t think it’s definitive, but I think it’s likely, and I hope he does because then no one can say Sliwa was a spoiler.Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, is the other big story of the night. His vote completely collapsed.He didn’t win a single precinct in any borough. Not even Tottenville in Staten Island, which is like an 88% Trump neighborhood. That really surprised me. Cuomo kept very white areas, very wealthy areas and very religiously Jewish areas, and then added all of these Republicans on Staten Island who had a strong turnout. I think there was a lot of tactical voting by the Republicans. They were doing it before Trump tweeted his support for Cuomo, but that definitely helped. It could have even turned the tide if Mamdani’s coalition hadn’t grown.View image in fullscreenWhat about your much mentioned “commie corridor” – was support for Mamdani overwhelming in those parts of Brooklyn and Queens?I think there was a little dilution of the commie corridor in some areas like Astoria or Greenpoint that have more older white ethnic folks. In Astoria, for example, the Greek landlords and homeowners all went for Cuomo. So there was a little resistance. But no, mostly the commie corridor is another huge reason why Zohran won – he was polling between 77% and 83% in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Bushwick.In the lead-up to the election we reported on whether Mamdani was making inroads with Jewish New Yorkers. Is there any suggestion that he did?There are neighborhoods with a lot of secular and more progressive-leaning Jews – like Park Slope and Morningside Heights – where he did well. But in the wealthy Jewish communities like the Upper East Side, his position on Israel definitely mattered there. Similarly in the more middle-class Jewish areas like Forest Hills, Rego Park, or Spuyten Duyvil and Riverdale in the Bronx – they all leaned Cuomo. And also, you have Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in southern Brooklyn, they were pretty staunchly Cuomo. So I don’t know if there were crazy narrative-busters on this one, but Mamdani did hold more progressive Jewish neighborhoods and even parts of the Upper West Side [which has more reform and conservative Jews] by big margins.Has Mamdani rewritten what New York means politically? Will the commie corridor become a launch pad for leftwing candidates?Yes, it’s no coincidence that some of the biggest political leaders from the left come from a handful of neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. I’m sure that we’ll see more of that – people will come from these neighborhoods to be elevated nationally.But I think that every city in America can have their own commie corridor. Urban places are the epicenters of leftwing power in America – because they’re young, people rent and they are places where people are crushed by the inequalities we face. More

    • 163 Shares164 Views

      in US Politics

      What does Prop 50’s passage mean for California, Gavin Newsom and the US?

      by

      Californians overwhelmingly backed Proposition 50, the crucial redistricting measure that Democrats have said is essential to safeguarding democracy and pushing back against the Trump administration.“We stood firm in response to Donald Trump’s recklessness, and tonight, after poking the bear, this bear roared with unprecedented turnout in a special election with an extraordinary result,” Gavin Newsom said on Tuesday after the ballot measure passed.The effort was a direct attempt to counteract Texas’s partisan gerrymander, undertaken at Trump’s behest, to create several new safely Republican districts. Under Prop 50, California will halt the work of its independent redistricting commission until after 2030 and allow the legislature to redraw congressional districts to carve out five additional Democratic seats.The new map is expected to oust longtime Republican officials, and have significant effects on the 2026 midterms.How did the state vote?As of Wednesday morning, results showed that some 63.8% of voters approved the proposition with just 36.2% voting against the measure in what the Associated Press described as a “swift and decisive victory”. More than 8 million people voted in Tuesday’s election and the measure won the majority of votes along much of the coast and in southern California. It was largely unpopular in the northern and inland regions that will be most affected by redistricting.Who is at risk of losing their seat?These Republicans are at risk under California’s new congressional map: Darrell Issa, whose district covers east San Diego county; Doug LaMalfa, who has represented a large swath of rural northern California for more than a decade; Ken Calvert, a Riverside county representative who has served in the US House since 1993; David Valadao, who represents the southern San Joaquin valley; and Kevin Kiley, the representative for much of eastern California. Kiley introduced a bill to ban mid-decade redistricting nationwide, but his proposal did not advance.After the measure passed, Republicans in California sued over Prop 50, and asked the court to block the new maps from taking effect. An attorney representing the plaintiffs – which include Republican state lawmaker David Tangipa, 18 California voters and the state’s Republican party – said that Democrats drew congressional boundaries to increase the voting power of Latinos. The new congressional districts will leave racial representation almost unchanged, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California.How will Prop 50’s passage affect the midterms?The measure is expected to have a major effect on the outcome of the 2026 midterms. Past elections have shown that the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections, and Democrats argued Prop 50 will help ensure Republicans do not retain full control of the federal government.“The passage of this new map – which is designed to protect a slew of vulnerable Democrats and will cost Republicans three to five seats in 2026 – is the most consequential development to date in the mid-decade redistricting wars due to the sheer number of seats that it impacts,” Erin Covey, with the Cook Political Report, said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The outcome of these races in California could ultimately determine which party wins control of the House next November.”What does this mean for Gavin Newsom?The decisive victory of Prop 50 is a major win for the proposal’s biggest champion, Gavin Newsom. The California governor has been one of Trump’s most high-profile opponents and helped rally massive support for the proposal. Newsom is widely expected to seek the White House in 2028 and the win has further raised his profile nationally and elevated his status as a Democratic leader.Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic consultant who leads the Center for the Political Future at the University of Southern California, told the Guardian this week that Newsom had gambled on Prop 50 and it appeared it would pay off.“But more than that is the fact that he fought back – that he dared to do this, that people said it was dangerous for him, and he forged ahead with it anyway.” More

    • 250 Shares166 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York: the Democrats can build on an uplifting night | Editorial

      by

      Since the re-election of Donald Trump last November, a demoralised Democratic party has struggled to reverse a palpable sense of downward momentum. At a grassroots level, amid plunging poll ratings, there has been a yearning for renewal and a more punchy, combative approach in opposition. Against that bleak backdrop, the remarkable election of Zohran Mamdani to the New York City mayoralty is a moment for progressives to savour.Mr Mamdani entered the mayoral race last October as a socialist outsider with almost zero name recognition. He won it with more than 50% of the vote after the highest turnout in more than half a century, and despite the best efforts of billionaires to bankroll his chief rival, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, to victory. That achievement makes him the youngest mayor of the US’s largest city for more than 100 years and the first Muslim to occupy the role.New York is a traditional Democratic stronghold and is in no sense a national bellwether. Nevertheless, faced with a Maga movement that has based its success on the support of working-class voters, the Democratic party can learn much from Mr Mamdani’s extraordinary triumph. Leaving culture-war politics to his increasingly desperate opponents, he campaigned relentlessly and almost exclusively on the theme of affordability.Charges of ideological extremism failed to stick because pledges of free childcare, free buses and a rent freeze spoke to an essentially social democratic message, offering public solutions to years of rising inequality. That vision persuaded a vast army of 100,000 volunteer canvassers to knock on millions of doors, more than offsetting Mr Cuomo’s far greater financial resources. The central insight was that values-driven opposition to Maga populism can succeed when supplemented by a positive offer to voters whose living standards have been steadily eroded.On an uplifting night for Democrats, a similar pattern was seen in New Jersey and Virginia, where more centrist-leaning candidates won gubernatorial races by impressive margins. Cost-of-living pledges were again to the fore, including a proposed freeze on electricity prices and a focus on housing costs. California offered further grounds for a cautious rebirth of optimism; after Republican gerrymandering of congressional boundaries in Texas, voters backed countermeasures to redress the balance ahead of next year’s midterm elections.As the Democratic party journeys through the wilderness of a second Trump term, it would be fanciful to believe that a corner has been definitively turned. For New York’s mayor-elect, the hard yards are yet to begin. Mr Trump has already threatened to withhold federal funds from an administration he will do his utmost to discredit, undermine and disrupt. More broadly, the reluctance of senior Democratic figures to endorse Mr Mamdani’s campaign confirms that internal divisions over strategy are a long way from being resolved.However, it would be churlish to ignore green shoots of political recovery when they appear. As Mr Trump’s popularity sinks amid ongoing cost-of-living concerns and high inflation, the hollowness of Maga pledges to improve blue-collar living standards is a major zone of vulnerability. An emerging focus on affordability anchors Democrats in the preoccupations of their lost voters, as well as those who have remained loyal. By campaigning on that basis with elan and conviction, Mr Mamdani has blazed an inspiring trail. More

    • 225 Shares136 Views

      in US Politics

      The Zohran Mamdani method can work beyond New York. Take the fight to the right | Aditya Chakrabortty

      by

      Zohran Mamdani was forged in the era of Donald Trump. He came to socialism through watching Bernie Sanders run for the US presidency in 2016, in the contest that ultimately gave us Trump I. Last November, a few days after the election of Trump II, he asked voters why they’d backed that guy. The conversations prepared Mamdani in his battle for New York, and the film of them reveals so much about the politics of this era that it repays watching.Those of us schooled in the tactics of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair might roll our eyes at yet another “listening exercise”, starring a powerbroker and his retinue in some beautifully lit hall, but this is no such thing. Here stands an unknown on a street corner in the Bronx, waving a placard as doughtily as a Seventh-Day Adventist. Rather than read off a Rolodex of platitudes, this politician sees his public – some of whom look a little like him, yet whose faces and bodies are etched with the strains of the city. Never having spoken to power, even a lowly state assemblyman such as Mamdani, they talk of lives made smaller and shorter in an economy where the daily basics are too costly. Politics has failed them, so they consider politicians to be failures.Such frustrations propelled Trump into the White House. This week they made Mamdani mayor of the US’s largest city. Analysts have often put the two side by side, only to utter banalities about how they are both good on TikTok or – that giveaway from pundits striving to earn their keep – “populist”. Yet the comparison carries far higher stakes.Both New Yorkers, they embody opposite sides of the metropolis: Manhattan versus its suburbs ; towers versus the streets. They also represent alternative paths for the US. Trump leads his country towards ethnonationalism and Darwinian economics; Mamdani stands for immigrants and a city affordable for all. Crucially, he understands the urban working class is not just white, but often black and brown. It is only through an understanding of the grave dangers posed by Trump that you can glean the hopes vested in Mamdani.A few examples: in September, Trump’s guards grabbed Korean engineers, who had their papers in order, from a Hyundai factory to force them out of the country and thousands of miles away. Last month, ICE agents abducted a British journalist travelling the US on a valid visa for criticising the brutalities committed by Israel. Last week, only hours before 42 million low-income Americans lost their access to food aid, the president hosted a Great Gatsby-themed bash, featuring a scantily clad woman in a giant martini glass. The fete was titled: “A little party never killed nobody.”Such guffawing, lethal thuggishness is why other cities are so enlivened by a contest of otherwise glancing importance to their own lives. Even in a globalised social media, the question of who heads five boroughs on the eastern seaboard of the US does not usually command transnational significance. In the country, the centre of financial power is shifting from east coast to west, from Atlantic to Pacific, Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Nor does the new boy’s crowd appeal derive solely from his youth and charm, or even his recognition of the enduring greatness of the Wu-Tang Clan – although none of those hurt.Still, the chief reason Mamdani has aroused such keen interest is because he is the first leftwinger to show that politicians can not only face down Trumpism, they can beat him. That is the defining task of our era, as New York’s new mayor knows. Amid the thank-yous of last night’s victory speech, he declared: “If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.”Over the past year of Trump II, the finest talents on the centre-left have been stumped how to respond. Obama? Almost nothing. Kamala Harris? Writing her memoirs, of course. The fiercest hostility to Mamdani has come from those supposed to be on his side. After losing in the primary, serial sex pest Andrew Cuomo ran as an independent – and campaigned as Trump’s pick in this week’s contest. The man who is today the first Muslim to lead New York has faced constant innuendo that he is a terrorist sympathiser.Across Europe, the prefects of social democracy have kowtowed to the US’s extremist-in-chief. Keir Starmer treated him to an unprecedented second state visit, while Nato chief Mark Rutte has called him “daddy”. Five years ago, US media moguls took the knee to show off their commitment to diversity; now they bend the knee to a racist loudmouth. Columnists and podcasters talk utter sausage about a “vibe shift” in US politics, even while two days of mass rallies against Trumpism drew something like 12 million people.The centre-left should be taking on the extreme right and acting as the anti-Trump. Instead, as Fintan O’Toole writes in the latest New York Review of Books, it is playing at being not-Trump. Or: not-Farage, not-Weidel, not-Le Pen. In the UK, Starmer’s pitch is basically: we’ll adopt the language and the flags, but deploy them with greater civility. As a response to this moment, it is morally contemptible and politically myopic.In his fine new book The Great Global Transformation, the former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic describes how our political and economic order is now coming to an end. China and the global south now account for more of the world economy than the US, Japan, Europe and the many others put together that he terms the “capitalist core”; at the same time, capitalism is being redefined. The elites who prospered under the regimes shaped by Reagan and Thatcher are now redefining their nations into narrower, meaner, harsher societies, ditching the old commitments to multiculturalism and equality for women. They are forcing upon the rest of us capitalism without secure contracts, unions or even the HR department.Hold Milanovic’s lens over Trump and what do you see? Not an all-powerful emperor, nor some scheming bureaucrat like Putin – but the US’s Yeltsin. He is the buffoon presiding over his country’s decline in influence and importance, while behind him in the shadows the oligarchs carve up the spoils. And if democracy proves too troublesome, why, they’ll buy it. One of the biggest players in the New York elections was hedge-fund guy Bill Ackman, who offered to bankroll anyone who could bring down Mamdani.In the 90s and 00s, the centre-left’s response to Reagan and Thatcher was Clinton, Blair and the third way. They compromised with the new money and triangulated their electoral bases – and they held power, for a while.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut this is a new era: you can’t reach an accommodation with an ICE agent when he’s kneeling on your neck. Climate chaos does not come with a moderate option. An oligarch is not interested in your pitiful attempts to strike a deal. To see the logical endpoint of the new left’s embrace of money, look no further than Peter Mandelson. Famous for being “intensely relaxed” about people getting filthy rich, he became especially relaxed in the company of the filthy rich, such as money man and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – and is now discovering anew the meaning of “disgraced”.The old foxholes and get-out clauses, abstractions and moist eyes, won’t work for the left now. Voters don’t talk about inequality; they worry about paying the bills and getting by. The young aren’t mollified by talk of “suffering” in Gaza; they want it stopped. And bang opposite, the right are bending politics and economics to their will.You can see the past year between Trump’s election and Mamdani’s as real-time dialectic. Thesis, antithesis; right hook, southpaw. It is foolish to pretend that there is any equivalence of power between the White House and Gracie Mansion, but at least the left is still in the fight.

      Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 163 Shares166 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court to hear oral arguments on legality of Trump imposing tariffs

      by

      Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on the world will be scrutinized by the US supreme court today, a crucial legal test of the president’s controversial economic strategy – and his power.Justices are scheduled to hear oral arguments today on the legality of using emergency powers to impose tariffs on almost every US trading partner.In a series of executive orders issued earlier this year, Trump cited the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, a 1977 law which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency, as he slapped steep duties on imports into the US.The supreme court – controlled by a rightwing supermajority that was crafted by Trump – will review whether IEEPA grants the president the authority to levy a tariff, a word not mentioned in the law. Congress is granted sole authority under the constitution to levy taxes. The court has until the end of its term, in July 2026, to issue a ruling on the case.Lower courts have ruled against Trump’s tariffs, prompting appeals from the Trump administration, setting up this latest test of Trump’s presidential power. The supreme court has largely sided with the administration through its shadow docket to overrule lower courts.Should the supreme court ultimately rule against Trump’s use of IEEPA to impose tariffs, it will force the White House to go back to the drawing board and reconsider how to enforce an aggressive economic policy which has strained global trade ties.Should the court side with the administration, however, it will embolden a president who has repeatedly claimed – despite warnings over the risk of higher prices – that tariffs will help make America great again, raising “trillions” of dollars for the federal government and revitalizing its industrial heartlands.Trump himself has argued the court’s decision is immensely important. The case is “one of the most important in the History of the Country”, he wrote on social media over the weekend, claiming that ruling against him would leave the US “defenseless”.“If we win, we will be the Richest, Most Secure Country anywhere in the World, BY FAR,” Trump claimed. “If we lose, our Country could be reduced to almost Third World status – Pray to God that that doesn’t happen!”But some of his senior officials have suggested that, if the court rules against their current strategy, they will find another way to impose tariffs. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, who plans to attend the oral arguments in the case, has said the administration has “lots of other authorities” to do so.According to the non-partisan Tax Foundation, Trump’s tariffs amount to an average tax increase per US household of $1,200 in 2025 and $1,600 in 2026.A coalition of 12 states and small businesses, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont, have sued the Trump administration to block the tariffs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSeveral other small businesses also filed suit against the Trump administration to block the tariffs. The cases, Learning Resources, Inc v Trump and Trump v VOS Selections, were consolidated by the court.“No one person should have the power to impose taxes that have such vast global economic consequences,” Jeffrey Schwab, Liberty Justice Center’s senior counsel, said in a statement on the lawsuit filed on behalf of small businesses against the tariffs. “The Constitution gives the power to set tax rates – including tariffs – to Congress, not the President.”About 40 legal briefs have been filed in opposition to the tariffs, including from the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby group in the US.The US Chamber has urged Congress to reclaim its constitutional role in setting tariffs, stating in a letter on 27 October to the US Senate: “American families are facing thousands of dollars in higher prices as a result of these increased taxes. Small businesses, manufacturers, and ranchers are struggling with higher costs, with additional economic pain likely in the coming months.”The US Senate voted 51 to 47 last week to nullify Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs, with four Republicans joining Democrats in the vote, though the House is not expected to take similar action.But despite opposition in the Senate, the House of Representatives is unlikely to take similar action. House Republicans created a rule earlier this year that will block resolutions on the tariffs from getting a floor vote. More