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      'You're fired!': New York, Trump's home town, celebrates his election defeat

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      The celebrations that broke out on the streets of the president’s home town of New York City sent a loud message to the former star of The Apprentice: “You’re fired.”Some shouted his old catchphrase from the show as hundreds gathered spontaneously outside the Trump Tower skyscraper on the glittering island of Manhattan.This was where the brash real estate mogul had ruled a roost of sorts, as the chippy property scion from the outer borough of Queens who inherited, borrowed and bullied his way to fame and fortune – with a reputation for stiffing contractors, courting the media like a celebrity, and swaggering around like a mob boss.Trump Tower was also where he had descended, riding his ostentatious golden escalator, to announce his 2016 bid to become president.And it was also where he boasted during that campaign that he could literally shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any votes – but his luck had run out on Saturday as news broke he would be a one-term president. More

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      Trump's deep narcissism acted as a distorted mirror for millions of voters | Hadley Freeman

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      There are plenty of stories about how Donald Trump’s mind works. Here’s mine. In 1990, the president of a well-known French retailer asked my father to help him open a branch in Manhattan. So my father contacted Trump, and named the retailer. Trump replied, “Great, I love their neckties.”
      Acting as translator, my father took the retailer to Trump Tower, gave Trump the man’s business card with his shop’s name on it and explained to Trump that he wanted to lease space in the tower. Trump was delighted. He met the Frenchman’s lawyers, looked over the lease and signed it. Then, my father got a phone call. “What is this junk you’ve put in my building?” Trump raged, using a less newspaper-friendly word than “junk”. Confused, my father said it was the French store, as they’d arranged. “Where’s Hermès?” he shouted. Trump had met the president, seen his business card and signed the contracts. But because he wanted the luxury brand Hermès in his building, he believed he was getting it.

      Narcissists see what they want to see. What makes Trump more unusual is that an astonishing number of people see what they want to see when they look at him. Let us take a brief journey back to the early days of what I guess we can describe as Trump’s emergence on to the political scene, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man emerged on to New York City in Ghostbusters. How eager some people were then to reassure us that all was fine, because they wanted it to be. “It would be a mistake to think that [Trump] is all instinct and impulse. He wants to bring to governing the same calculating business style that he has brought to communicating,” Michael Gove somehow managed to write in the Times, while simultaneously giving Trump a proctology examination with his tongue. “The Donald I know,” another British commentator wrote at the time, “is a smart, streetwise, charming (yes seriously!) guy who runs his businesses by putting good people into top jobs and letting them get on with it.” All those “my friend, Donald” takes: how sweetly they have aged. Like cottage cheese left for four years next to an orange boiler.
      It’s strangely apt that such a raging narcissist should function as a distorted mirror to so many, one in which they see their own fantasies reflected back at them. Whether he actually is a billionaire or not has never been important: since the 1980s he has presented himself as the cartoon image of one – Daddy Warbucks crossed with a particularly rubbish Bond villain – and people see what they want to see. His white working-class supporters saw in him their own aggrievement at not being accepted by elites who rigged the game; the elites saw a fellow plutocrat who would protect their fortunes. Before this election I often heard people talk anxiously about how, even if Trump lost, “Trumpism” wouldn’t go away.
      But what even is Trumpism? The man has never had any moral code beyond closing the deal, and these days barely seems capable of maintaining a thought to the end of a sentence: the idea that he has the desire let alone the wherewithal to construct an ideology is like assuming that monkey on the typewriter is writing Hamlet. Read any thinkpiece and “Trumpism” is boiled down to nativism, showmanship and lying, all of which can be more accurately summed up as “being a racist grifter”. In Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers, John W Dean and Bob Altemeyer rightly say that Trumpism is not about Trump at all, but about his followers and their own psychological predispositions. They look at him and see what they want to see: themselves.
      The final election result may not be known for days, and yet even before the sun had risen on Wednesday the takes were coming. Joe Biden was too centrist and the Democrats should have embraced a more far-left candidate, was one popular theory advanced by people who a) had apparently never heard of Florida, where some Cuban and Venezuelan-Americans reportedly rejected Biden because of what they perceived as his “socialism” and b) believed Bernie Sanders had been blocked from the nomination by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic National Committee as opposed to actual Democrat voters, twice, and therefore is possibly not the great unifying candidate some wish.
      “Today it is clearer than ever that moving to the political centre is not a winning strategy,” crowed a Momentum press release, with the kind of confidence you might not expect from a group whose far-left UK candidate was trounced in elections, about a US candidate winning by a decisive margin in the popular vote. The left – in the US but also the UK – has always been wilfully resistant to the possibility that a lot of Americans just really, really like Trump, and their vote has nothing to do with the Democrats (or even the Republicans) at all. But as with Trump himself, people look at this election and see what they want to see.
      The US-based journalist Andrew Sullivan, who has frequently expressed scepticism about identity politics, declared on Wednesday, “I found the left’s relentless identity politics increasingly repellent. I wasn’t alone.” Others have argued that Biden didn’t use identity politics enough. And yet, given the sheer number of votes Biden got, and that more African-Americans, Latinos and Asians voted for Trump this year than in 2016, and his LGBT vote doubled, the picture is clearly too complicated to bend into anyone’s pet theory. Meanwhile, his Jewish vote shrank, disabusing those who theorised that his pro-Israel policies would woo the Jews, except in Florida where it may have played a part. Isn’t it annoying when people are inconsistent?
      Captain Hindsights always insist that whatever just happened in an election was both totally foreseeable and proves their theory. But this election is not proving any theory, other than that the US electoral system is, yet again, not fit for purpose, when a candidate can win millions more votes and still not necessarily win. Biden got the numbers, but not necessarily in the expected demographics, and Trump didn’t win, but he didn’t lose in the way many predicted either. Anyone who sums all this up in one grand principle is attempting to wrench a lot of very disparate groups with wildly differing concerns into a self-serving whole. Trump is a true narcissist, but as his popularity and now his possible final downfall have shown, he is not the only one.
      • Hadley Freeman is a Guardian columnist and features writer More

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      Election night in New York City: anxiety, uncertainty and empty streets

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      New York City prepared for the final act of the most consequential election in a generation on Tuesday. There was reason to worry.
      During the city’s 10 days of early voting, many of the 1.1 million New Yorkers were forced to spend large parts of the day in socially distant lines that stretched across multiple city blocks – including some who had decided to vote in person after a mail-in ballot snafu. Even the mayor waited almost four hours, after which he and the governor suggested a complete overhaul of the board of elections. More

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      'Sue if you must': Lincoln Project rejects threat over Kushner and Ivanka billboards

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      The Lincoln Project “will not be intimidated by empty bluster”, a lawyer for the group wrote late on Saturday, in response to a threat from an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner over two billboards put up in Times Square.“Sue if you must,” Matthew Sanderson said.The New York City billboards show the president’s daughter and her husband, both senior White House advisers, displaying apparent indifference to public suffering under Covid-19.Kushner is shown next to the quote “[New Yorkers] are going to suffer and that’s their problem”, above a line of body bags. Trump is shown gesturing, with a smile, to statistics for how many New Yorkers and Americans as a whole have died.According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 8.5m coronavirus cases have been recorded across the US and more than 224,000 have died. Case numbers are at record daily levels and one study has predicted 500,000 deaths by February. New York was hit hard at the pandemic’s outset.The Lincoln Project is a group of former Republican consultants who have made it their mission to attack Donald Trump and support Joe Biden.On Friday, Marc Kasowitz, an attorney who has represented the president against allegations of fraud and sexual assault, wrote to the Lincoln Project, demanding the “false, malicious and defamatory” ads be removed, or “we will sue you for what will doubtless be enormous compensatory and punitive damages”.The Lincoln Project responded that they would not remove the billboards, citing first amendment rights of free speech and the “reckless mismanagement of Covid-19” by the Trump White House.In a legal response on Saturday night, attorney Matthew Sanderson told Kasowitz: “Please peddle your scare tactics elsewhere. The Lincoln Project will not be intimidated by such empty bluster … your clients are no longer Upper East Side socialites, able to sue at the slightest offense to their personal sensitivities.”Due to a “gross act of nepotism”, Sanderson wrote, citing supreme court precedent and “substantial constitutional protections for those who speak out”, Trump and Kushner have become public officials whom Americans “have the right to discuss and criticise freely”.Kasowitz claimed Kushner “never said” the words attributed to him on the billboards, and Trump “never made the gesture” she is shown to make.Vanity Fair reported the Kushner quote, from a meeting in March, in which Kushner criticised New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Trump tweeted the pose used by the Lincoln Project in July, controversially promoting Goya foods.The “bruised self-image” of the president’s daughter, Sanderson wrote, “does not change the fact that this billboard accurately depicts her support of a federal response that has utterly failed to prevent an unmitigated tragedy for the United States”.“May I suggest,” he added, “that if Mr Kushner and Ms Trump are genuinely concerned about salvaging their reputations, they would do well to stop suppressing truthful criticism and instead turn their attention to the Covid-19 crisis that is still unfolding under their inept watch.“These billboards are not causing [their] standing with the public to plummet. Their incompetence is.”A footnote to Sanderson’s letter cited “one of the seminal libel-proof plaintiff cases”, that of a well-known mobster whose reputation was “so tarnished … he could claim no damages for defamation”.“Mr Kushner and Ms Trump’s claims will fare no better than Boobie Cerasini’s given their tarnished reputations on Covid-19,” it said.Sanderson also said “this isn’t over” and added: “Sue if you must.”As University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the Guardian on Saturday, that seems unlikely.Donald Trump “has honed litigation abuse, as a business person and president, to an art form,” Tobias said. But “if they did sue, the litigation might take years to resolve, be expensive and lead to embarrassing revelations … suits like this by people who have thrust themselves into the public eye are notoriously difficult to win.“In short, this appears to be the usual Trump family bluster.” More

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      ‘It’s decorated for Halloween’: New Yorkers rally after Trump calls city ‘ghost town’

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      People mocked the president’s debate comment, pointing out new measures that have kept businesses alive as city managed to flatten the curveDonald Trump is no stranger to making throwaway comments that don’t stand up to scrutiny, but last night he made one that New Yorkers couldn’t abide.In the last of the presidential debates, Trump set his sights toward cities that he deemed overzealous in their response to the pandemic. Turning to New York, where the US president is from, Trump said: Continue reading… More

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      It's not enough for Black Lives Matter to protest. We must run for office too | Chi Ossé

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      Black Lives Matter, the second civil rights movement, was born seven years ago in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. It has now come of age. After numerous waves of protest, the 2020 surge marked the largest protest movement in the history of the country. In June, I co-founded Warriors in the Garden, one of New York’s leading protest collectives, and spent nearly every day for months in the streets. This mass mobilization sprang to life following the killings of two more Black Americans, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, at the hands of the police. But the catalyst was not the fuel. Slavery came to our shores in 1619, and has for 400 years defined both the Black experience and the United States. The nation is a powder keg; 2020 lit the fuse.The ensuing explosion has been bright and chaotic, like the final burst of fireworks on the Fourth of July. But powerful explosions, when coalesced, organized and pointed in the same direction, go by another name: a rocket. The protests are not the end but the engine. We are asked where we go from here. We answer that the sky is not the limit, but the direction.There exists a call in the movement to dismantle and deconstruct. Not just racism, but our strongest institutions as well. If for hundreds of years these institutions have served the powerful in quests of oppression, it is argued, then they must be replaced. I choose a more strategic approach, rooted in pride and optimism.The protests are working. Societal opinions of Black Lives Matter have flipped to majority-positive for the first time. As this is still a democracy, we must convert our popularity into political power.Black people built this country. For 400 years, our contributions to its foundations and fabric have been invaluable. Our free labor provided its original riches; our culture brightened its soul; our hard-earned successes gave it a fighting chance to look in the mirror and feel a sense of honest pride.Black people built this country. For 400 years, our contributions to its foundations and fabric have been invaluableWhile the language of the American promise is bold, optimistic, and worth fighting for, our history is more complicated. Our story is one of struggle and perseverance, by progressives against reactionaries, to make true Martin Luther King Jr’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Changing technology and demographics, combined with society’s long-sought agreement to confront its past, offer this era a glimpse of an end to this fight. At once, the horizon becomes within reach.Over seven years, the Black Lives Matter movement has touched individuals and cities from coast to coast to reshape society. It has illuminated to millions of Americans the suffering of millions of others happening just under their noses. It sparked a re-evaluation of our history and heroes. It shone a spotlight on a swath of artists and leaders who had labored unrecognized for too long.Through this movement, many people – of good intentions but often under-informed – were made aware of their complacency and complicity in grave injustices, and committed to alleviating them. Black Lives Matter has awakened America.There is a belief in this country that a “silent majority” of Americans are conservatives, opposed to progress and loyal to a mythical past. While in Richard Nixon’s era this may have been true, it is no longer. There is no silent majority opposed to progressive change. The majority is with us and it is loud.The next step is to convert these voices to votes. It is from the platform of this philosophy that I launched my own bid to serve as a Gen Z member of the New York city council, and call on a young, multiracial coalition of progressives across the country to step forward as well. Monumental change will come with this coalition at the helm of America’s institutions, including its businesses, schools and the government itself. No longer must we rely primarily on making requests and demands of those in power, nor should we insist the seats of power be dismantled. We will claim those seats.We have invested far too much in this country, both willingly and unwillingly, to not finish the job. We built this ship. It is our right to sail it, and our duty to point it in the right direction.Then our democratic dream can be realized.The political ideology espoused in the streets this summer is not new. But our clear path to enact it might be. With popular support behind us, we stand at the threshold of political revolution. The key lies in merging the utility of democratic government with the tidal force of mass mobilization. If government is the machine, the movement must be its fuel.As Black Americans and our coalition fulfill our role as what Nikole Hannah-Jones calls in the 1619 Project “the perfecters of this democracy”, this second civil rights movement will be the last. The partnership between government and movement is the remedy to heal our historical scars and open wounds, and carry this democracy toward perfection. More

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      I was caught in New York's election error. That's no cause for alarm

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      On Tuesday, I filled out my second ballot in the 2020 presidential election, and in the coming days, up to 100,000 New Yorkers will be joining me.No, this is not a large-scale incident of voter fraud. It was the result of a vendor error which saw ballots sent to the wrong people last week. The issue panicked New Yorkers worried about whether their vote would count, and provided ammunition for Donald Trump’s fight against mail-in voting.“Big Fraud, Unfixable!” the president said.But the unfixable incident has apparently been fixed, providing a lesson on the role of human error in elections and how that can be addressed. And this year, with an unprecedented number of Americans voting by mail, and Congress leaving the election severely underfunded, differentiating between election hiccups and chaos is crucial.Perry Grossman, voting rights project attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), put it bluntly. “Vendor errors happen,” Grossman said. “We’re 30, 40 days out from the election now. There’s time to get this fixed. My preference would be: everybody should fucking relax.”Grossman said he could spend hours explaining how to improve elections in New York, but the issue at hand was identified and resolved promptly, thanks to a set of existing quality controls.Roughly 24 hours after the issue was made public, the city announced it would be sending out new ballot packages that would supersede the original ballots if both were sent in. In New York, absentee voters can also vote in person as late as election day. The in-person vote will be the only one that is counted even if they have already mailed in a ballot.“If you have to or just want to vote by mail, don’t worry, you’re going to get a new ballot package, feel confident that if you fill it out, return it early, you’re going to be A-OK,” Grossman said. More

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      I visited Donald Trump's state park and it's not a park

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      We’ve just learned Donald Trump paid virtually no income tax in 10 of the last 15 years. While the fragments of Trump’s finances are still being investigated, there’s one unusually large relic of his dealings just an hour’s drive north of New York City.Last week, I went to Donald J Trump state park, a park few people know exists, because it’s not really a park. In fact, it’s two tracts of muddy, overgrown land between New York’s Putnam and Westchester counties that Trump purchased in 1998 for a total of $2.75m, hoping to build a golf course. Neighborhood officials halted the plan, citing environmental concerns, and the land was abandoned. In an alternate timeline, the story would just end here.But we’re living in Trump’s universe. In 2006, the reality TV mogul donated the undeveloped land to New York state, claiming it was worth $100m – an amount that, if claimed as a qualified conservation contribution, could have saved him a fortune in income tax, potentially carried forward for years. (Confusingly, Trump’s 2016 campaign valued the land at $26.1m in his public list of charitable contributions.) More