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      Zohran Mamdani’s writer on crafting a historic victory speech: ‘In New York, inspiration is everywhere’

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      In his victory speech after winning the New York mayoral election last week, Zohran Mamdani came out swinging.The speech included, among other dramatic flourishes, a reference to the socialist titan Eugene Debs, shoutouts to the city’s “Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses”, tributes to Jawaharlal Nehru and Fiorello La Guardia, sprinkles of Arabic – and it was all delivered with the cadence and command of a hip-hop emcee. Many who were listening could not help but wonder: how the hell did he pull that off?A healthy portion of the credit should go to Julian Gerson, the speechwriter on the Mamdani campaign who typifies the young, leftwing lieutenants powering this insurgent operation – a 29-year-old outer-borough dweller (in his case, Brooklyn) with unerring message discipline. He is especially unabashed when it comes to the words he puts in his boss’s mouth that draw inspiration from socialist greats and the multicultural city that the Mamdani campaign holds dear.“When this campaign has sung the most is when it feels like a love letter to New York,” Gerson told the Guardian.To write the victory speech, Gerson began working a week in advance, collaborating with Mamdani and his campaign consultant Morris Katz on overarching themes, before locking himself in his apartment until he had a draft ready for Mamdani to review on the Saturday before the election. (Mandani never saw a draft of the concession speech, which Gerson said was “not fun to write”.) “Push yourself to think of speechwriting as more than just the written word,” he said Mamdani told him – which is to say the 34-year-old Muslim and Indian Ugandan state assemblyman was already thinking about the space his victory would occupy in the annals of history. Gerson threw out a couple names he hoped to quote in the speech – and recalls Mamdani responding: “‘OK, but can you make sure to quote Eugene Debs?’ And I was like, ‘Actually, he’s already on the list.’”Gerson, the son of a Texas-born mediator with strong ties to the local Democratic scene and a Belgian NYU professor, did most of his growing up in the West Village and attended the prestigious Dalton school in Manhattan. One early exposure to professional writing came when his father, Stéphane, published a book about his younger brother Owen dying in a rafting accident at age eight. “It was a very formative, very hard part of my childhood that taught me how to express myself through the written word,” said Gerson, who gave notes on early drafts.View image in fullscreenGerson got his start in politics as a high school summer intern in Mike Bloomberg’s New York mayoral administration. For university, he went to Middlebury College in Vermont, where he served as the communications director for the Middlebury College Democrats. After graduation, he worked for Manhattan congressman Jerry Nadler – whom he commends for his bravery leading the first impeachment of Donald Trump and for voting against the Iraq war – and did a two-year stint ghostwriting for New York governor Kathy Hochul.Gerson joined the Mamdani campaign in March as political director, soliciting endorsements from elected officials across the state while working with Mamdani to deepen his relationship with a panoply of constituents across the city. “A lot of that was figuring out, how do we get him into parts of Black New York? How do you have him speaking with gay and trans New Yorkers?” Those ground-level experiences wound up supplying Gerson with steady fodder for speeches that would pull straight from the communities Mamdani was courting.For the victory speech, Gerson found the opening Debs quote – “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” also cribbed by Martin Luther King – inside William Safire’s speech compendium titled Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. The quote comes from a speech made when the labor organizer and perennial Socialist party candidate was sentenced to prison in 1918 for denouncing the US’s involvement in the first world war. “That’s it!” Gerson recalls saying when he came upon it.It was in many ways inevitable that the speech would draw comparisons to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory address in Chicago’s Grant park, widely regarded as one of the greatest orations in modern American history. He called it “a formative memory of what a speech can mean and how it can speak to people”, he said. “It was the only speech I really read in depth before I started writing.”Like Obama’s speechwriters, some of whom Gerson said he spoke to for advice, Gerson enjoys the benefit of writing for a deft multimedia performer. In the days leading up to election night, Gerson subbed in for Mamdani to give his voice a break. “At a certain point I would get into it and try to give a performance, and it’s crazy how different and how much better the speech is when you have somebody who just has this innate talent for knowing when to pause, knowing which syllables to emphasize. The most successful speechwriter-principal relationships are those where it’s close to a partnership, where they engage with the material really intensively and make it theirs.”Obama’s many rhetorical imitators in the Democratic party – US senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro – latch on to his pentecostal intonations in their public speaking. But Mamdani, who once pursued a rap career under the name Mr Cardamom and who still psyches himself up for work by playing Many Men by 50 Cent (a vocal critic of Mamdani’s plan to tax the rich), embraces the language and swagger of hip-hop. The kiss-off he delivered to rival Andrew Cuomo in his victory speech – wishing him “only the best in private life” while quoting his father, Mario, the former New York governor, without attribution (“A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”) – was a mic-drop moment straight out of a New York rap cypher.“We all know Mr Cardamom exists in the world,” Gerson said. “But when you’re in the midst of a campaign, you have to shave off parts of your life. First goes exercise, then reading, then grocery shopping – until you’re hoping you just make it to election day with laundry. Cultural consumption shrinks too, but music can still fill the liminal space.”View image in fullscreenGerson works in his own musical tastes, too. For a May rally, he drew inspiration from a song by the Chilean American electronic musician Nicolas Jaar’s band Darkside, using a Spanish lyric: si no funciona, no me diga si no funciona (translation: “if it doesn’t work, don’t tell me that it works”) – to set the tone for the rally speech Mamdani gave last month assailing Trump’s agenda. The campaign’s impulse to tie its populist ideas to musical references is a throwback to the community building and social activism that gave rise to hip-hop’s birth in the Bronx.Mamdani’s victory speech was not a universal hit, of course. CNN pundit Van Jones was among the critics who took issue with a speech he described as “sharp” and combative. “I think he missed a chance tonight to open up and bring more people into the tent,” Jones said.Gerson makes no apologies. “In response to Van Jones: this campaign and this mayoralty will absolutely be inclusive to every single New Yorker. Zohran had that final line in his long list of thank yous where he said: ‘Many of you voted for me, others of you did not and many didn’t vote at all – and I want to be the mayor for each of you.’ To New Yorkers, there’s a genuine eagerness to serve and prove that we’re going to follow through and that this is going to be a great four years.’”Mamdani and Gerson wanted New Yorkers to come away from the victory speech feeling as if they would also have an important part to play in the new administration, and that no suggestion was too small. That includes an Arabic line that made it into Gerson’s final draft – ana minkum wa ilaykum, which can translate to “I am of you and for you.” ” One of the “uncles” in Mamdani’s Astoria neighborhood pitched it to Mamdani while he was there shooting a campaign video in Arabic.“When you’re looking for inspiration, you have to look everywhere,” Gerson said. “Fortunately, we live in New York, inspiration is everywhere, and people are loud and eager to share it.” More

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      ‘Most horrific death you could imagine’: the truth behind Netflix’s Death By Lightning

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      The descendants of James Garfield, the 20th US president, were proud of his life but rarely spoke of his death. “We knew what had happened, that he was shot in a train station,” says James Garfield III, his great-great-great grandson. “We read about the story in books but, in one way or another, we just glanced over it.”That changed in 2011 with the publication of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, a book by Candice Millard that revived interest in Garfield’s unfinished life. Her work has now inspired a Netflix drama, Death By Lightning, starring Michael Shannon as the president and Matthew Macfadyen as the drifter who gunned him down.The series promises to shine a light on Garfield, who rose from poverty to the presidency in the Gilded Age only to fall victim to its toxic political divisions. His tenure was cut short after only 200 days not only by the assassin’s bullet but by medical malpractice – an event now forgotten as surely as the killings of Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy continue to fascinate.That tragedy set the table for one of US history’s great “what ifs” with Garfield’s lost potential felt most acutely in the area of civil rights, where his commitment to equality for African Americans might have altered the nation’s post-Reconstruction trajectory.James Garfield III, 58, an athletic trainer and professor from Cleveland, Ohio, adds: “You can’t help but be proud of what he did. He was like a multi-threat: he was a lawyer, he was a preacher, he was a farmer. He was all of these things which also shaped who he was and how he was and everything that we know about him the family carries down with us.”Garfield was the last president born in a log cabin, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in 1831. His father died when he was 18 months old, leaving his mother, Eliza, to raise five children in difficult circumstances. An insatiable reader, Garfield worked on canal boats to earn money for an education.He studied law, was ordained as minister, became president of Hiram College in Ohio and was a state senator. In 1858 he married a former classmate, Lucretia Rudolph, with whom he would have seven children. An ardent Unionist, Garfield viewed the civil war as a holy crusade against slavery and advanced to the rank of major general.Speaking via Zoom, Millard says: “When I started researching him, I couldn’t believe it. He was absolutely brilliant. He was incredibly brave. He was very progressive for the time. He was kind. He was a decent human being and would have been one of our great presidents had he lived.”Garfield was persuaded by Lincoln to resign his military commission when he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he would serve as a Republican for 17 years. He was strong supporter of black suffrage, viewing it as a matter of justice and the fulfillment of a wartime covenant.Millard continues: “The speech he gave on the floor of Congress will tear your heart out. He was an incredibly powerful orator and this issue was very important to him.“He wrote an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem while he was in Congress. He was this incredible classicist; he spoke Latin and Greek and knew huge lengths of the Aeneid by heart in Latin. He was an extraordinary mind.”At the 1880 Republican national convention in Chicago the party was deeply divided between the “Stalwarts”, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling, who supported a third term for Ulysses S Grant, and the “Half-Breeds”, who supported James G Blaine. Garfield attended as a supporter of his friend and fellow Ohioan John Sherman.When the 15,000-person convention was deadlocked between Grant and Blaine, delegates began looking for a compromise. Garfield’s impassioned speech nominating Sherman impressed them. During the speech, he reportedly shouted, “And now, gentlemen of the convention, what do we want?” to which a voice from the crowd unexpectedly replied: “We want Garfield!”On the 36th ballot, a stampede of delegates made Garfield the surprise nominee. To placate the Stalwart faction, Chester Arthur, a Conkling loyalist from New York, was chosen as his running mate. In the general election Garfield defeated the Democratic nominee to become the only sitting member of the House ever to be elected president.Millard says: “What would have made Garfield great and what is extremely rare and maybe unique to the American presidency is he didn’t want the job. It’s not that he had never thought about it but he was thrust into it.“He used to call it presidential fever because he would watch people he admired change drastically because they wanted the office so much that they were willing to give up their own values, set aside their own morals in order to get this position, and he was never willing to do that.”She adds: “When he found himself president, he was in this uniquely powerful position because he didn’t owe anyone anything, which never happens. To degrees people lose a little bit of themselves along the way and he didn’t because he wasn’t hungering for it. He was like, well, there’s some good I want to do and here I am so I can do it. Then unfortunately he didn’t have the chance to.”View image in fullscreenThe defining conflict of Garfield’s short presidency was his confrontation with Conkling over the “spoils system”. Conkling demanded control over federal patronage in New York, particularly the powerful and lucrative post of collector of the Port of New York. Garfield refused, stating the issue was “whether the president is registering clerk of the Senate or the executive of the United States”. He nominated a political foe of Conkling to the post.The confrontation escalated into a public battle but Garfield outmaneuvered Conkling in the Senate. Facing a humiliating public defeat, Conkling and his junior senator resigned their seats in protest. The next day, Garfield’s nominee was confirmed. It was a landmark victory for the power of the presidency over the party machine and for the cause of reform over “boss rule”.But even as Garfield battled the titans of his party, he was being stalked by a disturbed and delusional man who embodied the dark side of the patronage system. Charles Guiteau was a drifter with a history of professional failures, mental instability and physical and psychological abuse in his childhood. He had failed as a lawyer, bill collector, preacher and member of the Oneida free-love commune.Millard explains: “He was mentally ill and his particular brand of madness was delusion. He always believed that God had chosen him for greatness. He actually had financially a better start than Garfield but where Garfield achieved and rose, Guiteau failed at everything.“He tried to be a lawyer and failed; he tried to be a journalist and failed; he tried a free love commune and they nicknamed him ‘Charles Get Out’. He was the only one not able to partake in what they had to offer at the free love commune, partly because he refused to do any manual labor. He thought it was beneath him.”But Guiteau believed he had finally found a pathway to success: politics. Swept up in the drama of the 1880 election, he wrote and delivered an insignificant speech, “Garfield against Hancock”, and became convinced in his own mind that he was single-handedly responsible for Garfield’s victory.Under this logic, Guiteau reckoned he had earned a high-level government job. He travelled to Washington and relentlessly pestered Garfield, Blaine and other officials, demanding to be made the US consul in Paris — a post for which he had zero qualifications. He became such a nuisance that he was eventually banned from the White House.As he followed the dramatic Garfield-Conkling feud in the newspapers, Guiteau’s rejection curdled into a fanatical delusion. As he later described it, he woke one night with an “epiphany” he believed was a message from God: if Garfield were removed, the party’s internal conflict would be solved and he would be hailed as a hero.On 2 July 1881, just four months into his presidency, Garfield was leaving Washington for his college reunion. As he walked through the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station, Guiteau stepped from the shadows, pulled an ivory-handled British Bull Dog revolver from his coat pocket and shot the president twice in the back.View image in fullscreenGarfield cried out: “My God, what is this?” and collapsed on the station floor. When a police officer seized Guiteau, he declared: “I did it and I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be president.”One bullet had grazed Garfield’s arm; the other lodged behind his pancreas. Modern medical historians agree that the wound was not mortal. Had Garfield been left alone, he probably would have survived, as many civil war soldiers did with similar injuries. However, what followed was a catastrophic case of medical malpractice.Millard laments: “Can you imagine a more germ-infested environment than the floor of a train station? That’s where he fell and was immediately examined. People were coming off the streets where there was horse manure everywhere, inserting their fingers in his back, putting him in this horse hair and hay mattress.“At that time, the hospitals were so bad, you only went there to die so they took him to the White House, but the White House itself was falling apart at that point. It was rat-infested.”A doctor with a controversial past named Dr Doctor Willard Bliss (confusingly, his first name was Doctor) took charge of Garfield’s care. He repeatedly probed Garfield’s wound with unsterilised fingers and instruments, introducing massive infection. He invited Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, to find the bullet with his self-designed metal detector but without success.Millard says: “Bliss saw in this national and personal tragedy an opportunity for personal fame and achievement. He was very worried about taking what he thought were risks with the the newfangled medicine, including sterilising and cleaning antiseptic.For 79 days Garfield suffered immensely as the infection spread, developing sepsis and blood poisoning. He lost nearly a hundred pounds, becoming a skeletal figure. One of the last things he wrote was “strangulatus pro republica”, or “tortured for the republic”.Despite the president’s obvious decline, Bliss issued rosy reports to the press, driven by what historians describe as immense hubris. On 19 September Garfield finally succumbed to the infection his doctors had caused.Millard adds: “It was the most horrific death you can imagine. He was riddled with infection and, when they did the autopsy, there were huge gouges. The fingers had created these burrowing holes through him and they were filled with pus and infection. He lost so much weight and was horribly dehydrated. He almost certainly would have survived had it not been for his doctors.”As for Guiteau, he pronounced himself the happiest he had ever been because he was now a celebrity. Millard says: “He’s doing every interview he can. He’s having his portrait taken. He’s polishing off his memoirs that he had written before.“He writes a letter for the New York Herald to publish offering himself to any young woman who would like to marry him but she has to be younger than 30 and wealthy. He thinks he’s quite a catch now and he’s waiting for Arthur, whom he assumes is very grateful to him, to free him and then he expects to run for president himself.”Guiteau’s trial was a spectacle. His defence lawyers argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity and, more pointedly, that the president’s doctors, not Guiteau, were responsible for Garfield’s death. Both defences failed. Guiteau was convicted and hanged, his brain and enlarged spleen preserved by a museum.View image in fullscreenThe nation feared that Arthur, the ultimate machine politician, would entrench the spoils system. Instead, rising to the gravity of the office, he became an unexpected champion of reform. In 1883 he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which established a merit-based system for federal employment and stands as Garfield’s most direct legacy.Garfield was the second of four US presidents who have been assassinated. The shootings of Lincoln and Kennedy have spawned countless books and conspiracy theories; those of Garfield and, in 1901, William McKinley are little remembered. It was not until 2018 that a marker was erected on the National Mall close to the spot where Garfield was shot.Millard hopes that Death By Lightning will inspire fresh curiosity or renewed interest, especially among young people, and impress on viewers what America lost. She visited the set in Budapest, Hungary, during filming and is thrilled by the finished product. She credits Mike Makowsky, its creator, writer and executive producer, for doing his own research and offering a faithful portrayal of Garfield.“When we were talking early on six years ago, I told him I understand you’re going to take some creative licence and that’s fine. The one thing I really care about is Garfield’s character. It needs to stay intact because not only do people not know much about him; think there’s nothing interesting to know. You can’t understand the weight of this tragedy unless you understand who he was. Mike succeeded spectacularly with that. You understand who Garfield was.”Speaking via Zoom from Los Angeles, Makowsky says: “Garfield was truly a Renaissance man. He was fiercely intelligent and empathetic and was so ahead of his time on the prevailing questions around civil rights and reforms within his own government.“He believed in universal education at a time where that was not at all a popular notion. He exhibited genuine leadership and I hope that the show is able to successfully make the case for Garfield as one of the great tragic what-could-have-beens in our history. I can only speculate the positive effects that a full Garfield presidency would have had on our country.”

      Death By Lightning is now available on Netflix More

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      in Elections

      Trump pardons Giuliani, Meadows and others over plot to steal 2020 election

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      Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, both close former political allies of Donald Trump, are among scores of people pardoned by the president over the weekend for their roles in a plot to steal the 2020 election.The maneuver is in effect symbolic, given it only applies in the federal justice system and not in state courts where Giuliani, Meadows and the others continue facing legal peril. The acts of clemency were announced in a post late on Sunday to X by US pardon attorney Ed Martin, covers 77 people said to have been the architects and agents of the scheme to install fake Republican electors in several battleground states, which would have falsely declared Trump their winner instead of the actual victor: Joe Biden.Those pardoned include Giuliani and Sidney Powell, former lawyers to Trump, and Meadows, who acted as White House chief of staff during his first term of office. Other prominent names include Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, attorneys who advised Trump during and immediately after the election that Biden won to interrupt Trump’s two terms.“Let their healing begin,” Martin said in the post, in which he thanked Trump, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and her deputy, Todd Blanche, for “allowing me … to achieve your intent”.Martin is a staunchly conservative ally of the president said to be behind the “weaponization” of the justice department and a push to “bully, prosecute, punish and silence” Trump’s political foes and critics, including the recent indictments of the former FBI director James Comey, New York attorney general, Leticia James, and former national security adviser John Bolton.The pardons extend Trump’s efforts to rewrite the aftermath of the 2020 election and failed efforts to deny Biden the White House. On his first day back in office in January, Trump issued “full, complete and unconditional” presidential pardons for more than 1,500 people involved in the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress, in which five people died and many others, including law enforcement officers, were injured during a desperate attempt by his supporters to keep him in office.Many of those listed in Martin’s pardon document, which it specifically states “does not apply to the president of the United States”, were involved in legal cases and investigations in numerous states that Biden won, including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada.The pardons, like those for the 6 January rioters, are “full, complete and unconditional” – and apply only in federal court, making them “largely symbolic”, according to the New York Times.Proceedings against some of the individuals are still active at state level, including in Georgia, where an election interference case against an initial 19 defendants, including Trump, has stalled due to the disqualification of the Fulton county prosecutor, Fani Willis.Ellis joined Powell and another Trump lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, in taking a plea deal in the Georgia case in 2023. Addressing the court in tears, she admitted a felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.Chesebro was disbarred in New York earlier this year for his involvement, Ellis’s Colorado law license was suspended for three years, and efforts to disbar Powell failed because a panel in Texas ruled her misdemeanor convictions in Georgia were neither serious nor intentional.Giuliani also received severe consequences as leader of the plot to keep Trump in office. He was banned from practicing law in New York and Washington DC. He was ordered to pay almost $150m to two Georgia election workers he defamed. And the former New York City mayor was also caught up in defamation trials involving two voting machine manufacturers, Dominion and Smartmatic.Meadows, meanwhile, failed to persuade the supreme court to move the Georgia election case to federal court and pleaded not guilty last year to criminal charges in Arizona, where he was among 18 indicted defendants.Trump’s proclamation, dated 7 November, described efforts to prosecute those accused of aiding his efforts to cling to power as “a grave national injustice perpetrated on the American people” and said the pardons were designed to continue “the process of national reconciliation”,The White House did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Monday.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      in US Politics

      Snap workers say Trump administration is ‘using country’s poorest as pawns’

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      When Stacy Smith, a government worker, showed up to work last Monday – the first working day after food benefits lapsed, amid the ongoing federal shutdown – she found a long line outside her office door. Elderly and disabled individuals desperately wanted answers.Some had gone to buy groceries, not realizing that their usual benefits were unavailable.They quickly discovered that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) payments had been paused, after the Trump administration said it would not pay benefits because of the shutdown – crushing the largest anti-hunger program in the US.“I had a client that came in and said they were afraid they were going to have to start eating cat food again, because without Snap benefits, that’s all they can afford, because they’re on a fixed income,” said Smith, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 2882, who works as an eligibility technician for assistance programs including Snap in Providence, Rhode Island.“Those are the things that I leave my job, and I go home, and that’s what I’m thinking about,” she said.Nearly 42 million Americans rely on Snap. With benefits paused for the first time in the program’s history, workers who provide assistance to Snap recipients expressed stark fears over how the move will affect low-income families and individuals. Across the country, food banks have been scrambling to keep up with surges in demand.Following two court rulings, the Trump administration said it would only provide partial funding to Snap. Funding for the program lapsed on 1 November.Snap payments continue to be contested in the courts. On Friday, the Trump administration appealed to the supreme court against a lower court’s order compelling it to make the full aid payments. Its appeal was granted, temporarily, in an emergency ruling.A Boston-based federal appeals court late on Sunday then ruled the benefits must be paid for November. But the Trump administration was expected to appeal the ruling, which was not expected to have immediate effect after the supreme court ruling, leaving the current status of the Snap program itself uncertain.As the Trump administration fights against funding Snap, Smith said low-income families were scared. With the holidays approaching and schools due to close, breakfast and lunch meals provided during term time will not be available for their children.View image in fullscreen“Clients are coming in. They want to know when this is going to end. And we don’t have an answer for them,” said Smith. “It’s hard to look someone in the face who’s telling you they can’t feed their family, and be able to try to guide them to other avenues to try to get some food for their household. We have community food banks, and we have food pantries, and they’re they’re already maxed out.”Snap is funded by the federal government, but administered by state and local governments, already facing cuts by the Trump administration. “This is more chaos for states and their ability to manage all these other big program issues that they have, and they’re throwing all their resources in,” said a former USDA food and nutrition service employee, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, as they currently work for federal contractors. “There’s a real commitment by the states to get these benefits out there. This is a lifeline for the 42 million people that get the program. I see that commitment from them, but this really is unprecedented.”As the government shutdown drags on, Snap recipients have been reaching out to state offices in desperation for answers and relief.“At this point we have no more information, really, than they have in the news currently,” said Misha Dancing Waters, a member of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 720, who also works as an economic support specialist since the last nine years in Dane county, Wisconsin. “For Wisconsin, we haven’t even gotten partial Snap funding. We haven’t gotten anything so far.View image in fullscreen“We’re giving out a lot of resources, and they’re really just hitting all of those food pantries. Places where there’s anything to help are getting hit so hard that they just really can’t meet the need.”Pausing the scheme was “really punitive”, added Waters. “It’s another way to get people off of the benefit … It’s really scary times. There’s so many things up in the air. People really don’t have any way to plan or prepare.”Contacted for comment, the US Department of Agriculture – which oversees Snap benefits – pointed to a memo, which said that “maximum allotments” for households were being reduced to 50% during November “due to the limited availability of Federal funding” and “orders from two courts”.Should the shutdown persist, and Snap funding fail to be restored, Waters expressed fear things will get worse very quickly.“I think the next month we’re going to see things get drastically more dire if we don’t get this shutdown turned around and get our situation with health insurance and food care fixed. People need those basic things just to survive,” she said. “We are using our country’s poorest and most vulnerable as pawns in a political game, and that’s not acceptable on any level. It’s not OK for us to be denying people basic things like food and medical care.” More

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      in US Politics

      Resilience of Europe’s populist right carries warning for US Democrats

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      In the afterglow of electoral triumph, hope springs renewed for Democrats confined to the frustrating impotence of political opposition.Boosted by last week’s electoral wins in New York City, Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere, as well as California’s affirmation of Proposition 50 allowing for congressional redistricting, party members suddenly feel able to dream that future elections may herald an escape route from the Donald Trump era.Yet the experiences of other countries that have grappled with the rise of rightwing authoritarian or populist movements provide a cautionary antidote to such optimism.It suggests that even the rosiest Democratic scenario – one that would see the party retake control of (at least) the House of Representatives in next year’s midterms, and win the White House in 2028 – might not be enough to permanently break the feverish intensity of Trump’s Maga movement.Defeated rightwing populists are capable of mounting electoral comebacks after suffering setbacks at the polls – as Trump himself proved by winning the 2024 presidential election after his defeat by Joe Biden four years had lulled many commentators into writing him off.Three recent elections in east-central Europe attest to the electoral resilience of populist forces, with politicians or parties that had previously been voted out following mass protests returning to office.In the Czech Republic, the populist ANO party, led by the wealthy oligarch Andrej Babiš, is on the verge of a return to government in a coalition with a far-right anti-immigrant party and a previously fringe anti-environmental grouping after it finished as the biggest bloc in last month’s parliamentary election.It will mean Babiš returning as prime minister four years after an electoral defeat propelled by conflict of interest scandals, and mass protests against his government that resembled the recent No Kings demonstrations in the US.His comeback matches that in neighboring Slovakia of Robert Fico, a former socialist who was a guest speaker at this year’s CPAC gathering in Maryland. Fico, an anti-immigration hardliner who has abandoned his country’s support for Ukraine in favour of ties with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, returned as prime minister in 2023 when his Smer party won an election five years after he resigned following popular street protests sparked by the murder of an investigative journalist.View image in fullscreenIn another striking resurgence, the candidate of Poland’s rightwing Law and Justice party (PiS), Karol Nawrocki, narrowly won last June’s presidential election against a liberal centrist candidate of the governing Civic Platform, Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw.Nawrocki’s victory came less than two years after the nationalist and socially conservative PiS was ousted from power in parliamentary elections by a coalition headed by the Civic Platform.The PiS revival prompted Anne Applebaum to write in the Atlantic that “all elections are now existential”.“Small numbers of voters swinging one way or the next will decide the nature of the state, the future of democracy, the independence of the courts,” she added.Albin Sybera, a Czech commentator, said that although local conditions in all three countries differed, all demonstrated “the resilience of populism”.“The resilience feeds on similar ingredients and polarization is one common theme,” he said.“Another is the failure of liberal or centrist parties to find a lasting solution to economic discontent resulting from a rapidly changing economic landscape that has seen traditional manufacturing jobs disappear – a scenario familiar to many parts of the US, as well as former communist states in eastern Europe.“There is definitely something in common [with the US] in the Czech case and in the Slovak case, to some extent, in the dissatisfaction of the vulnerable parts of the society, in combination with the failure of the liberal political parties to address this,” said Sybera.Such parties are further energized by standing for an animating vision – usually a strident view of nationhood harking back to a supposed golden bygone, as exemplified by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, and often (though not always) bolstered by religious faith and socially conservative values.“If you look at all the major political forces in western democracies, the only one with any real ideology, any real passion, any real project, is the far right,” said Steven Levitsky, professor of politics at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die.“The far-left, center-left, liberal-center, Christian Democrats – none of them have a real project. They will unite in their opposition to the far right. But I can’t think of a social democratic party in the world that has people getting up out of bed early Saturday morning to work for the party.”The erosion of the traditional left versus right political axis in most western democracies provides a further boost to populists. Politics revolves less around traditional arguments about government spending and taxation – although these arguments still take place – than between urban cosmopolitan secularism and more rural traditional nationalism.“Politics in most western democracies is now primarily cleaved along what you can call cosmopolitan versus populist lines,” said Levitsky. “We call it left-right, but it’s urban-liberal, secular on the one hand, and more rural religious, ethno-nationalist on the other.”The tendency of centrist and leftist parties to prioritize defending democracy – a core theme of Biden’s presidency and adopted as a campaign issue by Kamala Harris – may also play into the hands of the far right.Populations the world over may be less motivated by democratic ideals and freedom than previously thought, believes Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador and ex-president of the American Foreign Service Association.“One of the things I’ve learned from 40 years as an American diplomat is that some of the basic assumptions we grew up with are not necessarily true. Some of them were ideological,” he said.View image in fullscreen“The assumption, that people, given a choice, will prefer democracy, they want to elect their own leaders, they want freedom of speech and all the other freedoms – as a default, that’s probably true but there are trade-offs.“If you ask most people in the world, would you give away some freedom for economic security or prosperity or national security, I think in most countries the answer is yes. But I think we convinced ourselves, à la Barack Obama, that the arc of history bends toward progress.”Such pragmatism fits with another factor explaining the populist bounce-back facility – the growth of anti-incumbency sentiment, particularly prevalent following the Covid pandemic.“The generalized unpopularity of incumbents hits everybody, not just the liberals,” said Levitsky. “It hits the far right. It affected Trump in 2020. It’s going to affect the Republicans in 2026 and 2028.”But that assumes that the continuation of an even electoral playing field in the next two election cycles that Democrats suspect Trump is scheming to tilt in Republicans’ favor.An exception to the trend has been Hungary’s strongman prime minister, Viktor Orbán – who visited Trump at the White House on Friday – and who has won four consecutive elections aided, critics say, by ruthless gerrymandering. But he faces a tough re-election fight next spring as polls show his Fidesz party trailing the main opposition.Trump has repeatedly hailed Orbán’s illiberal philosophy – characterized by, according to opponents, a takeover of institutions such as the courts and universities, buying up independent media by the prime minister’s cronies, and unfair elections – as a model for his own governing style.Rubin believes the US’s current trajectory has close parallels to Hungary and warned that the combination of a 1929-style crash and a determined ideological project could pose a dire threat to democracy.“Don’t assume that this is about winning majorities over to whatever the cause or the plan is,” he said. “It’s about finding a way to keep and seize power regardless of what the majority wants.” More

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      In New York, Zohran Mamdani showed how it’s done: ‘identity politics’ can win elections | Nesrine Malik

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      It is inevitable that too much will be laid on Zohran Mamdani’s head. So large is the vacuum on the left of politics that his victory will occupy an outsized space for progressives beyond New York City. And so, before I lay too much on his head myself, some caveats. New York is a specific place. It has a specific demographic and economic profile. And Mamdani is a man of a specific background, racial, political and religious. But with that out of the way, I think the successful practice of “identity politics” during his campaign offers some universal lessons.I put identity politics in quote marks because the term now means little that is universally agreed upon. Broadly, it has come to mean something derogatory, kind of in the same way that “wokeness” has. It increasingly has negative connotations: a political appeal to race or other markers of identity that is shallow, rooted in perpetual victimhood, focused only on representation and disconnected from material reality. Seen this way, identity politics is not about universal goals, such as lifting people out of poverty and so mobilising broad coalitions of voters, but simply about visibility.But identity politics as an organising political force has its origins in precisely the opposite idea. Coined by the Black feminist socialist organisation the Combahee River Collective in 1977, identity politics was defined as a path to a liberation that could only come about through the understanding that systems oppress many different people along the lines of their identity, and so could only be dismantled if all groups worked together. “We believe,” the collective declared, “that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity”, but that “we also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”That “simultaneous experience” is what I am talking about here. Mamdani tapped into that. He rooted his campaign solidly in the experience of being a New Yorker, and how the city needed to be made more affordable, then expanded that to include all the ways in which different groups live that experience. He released campaigning videos in Urdu, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic, and consistently made all of them about a retail economic message: rent freezes, free buses, universal childcare, making New York a place to raise your children and build small businesses. Then he threw in a bespoke little twist. In his Arabic message he quipped that something more controversial than his political message is his belief that the knafeh, an Arab dessert, is better on Steinway Street in Queens than it is in New Jersey. Talk about hitting a sweet spot.Including the languages of underrepresented identities is an exercise in enfranchisement. He quoted the Arabic phrase ana minkum wa alaikum – “I am of you and for you” – in his victory speech, and named those “forgotten by the politics of our city”, the “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties”.He combined that with being in the places that working-class people, many of whom are people of colour, occupy. Visiting those on the taxi ranks and working the late-night shifts, he forged a powerful metaphor of a city that is kept going by those who labour in the dark. And he drew that all together by bringing his own identity, as he himself put it, “into the light”. A Muslim who grew up in the shadows of Islamophobia, he suffered an outrageously racist campaign against him, but resisted the pressure to play down his identity in order to fit in, to succeed. “No longer will I live in the shadows,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThose shadows are vast and, in this moment, encompass not only Mamdani, but huge swathes of people across all identities living under a regime of fear, economic struggle, deportations, suffocation of freedom of speech and an entire political establishment that has made bullying and cruelty its modus operandi. The coalition that Mamdani built, across all ethnicities, became about closing the yawning gap between people and power. In a revealing contrast to establishment Democrat politicians, when Mamdani was heckled last week over his position on Gaza, he did not say, as Kamala Harris did when she was heckled, “I’m speaking”. Mamdani smiled and said: “I want you to be able to afford this city too, my brother.”But there is something else about Mamdani’s approach that reveals how identity done right is generative. His is a politics that is forged and defined by being on the margins, but not as a single individual who wants to escape alone. Those who see their identity as a way to become part of an establishment that can then hold them up as exemplars of inclusive politics will always have limited appeal, and therefore limited success as changemakers. To see those margins, racial, economic and political, as spaces in which a majority can be mobilised, as spaces where people don’t want to hear about victimhood but justice, is to create coalitions and escape together. It is to reveal to the voting public that the problem is not particular racisms or prejudices, but an entire system that excludes all those who don’t have capital in all its forms.That message resonates with the college-educated white parents who are struggling with childcare costs, as well as the immigrant taxi driver struggling to pay rent. But above all, ironically, Mamdani exemplified the virtues of the American “melting pot”, a nation of immigrants at the sharp end of capitalism who together increasingly recognise all the ways in which the country is failing to live up to its ideals. All the ways in which Mamdani has been fought, not only by the right but by his own party, prove that American liberal politics has long lost its way in its service to capital and its preening approach to identity. What works in New York doesn’t necessarily map perfectly on to the rest of the US and beyond, but Mamdani’s win is a reminder that the people, whatever their identities, all want one thing – leaders who are of them, and for them.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump news at a glance: eight Democrats join Republicans to advance funding bill

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      The first step toward ending the US government shutdown has been made after a handful of Democrats and dozens of Republicans voted to advance legislation in the Senate.The funding bill will still need to be deliberated and passed by the Senate and approved by the House to end what has been the longest government shutdown in US history.The compromise bill received exactly the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate, with almost all Republicans voting in favor along with eight Democrats, many of whom are moderates or serving their final terms.But the measure leaves out the healthcare subsidies that Democrats had demanded for weeks, leading most Democrats to reject it.Here are the key stories at a glance:Senate advances funding bill to end longest US government shutdown in historyThe Senate on Sunday made significant progress towards ending the longest US government shutdown in history, narrowly advancing a compromise bill to reauthorize funding and undo the layoffs of some employees.But most Democratic senators rejected it, as did many of the party’s lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which will have to vote to approve it before the government can reopen.Read the full storyUS flight cancellations riseFlight cancellations and delays are set to grow as airline passengers across the US spent the weekend grappling with those issues at major airports nationwide after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated a 4% reduction in air traffic in response to the ongoing federal government shutdown.If the shutdown continues, the FAA has instructed airlines to cut 6% of flights on Tuesday – and to do the same to 10% by 14 November.Read the full storyTrump weighs giving Americans $2,000 from tariff revenuesDonald Trump on Sunday mused about giving most Americans $2,000 funded by tariff revenues collected by the president’s administration – an evident bid to rally public support on the issue.“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday. For such a plan to take effect, congressional approval would likely be required.Read the full storyTrump shares false claim about Obama Donald Trump promoted the false claim that Barack Obama has earned $40m in “royalties linked to Obamacare” in a post to his 11 million followers on Truth Social on Sunday.The fictional claim that the former US president receives royalty payments for the use of his name to refer to the Affordable Care Act, which he signed into law in 2010, has been repeatedly debunked since at least 2017.Read the full storyTrump attacks BBC after Tim Davie resignationDonald Trump on Sunday attacked the BBC after its chief resigned in a scandal over the editing of a documentary about the US president.Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and the head of BBC News resigned after a former adviser to the corporation accused it of “serious and systemic” bias in its coverage of issues including Trump, Gaza and trans rights.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that “very dishonest people” had “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election”.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, has reportedly said that she is “much, much happier” after the Trump administration transferred her to a minimum-security federal prison in Texas, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

      Donald Trump became the first sitting president in nearly a half-century at a regular-season NFL game, attending the Washington Commanders’ contest against the Detroit Lions on Sunday. There were boos from large sections of fans in the stands – as well as scattered cheers.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 8 November. More