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      They flew to New York to help Mamdani – now they want to bring the hope to LA

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      While the excitement for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has radiated through New York, his win has also energized young activists across the country – particularly some in Los Angeles, who flew to the east coast to canvass for Mamdani and now want to bring their experiences westward.Standing near the poll site at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Neda Davarpanah – a screenwriter and actor based in Los Angeles – was inspired by Mamdani’s campaign for mayor so she flew out to New York in late October to canvass on the Upper East Side.Davarpanah had walked alongside the picket lines in Hollywood in 2023 as a newly minted Writers Guild of America member. Despite initial momentum, she felt the energy from the frontlines of the strikes had dissipated in the last year. That energy reignited when Mamdani entered the picture.“We felt so motivated and energized to help people in a city we don’t even live in because of the broader impact on the country,” she said.Many of the people interviewed are part of the 4,000 young members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Los Angeles chapter who felt inspired by Mamdani’s campaign and its national implications. Looking ahead, they want to bring the hope and lessons from field organizing back to Los Angeles.New York and Los Angeles have very different geographies and spreads of power. In Los Angeles, city council members’ elections tend to have more weight compared to a mayoral race. And given the DSA-LA chapter has endorsed five candidates so far in the city council and local school board elections, there are plenty of volunteer efforts for these hopefuls to work on in the coming year.View image in fullscreenLeslie Chang, who serves as the East San Gabriel Valley coordinator for Democratic Socialists of America, flew out during the primaries to canvass for Mamdani. She volunteered to canvass in Chinatown, where she spoke the language, and the Red Hook public housing projects.“These were tough conversations,” Chang said, noting residents felt left out in the city’s development. “They would say: look at the condition of this place that I live in. We are still waiting for repairs from the hurricane. Why should I give a shit who is running for office if my life hasn’t gotten better?”During her volunteer field training, Chang met two New York City council members who were vouching for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. They told Chang to give out their phone numbers to start conversations with constituents.“I thought that was really powerful, because in almost all of the canvases that I do here [in Los Angeles], there isn’t that level of engagement,” she said. After canvassing, there was even a social event for volunteers to get to know one another and discuss what strategies worked best.Paul Zappia, an animator and illustrator who also serves in DSA-LA leadership, first met the mayor-elect in 2023 at the DSA national conference in Chicago, where Mamdani served as a keynote speaker. He flew out in late October to canvass with friends in Bushwick. At the beginning of his shift, the field lead asked why each volunteer had come out.“I shared with everybody that I was here from Los Angeles because the victory of Zohran Mamdani is bigger than New York City,” said Zappia, who attributes his involvement in politics to the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.View image in fullscreenEven walking to lunch a few blocks away, he encountered another canvassing group. “It’s just a bunch of people who are there on their free time and want to spend a couple hours on their Saturday together with other people that also care about their fellow working class people. And it was just such a blast,” he said.The geography and public transportation layout of New York’s five boroughs makes it easier to canvas in groups. Zappia said he could feasibly knock on hundreds of doors in a one-block radius there. In Los Angeles, a street could be filled with mostly single-family homes. And with the abundance of Ring doorbell cameras, people can easily decline a visitor from the comfort of their couch.Clayton Ryles, 31, only canvassed for one afternoon in Manhattan’s Chinatown in late October and felt the contrast between Mamdani’s campaign and others. In September last year, Ryles canvassed for Kamala Harris with his fellow United Auto Worker labor organizers in Las Vegas. Knocks on doors yielded intrepid voters who were “upset and suspicious”. Despite many people being pro-union, they felt that their cost of living was too high under Joe Biden.“Nobody was excited about the election. Everybody was like this is being inflicted upon us. We have to decide one way or another. For Zohran, most of the people were enthusiastic about what could happen with his mayoral tenure,” Ryles said.Davarpanah agreed, pointing to the call and response levels of Mamdani’s speech when crowds could clearly repeat phrases such as “fast and free buses” and “universal childcare”.“You can name them. Harris 2024 was not successful in articulating a vision,” she said. “A policy vision that materially impacts your constituents is something every candidate should take to heart. This is what actually inspires people to get involved when they actually see what you’re going to deliver.”View image in fullscreenAcross social media, users have been making posts about how California, and Los Angeles specifically, needs a Mamdani.For Zappia, that means bringing back hope after a tough year that started with the Altadena wildfires and has continued with ICE raids, cutbacks to Snap benefits, and rising inflation, among many other difficulties.“People are just really looking for a sort of sign that things can turn around. In order to actually affect the change that we want to see, we have to first believe that we can actually do it,” he said.“And what happened in New York City is proof that it can be done, it’s proof that organized people can beat organized money.” More

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      A year after devastating Trump loss, have the Democrats begun to find their way back?

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      It has been a year of soul-searching, hand-wringing, and self-flagellation for Democrats after a ballot-box rejection so thorough that some had come to believe that the party had lost not only the White House and Congress but the culture itself.Shell-shocked, Democrats entered Donald Trump’s second term in a political stupor – unsure of who they were or what they stood for. Their base had lost faith in its aging leadership class, and their brand, in Democrats’ own words, had become “toxic”: a party increasingly confined to coastal states, big cities and college towns. And even there, warning signs were flashing.Then came Tuesday night – a coast-to-coast romp in the first major elections of Trump’s turbulent return to the White House that exceeded even the party’s most optimistic projections.“What a night for the Democratic party,” California governor Gavin Newsom marveled, after news networks projected the redistricting ballot measure he spearheaded had passed so decisively that some voters were still in line to cast ballots. “A party that is in its ascendancy,” he continued, “a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels.”Abigail Spanberger, a congresswoman and former CIA agent, stormed to victory in Virginia, becoming the first woman elected governor of the state, an office currently held by a Republican. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, another congresswoman and former Navy pilot, turned what was expected to be a close race into a rout. And in New York, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, made history by vanquishing the former three-term Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, in a race that drew the highest turnout in decades.“Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” Spanberger proclaimed in her victory speech, while in New York, Mamdani celebrated “a new era of leadership” and declared that “no longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great”.Their wins did little to resolve the big, existential questions of whether Democrats’ future lay in a full-throated adoption of leftwing populism or a tactical turn to pragmatic centrism. The night offered ammunition for either path, or perhaps both.Yet a year after Kamala Harris’s concession to Trump, Democrats have repeatedly found success not by picking a single ideological lane, but by embracing the forces of disruption that have dominated Trump-era politics. Their victories, while strikingly different in style and approach, point to a party less bound by orthodoxy and old notions of decorum – a recognition that the times have changed, and so must they.“This is not your grandfather’s Democratic party,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the next morning. “We are not going to play with one hand behind our back. We’re not going to roll over. We’re going to meet you, fire with fire.”For much of the past decade, Democrats cast themselves as guardians of the system – defenders of the democratic institutions under siege by a “wrecking ball” former builder who bulldozed his way into the White House and then clawed his way back.After the tumult of Trump’s first term, Democrats turned to Joe Biden, a consensus-builder and institutionalist who once predicted that history would view his adversary “as an aberrant moment in time”. In office, Biden dedicated his presidency to restoring domestic political norms while preserving the liberal international order abroad. But with his legacy now framed by Trump’s re-election, many Democrats have abandoned Biden’s return-to-normalcy appeal, seeing it as ill-suited to the politcal moment.Instead, as Trump moves aggressively to consolidate power and tilt the electoral map in his favor, the party’s instincts have shifted sharply away from caution, yet many progressives felt they had been too slow to adapt. Shortly before the 2024 election, a survey found that the overwhelming majority of voters valued a candidate who could deliver “change that improves people’s lives” rather than one who was committed to preserving institutions.Tensions built earlier this year, when angry Democrats began calling on their leaders in Washington and in state capitols around the country to do something – anything – to stop Trump’s attacks on the federal government, the rule of law and his political opponents. Those fears grew into the No Kings protest movement, which saw an estimated 7 million people in all 50 states take to the streets last month.Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, argued that Tuesday’s wins, following mass days of protest, were proof that a more combative and less deferential politics was the way to defeat Trumpism. “The No Kings era is here to stay,” he wrote.That assertive posture extended to Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats are refusing to lend the votes needed to reopen the government – now the longest federal shutdown in US history – unless Republicans extend healthcare subsidies: a bare-knuckle approach they had resisted as recently as few months ago.Meanwhile, in the redistricting battles unfolding across the states, party leaders and longtime champions of fair maps including Barack Obama campaigned for California’s retaliatory gerrymander, as Newsom called on other Democratic governors to follow suit.View image in fullscreen“Politics has changed. The world has changed,” Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential contender, told NBC earlier this month. “The rules of the game have changed.”In nearly every election held this year, Democrats improved on their 2024 showing. Exit polls in Virginia and New Jersey show that both governors-elect not only held their base but peeled off Trump voters, while re-engaging young men and Latino voters who defected in 2024. In New York, Mamdani saw enormous youth turnout for his candidacy.“On Tuesday night, we saw a lot of different kinds of Democrats win – and that’s kind of the point,” said Rebecca Katz, a veteran political strategist whose political firm, Fight, worked for Mamdani’s campaign. “To win big, we need a big tent.”Voters, she said, sent a clear message that a back-to-basics formula – a relentless focus on improving affordability and a campaign built around authentic and visible candidates – resonates.Katz, who also advised the successful swing-state Senate campaigns of John Fetterman in 2022 and Ruben Gallego in 2024, argued that the central divide in the party was no longer where a candidate falls on the moderate to liberal spectrum but a choice between boldness and caution: “Playing it safe is the riskiest thing Democrats could do right now.”Winning has given the wounded party a much-needed morale boost. In a fundraising appeal this week, Democrats told supporters to “remember this feeling”. Yet beneath the celebration, the old fault lines – over age, ideology, tactics, and style – still run deep.Several seasoned House Democrats are facing contentious primary challenges, fueled by generational impatience and a desire for the party to take a more combative approach to Trump. Democrats’ prospects in 2026 may hinge on whether progressives and moderates can unite behind a message that addresses both economic anxiety and the fears of Trump’s presidency.In 2028, Democrats say they need a nominee who can articulate a vision beyond their opposition to Trump, the glue that has held together a Bernie Sanders-to-Liz Cheney coalition.Appearing at a live taping of the podcast Pod Save America this week, Obama said it was exhilarating to see progressives “get off the mat”. But, he added, “we’ve got a lot of work to do” and cautioned progressives in the audience against pushing ideological “litmus tests”.“We had Abigail Spanberger win and we had Zohran Mamdani win,” the former president said, “and they are all part of a vision for the future.”Sanders, the progressive Vermont senator who campaigned for Mamdani, told reporters this week that ideological divisions in the party were “no great secret”.But he sensed a party-wide shift: “I think there is a growing understanding that leadership and defending the status quo and the inequalities that exist in America is not where the American people are.”Republicans have sought to downplay Democrats’ string of victories this year. Since 2016, Democrats have tended to perform better when Trump was not on the ballot, their coalition proving more reliable in off-year and special elections.“They say that I wasn’t on the ballot and was the biggest factor,” Trump said this week. “I don’t know about that. But I was honored that they said that.”Historically, the party out of power typically fares well in the midterm elections. But redistricting efforts are expected to tilt the 2026 House map toward Republicans. In the Senate, the task is even more daunting for Democrats, who will have to win in states Trump carried by double digits. While Trump’s plunging popularity has Republicans worried, Americans hold markedly negative views of the Democratic party as well.Still, Democrats see momentum building in parts of the country where they haven’t been competitive for years.This summer, Catelin Drey, a Democrat and first-time candidate, won a special election for a state senate seat in Iowa, breaking the Republican supermajority by flipping a district that backed Trump in the 2024 election. It was a consequential victory and one that gave Democrats a jolt of hope.For weeks after her election, she kept getting the same question: how did she pull it off?“I knocked on thousands of doors,” said Drey, 38, a mother whose campaign centered on affordability, especially the rising cost of childcare. “I had people tell me, ‘I’ve never had a candidate come to my door before,’” she said. “Seeing that kind of work ethic – having someone show up and say, ‘Yeah, life is really tough right now. What’s the hardest thing for you? How can I help? What would make things better?’ That type of attention is not what we’re seeing across the board right now.”Since Harris’s defeat last November, Democrats have produced a glut of election postmortems, polling memos and policy white papers offering theories about why they lost — and how to win again. Drey thinks the answer might be surprisingly simple.“Show up and work for the people you serve,” she said. “It’s not rocket science.” More

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      US grants Hungary one-year exception from sanctions over Russian oil and gas

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      The United States has granted Hungary a one-year exemption from US sanctions for using Russian oil and gas, a White House official said on Friday, after Viktor Orbán pressed his case for a reprieve during a friendly meeting with Donald Trump in Washington.Last month, Trump imposed Ukraine-related sanctions on Russian oil companies Lukoil and Rosneft that carried the threat of further sanctions on entities in countries that buy oil from those firms.The Hungarian prime minister, a longtime Trump ally, met with the US president at the White House on Friday for their first bilateral meeting since the Republican returned to power and explained why his country needed to use Russian oil at a time when Trump has been pressing Europe to stop doing so.Orbán said the issue was vital for Hungary, which is a European country, and pledged to lay out “the consequences for the Hungarian people, and for the Hungarian economy, not to get oil and gas from Russia”.Trump, aiming to put pressure on Moscow to end its war with Ukraine, appeared sympathetic to Orbán’s position.“We’re looking at it, because it’s very different for him to get the oil and gas from other areas,” Trump said. “As you know, they don’t have … the advantage of having sea. It’s a great country, it’s a big country, but they don’t have sea. They don’t have the ports.”“But many European countries are buying oil and gas from Russia, and they have been for years,” Trump added. “And I said: ‘What’s that all about?’”The White House official noted that, in addition to the sanctions exemption, Hungary had committed to buying US liquefied natural gas with contracts valued at some $600m.Hungary has maintained its reliance on Russian energy since the start of the 2022 conflict in Ukraine, prompting criticism from several European Union and Nato allies.International Monetary Fund figures show that Hungary relied on Russia for 74% of its gas and 86% of its oil in 2024, warning that an EU-wide cutoff of Russian natural gas alone could force output losses in Hungary exceeding 4% of GDP.The two men also discussed Russia’s war with Ukraine.Trump said last month that he would meet Vladimir Putin in the Hungarian capital, but the meeting was put on hold after Russia rejected a ceasefire.Trump on Friday said Russia simply did not want to stop fighting. “The basic dispute is they just don’t want to stop yet. And I think they will,” he said.The president asked Orbán whether he thought Ukraine could win the war. A “miracle can happen”, Orban responded.Greater economic cooperation between the US and Hungary was also on the agenda. Orbán predicted a “golden age” between the two nations and made a point of criticizing Joe Biden’s administration, a sure way to garner favor with Trump, who continues to use Biden as a frequent foil.The Hungarian leader, who faces an election in 2026, has cultivated a strong personal rapport with Trump over the years, including on their shared hard-line immigration policies. Trump on Friday gave Orbán his support for the election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He has not made a mistake on immigration. So he’s respected by everybody, he’s liked by some … I like and respect him, I’m a double,” Trump said. “And that’s the way Hungary is being led. They’re being led properly, and that’s why he’s going to be very successful in his upcoming election.”The EU’s top court ruled last year that Hungary must pay a €200m ($216m) fine for not implementing changes to its policy of handling immigrants and asylum seekers at its border. It must also pay a daily fine of €1m until it fully implements the measures.Orbán referenced the fine during his meeting with Trump but said Hungary would handle its intra-EU disputes on its own.A tangible sign of Hungary’s improved ties with the US under the Trump administration came last month when the US fully restored Hungary’s status in its visa waiver program.Hungary has pushed back against plans by the European Commission to phase out the EU’s imports of all Russian gas and LNG by the end of 2027, deepening a rift with Brussels over relations with Moscow.Ratings agency S&P noted that Hungary has one of the most energy-intensive economies in Europe – and that its domestic refineries are built to process Russian Urals crude oil.While S&P said gas supplies from Azerbaijan and Qatar could help replace Russian supply, it warned that Hungary’s fiscal and external accounts remain vulnerable to an energy shock. More

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      in US Politics

      Passengers start to feel bite of flight cuts amid US government shutdown

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      A US government order to make drastic cuts in commercial air traffic amid the government shutdown has taken effect, with major airports across the country experiencing a significant reduction in schedules and leaving travellers scrambling to adjust their plans.The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said the move is necessary to maintain air traffic control safety during a federal government shutdown, now the longest recorded and with no sign of a resolution, in which air traffic controllers have gone without pay.While airlines have started to reduce domestic flights, global hubs such as JFK in New York and LAX in Los Angeles will be affected, meaning delays and sudden changes that could have a cascading effect on international air traffic. The FAA said the reductions would start at 4% and ramp up to 10% by 14 November. The reductions are set to be in effect between 6am and 10pm and impact all commercial airlines.“We are seeing signs of stress in the system, so we are proactively reducing the number of flights to make sure the American people continue to fly safely,” said Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator.As of Friday morning, more than 800 US-linked flights had been cancelled, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. The data showed about four in five cancelations globally were related to the US.Transportation secretary Sean Duffy warned on Friday that cancellations could rise to 15% or 20%. “If the shutdown doesn’t end relatively soon, the consequence is that more controllers don’t come to work,” he told Fox News, as US airspace became a potent proverbial weapon in the political standoff.Since the beginning of the shutdown, which began last month after a breakdown between Republicans and Democrats over spending plans, air traffic controllers have been working without pay, which has already caused delays.A potential agreement between the parties to reopen the government appeared to crumble again on Friday after Democrats in the Senate, emboldened by Tuesday’s favorable election results for them, rejected an emerging proposal that would have linked a stopgap funding bill known as a continuing resolution to three full-year appropriations bills.The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has announced 40 “high-traffic” airports across the country that would need to reduce flights. A 4% reduction in operations at those airports has taken effect but this will increase to 10% over the next week.Duffy has accused Democrats of being responsible for any “mass chaos” that ensues, even though the shutdown is the result of both Republicans and Democrats refusing to agree to a deal.The director of the National Economic Council​, Kevin Hassett, told Fox Business on Friday that he did not discount a broader impact on US economic activity from the air space restrictions.“Business travel is a really big, important part of air travel – and if business travel isn’t happening then those are deals that aren’t being cut and hotel rooms that aren’t being filled,” he said.“Travel and leisure is a place that’s really being heavily hit right now and if it continues to get hit, if the air travel thing goes south for another week or two, then you could say that they would have at least a near-term downturn,” Hassett added.View image in fullscreenThe cuts could represent as many as 1,800 flights and upwards of 268,000 seats combined, according to an estimate by the aviation analytics firm Cirium.With deep antagonism between the two political parties, Donald Trump’s government has beaten the previous record for the longest shutdown, which was set during his first term in 2018-19.United, Southwest and Delta airlines began cancelling flights on Thursday evening.Affected airports cover more than two dozen states including the busiest across the US – such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas/Fort Worth, Orlando, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco. Flight schedules will be reduced in some of the US’s biggest cities, including New York, Houston and Chicago.Scott Kirby, the United Airlines CEO, said in a statement that the airline “will continue to make rolling updates to our schedule as the government shutdown continues so we can give our customers several days’ advance notice and to minimise disruption”.Delta Air Lines said it would comply with the directive and “expects to operate the vast majority of our flights as scheduled”.The airspace disruption comes two weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday – typically the busiest travel period of the year – and raises the pressure on lawmakers to reach a deal to end the shutdown.Politically inspired flight chaos, with its potential to continue into or beyond the Thanksgiving holiday later this month, has exacerbated pre-existing structural issues in air travel scheduling, airspace constraints and safety considerations, including outdated air traffic control equipment and a long-term shortage of air traffic controllers.“The FAA is a slow-moving bureaucracy,” said Michael Taylor, a travel analyst at JD Power. “It has a daunting task keeping planes from colliding with each other, and they do a really good job with that, but it makes them ultra-conservative in terms of the technologies they could be using. It’s not like your living room where everything is digital. The FAA still relies on technology invented for the second world war.“Under-staffing is long-term problem and that’s not going to change with a political solution to the shutdown,” he adds. Coupled with underlying technological issues, politicians have learned that travel is an unique opportunity to apply pressure. “This is a leverage point that politicians can use to try to drive public opinion towards one party or the other. It’s a shame but that’s where we are today,” Taylor added.In a statement, American Airlines said most customers would be unaffected and long-haul international travel would remain as scheduled. Customers could change their flight or request a refund. “In the meantime, we continue to urge leaders in Washington to reach an immediate resolution to end the shutdown,” the airline said.The government shutdown has left shortages of up to 3,000 air traffic controllers, according to the administration, in addition to at least 11,000 more receiving zero wages despite being categorised as essential workers.“I’m not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we’ve had a situation where we’re taking these kinds of measures,” Bedford has said. “We’re in new territory in terms of government shutdowns.” More

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      Trump is threatening the basic needs of poor Americans. How low he has sunk | Robert Reich

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      The Democrats had a great day on Tuesday. It’s crucial that they hone their economic message for next year’s midterms to focus on affordability and fairness.Trump is doing the opposite. Although a federal court ordered him to continue to provide food stamps to about 42 million low-income Americans who depend on them, Trump threatened to deny them anyway until the end of the government shutdown.In a post on social media on Tuesday, he said benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), commonly referred to as food stamps, “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up the government, which they can easily do, and not before!” The White House later confirmed it would comply with a court order to use emergency funds to support Snap – but the administration said users would receive only half of what they typically do. On Thursday, the saga continued, with a court ordering the administration to fully fund Snap benefits in November; the administration moved to appeal.How low Trump has sunk.Eighty-eight years ago, in his second inaugural address, Franklin D Roosevelt told America that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”It was not a test of the nation’s military might or of the size of the national economy. It was a test of our moral authority. We had a duty to comfort the afflicted, even if that required afflicting the comfortable.The Trump regime has adopted the reverse metric. The test of its progress is whether it adds to the abundance of those who have much and provides less for those who have too little. It is passing this test with flying colors.What is the Democrats’ demand amid the shutdown? That lower-income Americans continue to receive subsidized healthcare. Otherwise, healthcare premiums for millions of lower-income Americans will soar next year in large part because the Trump Republican One Big Beautiful Bill Act (really, Big Ugly Bill) slashed Obamacare subsidies.Republicans had rammed the Big Ugly Bill through Congress without giving Senate Democrats an opportunity to filibuster it because Republicans used a process called “reconciliation”, requiring only a majority vote of the Senate.The Big Ugly Bill also requires Medicaid applicants and enrollees – also low-income – to document at least 80 hours of work per monthMany people dependent on Medicaid won’t be able to do this, either because they’re not physically able to work or won’t be able to do the required paperwork to qualify for an exemption from the work requirement.The Congressional Budget Office, as assessed by KFF, estimates the work requirement will be the largest source of Medicaid savings, reducing federal spending on the low-income Americans by $326bn over 10 years and causing millions to become uninsured.All told, the Big Ugly Bill cuts roughly $1tn over the next decade from programs for which the main beneficiaries are the poor and working class, and gives about $1tn in tax benefits to the richest members of our society.It is the most dramatic reversal of FDR’s moral test in American history.By the time of FDR’s second inaugural address in 1937, most of the country was still ill-housed, ill-fed, and ill-clothed. Yet we were all in it together. The fortunes of the robber barons of the Gilded Age had mostly been leveled by the Great Crash of 1929.Perhaps it was easier under those circumstances to accept the idea that the test of our progress wasn’t whether we added more to the abundance of those who had much but provided enough for those who had too little.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionToday, though, the moneyed interests lord it over America – exerting so much economic and political power that the nation is badly failing FDR’s test.Last weekend, just as millions of low-income Americans were losing their food stamps, Trump threw a lush Great Gatsby-themed party at his Mar-a-Lago estate, replete with 1920s flappers and Gatsby-inspired music from the roaring 20s.Some critics have called it “tone deaf”, but it was an accurate rendition of the tone Trump has set for America.Trump is throwing a huge party for America’s wealthy – giving them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks to ensure that their wealth (and support for him) continues to grow.Meanwhile, he is throwing to poor and working-class Americans the red meat of hatefulness – hate of immigrants, people of color, the “deep state”, “socialists”, “communists”, transgender people and Democrats.This is the formula strongmen have used for a century – more wealth for the wealthy, more bigotry for the working-class and poor – until the entire facade crumbles under the weight of its own hypocrisy.On Tuesday, millions of American voters refused to go along with this unfairness. They repudiated, loudly and clearly, the formula Trump and his regime have used.It is the responsibility of all of us to return the nation to a path that is morally sustainable.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now More

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      Out-of-touch Trump talks up economy among sycophants and stars in Miami

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      It was the week in which Republicans took a beating at the polls, the government shutdown became the longest in history, and 42 million people across the country, including 3 million in Florida, saw their federal food aid slashed.But in the alternative reality of Miami, where tickets to an overwhelmingly conservative business conference headlined by Donald Trump cost up to $1,990, and billionaires from Saudi Arabia rubbed shoulders with equally wealthy American tycoons such as Jeff Bezos and Ken Griffin, those events created barely a ripple.Instead, in a gesture that appeared almost to mock the widening disparity between the city’s haves and have-nots, organizers of the America Business Forum cooked up a little treat for attendees: a $50 gift card to spend on food to sustain themselves while they listened to their president congratulate himself for a “golden age” he said his “economic miracle” had delivered.Advocates say the move, along with the high-budget opulence of the conference itself, was an ill-timed insult to more than a half-million Miami-Dade county residents who just saw their own ability to buy essential groceries for their families kiboshed by the gutting of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap).“There’s just a massive cognitive dissonance between what real people are going through, and the elite,” said Larry Hannan, communications and policy director of State Voices Florida, a coalition of more than a hundred non-partisan, pro-democracy and civic engagement groups.“Jeff Bezos does not need a $50 food card. But we saw that with the Great Gatsby theme party last week. They just can’t seem to stop doing things that are shockingly out of touch.“We’ve been through shutdowns before, and while obviously the White House bubble is always somewhat insane, presidents are usually smart enough, they usually know not to flaunt this type of stuff. But this administration does not seem to care.”The president’s hour-long address on Thursday had the flavor of a political rally, with familiar insults for old political foes such as the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and a new one: Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected democratic socialist mayor of New York.View image in fullscreenTrump touched on his economic agenda, and lauded a host of speakers from the worlds of politics, sport and business that filled the two-day agenda, created largely by Francis Suarez, mayor of the city of Miami, to showcase south Florida and its investment opportunities.Lionel Messi, the Argentina soccer star and World Cup winner, provided celebrity glitz from sporting circles, along with tennis champions Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams. A conversation between Suarez and María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and democracy activist who last month won the Nobel peace prize that Trump coveted, was well received on day one.Yet overall it was a curious and unmistakably politically charged event with a field of Trump sycophants on the stage, loudly cheered by a crowd of mostly younger and affluent supporters of the president in the audience, some blending business suits with his trademark red Make America Great Again (Maga) caps.How else to explain the presence of Javier Milei, the rightwing president of Argentina, the country whose shaky economy Trump helped shore up last month with a $20bn currency swap lifeline? Or that of Saudi Arabians Fahad AlSaif, head of its $925bn Public Investment Fund, and Reema Bandar Al-Saud, Riyadh’s ambassador to the US, touting their country as ripe for investment while the Trump family’s financial ties and influence there come under greater scrutiny?Then there was Gianni Infantino, head of Fifa, international soccer’s governing body, dropping hints that Trump is in line for the organization’s first peace prize, an unwanted new award that observers see created specially for the president as consolation for his Nobel snub.Other speakers, including Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan; Adam Neumann, founder of WeWork and Flow; and Griffin, the hedge-fund manager and Republican donor; have all previously praised, worked with or voted for Trump, offering more than a suggestion of a politically skewed lineup.Suarez, unsurprisingly, saw it differently.“We wanted it to be a sort of a cross-section from different verticals, right?” he told the Guardian.“We got in a room. We said, ‘Hey, what are the leading voices?’ People from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different genders … sports, business, politics, technology, things that touch everyone’s lives.”He pointed to discussions of upcoming, money-spinning notable events in Miami, including the Formula One grand prix, next year’s G20 economic summit at Trump’s Doral golf resort, and games during the 2026 World Cup, which he called “a generational opportunity”.“Our hope is that Miamians are transformed by the experience,” Suarez said. “We want them to leave thinking, ‘I can be on that stage.’”View image in fullscreenThe advocates of State Voices Florida, however, believe many Miamians are more focused right now on other issues, especially soaring housing and food costs. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis rejected a call from Hannan’s group and others to declare an emergency over Snap benefits and tap state reserves to fund urgent food distribution.“Any civics teacher would tell you it’s his job to look after the people of Florida, and he’s doing the exact opposite,” Hannan said, noting the juxtaposition of a conference of billionaires taking place in the same county in which almost 25% of households rely on Snap benefits to survive.“There just seems to be this detachment at the top. I don’t think the answer is electing a Democrat or electing a Republican, I just think we have to have more empathy for people who are struggling in this state.”Empathy was in short supply in Miami from Trump, a president not known for ever taking responsibility during a crisis.“The radical left Democrats are causing millions of Americans who depend on food stamps to go without benefits,” he said, blaming the out-of-office opposition party for the government shutdown.“I just want to have a country that’s great again. Is that OK?” More

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      Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani’s supposedly radical policies as ‘normal’

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      After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal childcare and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said the Dutch environmentalist and former government adviser Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo cafe, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.“Normal. That’s the word,” Verbeek wrote in his newsletter, The Planet. “Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.”That view hit on the wide differences in how Mamdani’s promises are seen by many across the Atlantic. “Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,” said Verbeek. “We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.”More than a decade ago, Tallinn, the Estonian capital, became the largest city in the world to introduce fare-free public transport. Financed by the city’s resident tax, the scheme faced heavy opposition before its rollout, with some describing it as a political stunt that the city couldn’t afford.Nearly a year later, researchers found that public transport use had increased by 14% and that the mobility of low-income residents had improved. Similar schemes have since sprung up across the continent, in France’s Montpellier and Dunkirk, for example, and expanded across countries in the case of Luxembourg and Malta.When Mamdani promised to launch one city-owned grocery story in each of New York’s five boroughs, with a view to expanding if the pilot was successful, it reminded Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, of the city-run grocery store she had visited in Istanbul in 2014.Back then, she had been surprised to see the heaving shelves, laden with products that ranged from bread to lentils to basic household appliances, much of it provided by small, little-known manufacturers. Access to these stores was limited to low-income households, with families receiving a preloaded monthly loyalty card to use at these shops, she said. “These city-run grocery stores in Istanbul were successful and replicated by other cities.”More than a decade on, the experience convinced her of the viability of Mamdani’s promise. “I was struck by the fact that New York elite and Republicans wanted to paint these proposals as sort of coming from the moon,” she said. “Things like non-profit stores or free buses, these are not outrageous ideas, nor are they socialist. They’ve been tried in different parts of the world.”For New Yorkers, precedents for city-run grocery stores can also be found closer to home. Chicago is mulling similar plans, while Atlanta and St Paul, Kansas have launched their own takes on municipal-run grocery stores.Mamdani’s campaign also promised to make childcare free for all children in the city, ages six weeks to five years. Days before the election, the state of New Mexico provided the city with a precedent-setting example, becoming the first US state to offer free childcare to all of its residents, in an effort to boost its economy and raise education and child welfare levels.Across the Atlantic, Portugal’s government began introducing free childcare in 2022, starting with children ages one and under with promises to gradually expand the program to children up to the age of three. While the program is open to all, places are limited and can be tough to access, with priority given to low-income and single-parent families.In Berlin, childcare has been free for children from their first birthday until they start school since 2018, though centres are allowed to levy additional charges for provisions such as lunches and extracurricular activities. Across the Nordic countries, free childcare is not universal, but is heavily subsidised by the state for most families.Mamdani’s platform also included a promise to provide new parents with a free baby basket that includes items such as diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, swaddles and books. In Finland, the baby box has been a universal benefit since 1949 and has since been emulated by nearly 100 programs in 60 countries around the world.The sharp contrast in how Mamdani’s policies were seen within the US and abroad probably has much to do with the scant existence of a welfare state in the US, writer Mary Holland noted this week. “To anyone living in a western European state, the self-professed democratic socialist’s ideas probably sound entirely reasonable,” she wrote in Monocle. “But to many Americans, they’re wildly ambitious – radical, even.”Perhaps the most widely panned of Mamdani’s ideas is his vow to freeze rent for nearly 1 million rent-stabilised tenants in the city. The former US treasury secretary Larry Summers was among those who slammed the idea, writing on social media that rent control was the “second-best way to destroy a city, after bombing”.In 2020, Berlin passed a law that resulted in a five-year rent freeze, at June 2019 levels, for 90% of the flats in the city. While the law offered relief to about 1.5 million households who had seen rents rise by an estimated third in the six years prior, it was ruled as unconstitutional in 2021 after Germany’s highest court sided with landlords and property investment lobbyists who had argued it was inappropriate and illegal for the state to meddle with the private market.A 2022 paper, however, marked out an interesting impact of the short-lived measure, in that it found that while rent control was in place, residents were seemingly more receptive to new housing developments in their area. The finding suggests that if Mamdani is able to carry out the rent freezes as promised, it could help to pave the way for his promise to also triple the city’s production of affordable homes.Perhaps the strongest precedent, however, for rent freezes comes from New York’s own recent history. In the past 10 years, during Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor, members of the city’s rent guidelines board voted to freeze the rent four times, one former member of the New York City rent guidelines board, Leah Goodridge, noted recently in the Guardian. “This is why criticisms of Mamdani’s rent freeze ring hollow for me – it’s painted as out of touch, yet there’s already a precedent, backed by government reports and data.” More

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      Zohran Mamdani is filling disillusioned Americans with hope and inspiration | Osita Nwanevu

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      The thing that should surprise us most about Zohran Mamdani’s election win is that it wasn’t a surprise. Well before the result was called on Tuesday night, weeks of reliable surveys had already suggested his victory in New York City’s mayoral race, by a nine-point margin over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, would be a foregone conclusion ⁠– an extraordinary finish for a man unknown to the vast majority of New Yorkers when he launched his run just over a year ago. The campaign that followed was one of the greatest in American history.True as it may be that both Cuomo and incumbent mayor Eric Adams were deeply flawed candidates marred by scandal, it was by no means inevitable that Mamdani would be the leading candidate against them. ⁠As recently as February, Mamdani was polling at 1% in the Democratic primary, well behind a slew of challengers with more name recognition, more experience and deeper roots in city politics. They were defeated by an ever-growing army of volunteers ⁠– 90,000 by the summer ⁠– led substantially by organizers from the Democratic Socialists of America. Early in the campaign, it was a given to many commentators that an openly leftist campaign for the mayorship of the world’s financial capital would face impossible headwinds. In Tuesday night’s victory speech, Mamdani opened with a quote from Eugene Debs. Per exit polling from CNN, nearly one in four New Yorkers who went to the polls described themselves as socialists.As contested as the definition of socialism remains, Mamdani offered up a version of it New York’s voters clearly liked. Free buses, free childcare, higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations ⁠– the critical test now of course, as we are being reminded hourly by those who hope he fails ⁠– will be whether he can actually deliver on these things and more.Fortunately, Mamdani’s campaign has also given us some reason to suspect, beyond his bright and blazing charisma, that he might have the makings of a hard-nosed administrator. Threading the needle on policing, meetings with the business community, taking in new ideas on housing, all while retaining the support and enthusiasm of a progressive base ⁠– all of this was a preview of the balancing act Mamdani will have to do if he wants to succeed where recent progressive mayors and a long line of frustrated New York City reformers haven’t.View image in fullscreenWhatever he manages to accomplish as mayor, much of potentially national significance can be learned from his candidacy alone. Mamdani is the first New York mayoral candidate in over half a century to have earned more than a million votes. It is true that he did so in a diverse and heavily Democratic city that looks nothing like the US at large. But the very same can be said about cities such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit ⁠– among the swing-state urban areas where maximizing Democratic turnout and vote share is critical to winning both state races and the electoral college. Last year, Donald Trump made gains in all three on his way to very narrowly winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan ⁠and the presidency ⁠– thanks in large part to increases in support from working-class minorities and young men.Both are constituencies where Mamdani rapidly and remarkably built strength over the course of the year ⁠– beating Cuomo by nearly 40 points with men under 30 and by double digits in some minority neighborhoods Cuomo had initially won during the primary. One of the first pieces of media his campaign released was a video of Mamdani doing man-on-the-street videos asking young people, people of color, and immigrants why they either did or didn’t votefor Trump.The answers given ⁠– affordability, Gaza, distrust in the system – were obviously the ones the campaign wanted viewers to hear. But the video’s approach, treating voters to be won with an openness and friendly curiosity rather than hostility or pontifications from on high, was instructive. It demonstrated ⁠– performed, perhaps ⁠– a willingness to listen and learn lacking among moderate pundits and Democrats already making pronouncements that what Mamdani has been able to accomplish tells us nothing whatsoever about what Democrats elsewhere might.That attitude is reflective of the confidence and self-satisfaction that blinded New York’s politicos to the viability of Mamdani’s campaign to begin with ⁠– a disposition leading Democrats and their operatives refuse to be shaken from even now, a full decade into Trump’s ongoing exposure of the cracks in the Democratic electoral coalition. It’s often suggested that the main force ailing party leadership is gerontocracy ⁠– that Democrats such as Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse Mamdani as the Democratic nominee, are simply too old and personally embittered to recognize talents like Mamdani, pass the torch on to them and embrace new ideas. But this isn’t even half the story. Mamdani was the only serious candidate in this race.View image in fullscreenHis most significant rivals, Cuomo and Adams, have both faced criminal investigations over their conduct in office, and Cuomo resigned in disgrace in 2021. Despite this, out of sheer timidity and careerism, Democratic leaders around the city and around the country, many of them not especially elderly, embraced the two anyway. So too did a bipartisan front of elites. “The coalition opposing Zohran Mamdani,” Jacobin’s Luke Savage writes, “has spanned the New York Post to the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It now also includes the Trump White House and Elon Musk, to say nothing of Bill Ackman, Michael Bloomberg, real estate tycoon Ronald Lauder, and the wider constellation of plutocrats who’ve pumped more than $40m in outside money into the campaign in addition to the more than $12m spent by the Cuomo campaign directly.”Those expenditures didn’t work. And neither did identity politics ⁠– reliably the last refuge of centrists who, of course, also condemn identitarianism from progressives and the right when it suits them. Adams tried to crown Mamdani “king of the gentrifiers” a few weeks ago; less amusingly, the nonstop effort to label Mamdani a threat to Jewish New Yorkers for his stances on Gaza failed so totally that it might encourage other Democratic candidates to be more critical of Israel.Against all odds and despite increasingly desperate and despicable slights against his faith in the last weeks of the campaign, Mamdani will be mayor ⁠– which unfortunately means the attacks against him and the city he will run will only get worse in the months and years ahead. The president has openly contemplated sending troops into New York City; already, he is using the policy levers available to him to upend the city’s governance however he can. In all probability, a grand showdown is coming. We have ample reason already to look to Mamdani for inspiration. From here on out, millions of Americans, in New York and beyond, will be looking to him for leadership.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More