Two years on, the once Trump-loving Muslim community here looks back on those promises with bitterness. Some of Israel’s worst atrocities in the Gaza war, they believe, took place under Trump’s watch (and the bombings have continued even under his peace plan). Meanwhile, Trump has plunged America into yet another Middle East war — this time with Iran — that is now stretching into its ninth month. And it is putting upward pressure on gas and other consumer prices to boot. In Michigan, roughly 40% of the state’s population is struggling to afford basic necessities, and fuel costs have surged to nearly $5 a gallon, up from an average of $3 a gallon just before the war.

No wonder, then, that some of Trump’s own voters are beginning to reconsider their vote. Many are even prepared to back a very different kind of politician — Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat poised to become the state’s next senator, if polls are to be believed.

More from this author

Zohran Mamdani is no revolutionary

By James Billot

Earlier this month, MS NOW conducted a panel with 10 Michigan Trump voters, asking them whom they planned to support come 3 November. Only one voter raised her hand for Republican Mike Rogers, while five others raised theirs in support of El-Sayed. This seemed, to put it charitably, fanciful. Were half of Trump’s Michigan voters really planning to back a progressive well to the Left of most Democrats, never mind MAGA Republicans?

But last month, a New York Times/Siena poll suggested that a shift was underway, albeit less pronounced than the MS NOW panel suggested. It found that El-Sayed was garnering support from 8% of 2024 Trump voters, better than other Democratic Senate nominees in swing states. A recent UnHerd visit to Michigan revealed the reason: anger over the war in Gaza and the affordability crisis back home.

When Trump swept to power in 2024, Michigan was the final piece of the Democrats’ Blue Wall to crumble. In a state that Joe Biden had won narrowly four years earlier, anger over the war in Gaza and soaring inflation helped drive working-class and minority voters toward Trump. Nowhere were these gains more strikingly evident than in Dearborn, the nation’s largest Arab-majority city, where Trump won 42% of the vote.

Among those who voted for Trump was Faye Nemer, who migrated to Dearborn from Lebanon as a child. A lifelong independent, she had rejected Trump in his first two presidential bids but changed her mind after meeting him in Dearborn. “Kamala Harris’s disregard for us was a complete slap in the face,” Nemer told me. “She had no interest in changing the Democrats’ position on the Middle East, whereas Trump came to us and said, ‘I want to make sure you have a voice and a seat at the table.’” 

Ibrahim Duhaini, a Dearborn resident and local physician, felt similarly. Although he didn’t vote for Trump, he backed the Green Party, which won nearly a fifth of the ballots in Dearborn, potentially depriving Harris of a victory. But Duhaini felt comfortable with making what he described as a “soft vote” for Trump. “Although I did not vote for Trump,” he told me, “I knew that my support for the Greens would help him, too. I met Trump, and I had a very fruitful meeting with him. He said that he would bring peace and prosperity to the region.”

Today, both Nemer and Duhaini plan to vote for El-Sayed. They believe many others in their community, disillusioned by the war in Iran and the affordability crisis, will do the same. 

In West Dearborn, where mosques and Islamic centers stand alongside churches, Arabic signs line the streets, and bars are few and far between, there is not a Trump sign in sight. House windows and porches are plastered with Abdul El-Sayed signs reading: “Money out of politics! Money in your pocket! Medicare for all!” and Democratic volunteers are picketing on every street corner. Were Trump to show his face again here, it’s doubtful that he’d receive the same warm reaction as he did in 2024. 

El-Sayed, a 41-year-old former public-health official, is vying to become America’s first Muslim senator. A progressive variously described as a Muslim Bruce Springsteen and an Arab Pete Buttigieg, he’s quick on his feet, adept at both soaring Obama-ian rhetoric and the polemical jab. One day he’s bantering with Fox News hosts about circumcisions, the next he’s sparring with audience members about Right-wing claims that he supports the Muslim Brotherhood (the only evidence for which seems to be tweets from his half-sister from more than a decade ago).

To his detractors, El-Sayed comes off as thin-skinned and condescending, which even Democratic strategist David Axelrod described as a “not appealing quality.” The RealClearPolitics polling average puts him 2.5 points ahead of Rogers, but some moderate Democrats believe an establishment candidate would be doing better in a political climate favorable to the Left. Some are even encouraging voters to leave El-Sayed’s spot on the ballot blank. 

“I support Abdul because he is America First,” Nemer told me. “It’s not just his position on Israel — he wants to fix our broken health-care system and address the cost-of-living crisis. Ending the war in Iran is a good place to start.” Despite still receiving death threats over her vote, Nemer says that she doesn’t regret supporting Trump. She frames it as a wake-up call for Democrats, who took the Arab-American vote for granted: “The Democrats treated us terribly in 2024 — Harris deplatformed us at the DNC convention. The party still needs to improve, but there has been a sea change in its approach and outreach since that election.”

El-Sayed may be doing well with Arab-Americans, but there are other groups with whom he has struggled to connect. During his fractious primary battle against moderate Haley Stevens, El-Sayed severely underperformed with Jewish voters, in part thanks to his campaigning with far-Left streamer Hasan Piker, his equivocal remarks about a Michigan temple attack, and his uncompromising stance in favor of ending foreign aid for Israel (and, to be fair, all other foreign states). His standing with this community has not improved in the general, and last month, a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders petitioned voters to withhold their support until he tempers his Israel rhetoric and policies.

Long-simmering tensions between the black and Arab-American community in Michigan have also hurt El-Sayed. The Democratic nominee has responded with a not-so-subtle pitch to black voters that includes late-night visits to gas stations to purchase Doritos and soda. He has also ordered fried chicken on a black-influencer podcast. 

If his rally in the majority-black city of Flint was anything to go by, El-Sayed’s outreach to this community didn’t seem to be landing. Most of the attendees were older and white, with Democratic Socialists of America and “AOC for President” badges pinned on their shirts. When he took to the stage, El-Sayed was met with raucous cheers as he lamented the money being spent to defeat him, imploring the audience to “choose between the many and the money.” He was most animated when attacking Rogers, his GOP opponent, whom he derided as a “non-playing character” (NPC) and a “human sock puppet, doing what Trump and the corporations want him to do.”

Trump and Rogers have made El-Sayed’s faith a centerpiece of the GOP campaign. The President regularly refers to him as Mohammed and “a Muslim Brotherhood guy,” while Rogers has more of a tightrope to walk. Wary of angering the state’s 350,000 or so Muslim-Americans, he has tried to distinguish between El-Sayed’s purported Islamist political ties and his faith. Out on the campaign trail, he tends to avoid the issue altogether. The GOP flyers handed out to Dearborn residents made no mention of El-Sayed’s Muslim background; all focused on his “radical” agenda.

Suggested reading

Who’s afraid of the Abdul bros?

By Zaid Jilani

It would be wrong to suggest, however, that all voters switching from Trump to El-Sayed are Muslim-Americans. Stephania Messina, a Detroit resident, is a former Trump voter from a conservative Christian background. In 2016, she and her family were enamored with Trump and in particular his message on China. They saw Trump as the man who could bring back jobs from overseas after Michigan’s manufacturing industry was hollowed out by decades of offshoring. 

But over the last few years, she and other members of her community became disillusioned with Trump. “When you are confronted with the stark, visceral reality of Americans being murdered on the streets by ICE, that just cannot be written off as fake news,” she told me. These events “appalled” the evangelical Christians in her community, forcing them to reconsider their political allegiances. “Most of my family are evangelical Christians who voted for Trump. But in the last two years, my brother, my son, and his four friends have all denounced Trump. Nearly all of them are now voting for Abdul.”

Christian conservatives are, for the most part, still riding with Trump. But it is surely a worrying sign for the President that even members of this most loyal constituency are beginning to turn against him. That might sound like good news for Democrats, yet few of the people I spoke to expressed any real affection for the party, either. Add El-Sayed’s difficulties with two central Democratic constituencies — Jewish and black voters — and Michigan’s Senate race has become an unusually tangled contest of ideology, identity, and resentment. 

This race is defined as much by what voters oppose as by what they support: they are anti-Israel or anti-Muslim, anti-Trump or anti-Left. What many voters share, though, is a deep anger at the status quo, be it directed at the administration or the political system writ large. Whoever wins next week’s election — the Trump cipher or the hard-Left progressive — there is very little sign that that anger will dissipate anytime soon. As one Michigander told me after the Flint rally, “the whole country looks at Michigan when it’s an election. But it turns away as soon as it’s over.”

To this turn of events — a Muslim socialist chief executive of America’s largest city — the Right responded with characteristic restraint. “Democrats in New York City have chosen a true extremist and Marxist,” warned House Speaker Mike Johnson, “and the consequences will be felt across our entire nation.” The hard-Right commentator Laura Loomer posted: “The Islamic takeover of America is in full swing.” Then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) posted a cartoon of Lady Liberty dressed in a burka.

Nearly a year on, the Big Apple has yet to succumb to an Islamo-communist takeover. Nor has it, much to the chagrin of the Left, transformed into a socialist utopia, with free electric buses gliding through the streets, public grocery stores on every block, and children playing freely under the supervision of nonbinary government employees. 

In fact, what’s notable about Mamdani’s first nine months in office is not what he has accomplished — but what he hasn’t. Despite all the predictions of a communist revolution with Islamic characteristics, the Big Apple today doesn’t look all that different from, well, 2025. We were promised Islamo-Marxism; all we got was a progressive Democrat who likes the camera.

What gives? 

More from this author

How MAHA grew up

By James Billot

The more germane detail about Mamdani’s biography isn’t his faith or his socialist ideals. It’s that he is an urban Millennial who — avert your eyes, mullahs — met his wife on Hinge. In other words, he is a creature of social media, instinctively attuned to the demands of online self-promotion. His constant TikTok-length videos and mostly symbolic initiatives — free tickets to the Met Opera! government babysitters to allow couples to take date nights! arresting Benjamin Netanyahu! — have helped him project the image of a radical new politics while mostly allowing the city’s various bureaucracies to conduct business as normal.

Those bureaucracies, moreover, are formidable in their own right. And some of them are answerable not to City Hall, but to the state legislature and the governor’s mansion in Albany. Thus, in addition to his own taste for symbolic politics, Mamdani is hemmed in by the realities of governing.

During Mamdani’s inaugural address, the new mayor promised a “new era.” He pledged that the city would “govern expansively and audaciously,” replacing the “frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” His suite of expansive (and expensive) policies — free public buses, universal childcare, a rent freeze, and public grocery stores — gave proof of this collectivist embrace. On Jan. 1, 2026, it really seemed as though a new socialist dawn was breaking over the world’s financial capital. 

The record since is more mixed than either his admirers or his enemies allow. First, the achievements: a rent freeze for many New Yorkers, $1.2 billion in state funding for childcare, and a $22 billion pledge to build or preserve 400,000 affordable homes over the next decade. But the policies that defined his campaign haven’t panned out quite as well. His plan to launch five public grocery stores by 2029 is already mired in legal challenges, as is his controversial tax on expensive second homes in the city. Meanwhile, budgetary constraints and divisions within his own party have stalled progress on free buses.

Mamdani has been merrily posting his way through these setbacks. Whether it was singing “The Wheels on the Bus” with Barack Obama at a school, cutting an ad featuring Charli XCX music in support of Gov. Kathy Hochul, or brandishing green plantains at a grocery store, Mamdani has shown a gift for political optics. Through hundreds of zippy, viral videos, he has cultivated the impression of a hyper-productive mayor Citi-biking around the five boroughs to address the concerns of ordinary New Yorkers.

By (literally) rolling up his sleeves on camera, Mamdani has turned the less glamorous aspects of the job into a hallmark of his mayoralty. Since January, he has shared cheery videos of him fixing water fountains with plumbers, shoveling dirt onto the Williamsburg Bridge bump with city transportation workers, and filling potholes with repairmen. He has also scored easy populist wins with free opera seats for the public and discounted World Cup and US Open tickets to the public. 

Conservatives have responded by variously casting Mamdani as a reincarnated Deng Xiaoping or a closet Islamic extremist biding his time. They have seized on his decision to wear an Arsenal kurta during Eid prayers and his greeting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a smile at the 9/11 memorial. The latter brouhaha was quickly debunked after the full footage revealed that he’d only briefly embraced AOC before turning his attention, solemnly, to the reading of the names of the victims; meanwhile, Right-wing officials — not least JD Vance — were seen smiling or chuckling at various points, too.

That isn’t to say that his symbolic politics have lacked for missteps. A city-produced map of “Immigrant Enclaves” conspicuously excluded Little Italy, triggering a Sopranos-style eruption in downtown Manhattan. (The map, meanwhile, included a reference to “Little Palestine,” a phrase that has never crossed the lips of an actual New Yorker.) The mayor’s video protesting financier Ken Griffin’s house in Manhattan was roundly criticized as an ill-judged attempt to turn a billionaire into a political prop. And his grandstanding on arresting Benjamin Netanyahu — which he walked back a few days later — was a weak attempt at serving red meat to his Left-wing base.

More from this author

Zohran’s conservative muse

By Nikos Mohammadi

But by portraying Mamdani as an Islamo-communist hellbent on turning New York into Gaza-on-the-Hudson, his opponents have allowed the mayor to present himself as a moderate, even technocratic, leader more interested in reducing the cost of groceries than imposing Sharia law. Worse still, these attacks have distracted from more substantive concerns about Mamdani’s policies and ability to govern. Most pertinently, can a 34-year-old with five years in the state legislature really deliver the most ambitious agenda in a generation?

Today, Mamdani is the most popular elected official in the city. Some Democrats have even lamented that the Uganda-born mayor can’t run for higher office. But it is also possible that his symbolic gestures will soon wear thin — not with Republicans, but his own supporters. Recently, the Democratic Socialists of America and various Mamdani allies attacked the mayor over his failure to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, hated by the Left for being a tough-on-crime law-enforcer and a Zionist to boot. Mamdani has not only retained Tisch from his predecessor’s administration, but given her wide berth to do her work. 

For as long as he keeps Tisch — and the relationship between the two appears strong — Mamdani has an answer to the accusations that he is weak on crime, a common critique of Left-wing leaders. For now, crime in the city is at record lows, and subway ridership is nearing pre-pandemic levels, but a recent spate of subway killings and rise in felony assaults and hate crimes could yet test his approach to public safety. Posting slickly edited social media clips on his channels won’t suffice.

Who, then, is the real Zohran Mamdani? Is he a run-of-the-mill social democrat who realized that the key to governing was to play the radical, without actually being one? Or is his newfound pragmatism a way of demonstrating that a democratic-socialist future needn’t mean street-level disruption, chaos at City Hall, or intra-Democratic turmoil? Perhaps even he doesn’t know. But at some point, the mayor’s honeymoon will end, and Mamdani will have to show what he really stands for.

The flamingos open their eyes and glance around. Suddenly, they remember that this is the second annual Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit, not a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi retreat. The instructor guiding them is, in fact, Bryan Johnson, the investor-cum-longevity influencer who has set himself the modest goal of becoming the first human to not die. “If your balance lasted between zero and seven seconds, your biological age is 60 to 80.” Several 40-somethings look distraught.

The scene was undeniably nutty. But behind the biohacking and balance tests, MAHA is becoming something much more serious: a political movement with money and institutional backing that is moving well beyond its activist roots.

Johnson might seem like an unlikely ambassador for MAHA. He is a Silicon Valley millionaire whose transhumanist worldview has little in common with the more quotidian concerns of MAHA’s crunchy moms. He worries about the end of the human race; they fret about Red 40 in their kids’ cereal. 

But this strange alliance is what makes MAHA one of the most dynamic and politically potent forces in the United States today. Having evolved from a populist insurgency into a viable electoral coalition, MAHA in 2026 looks very different from the movement that helped propel President Trump to victory in 2024. It now counts in its ranks biotech bros like Johnson, health-care CEOs, and world-famous athletes, all of whom appeared at this week’s summit. 

More from this author

How MAHA grew up

By James Billot

Some of MAHA’s original supporters view these additions less as a success than a hostile takeover. They pointed to the summit’s corporate sponsors and its speaker list, which featured more CEOs than MAHA moms, as evidence that the movement has sold out or been captured. As one despairingly wrote: “It is a betrayal of what MAHA claimed to stand for.” 

This is, however, a misread. That the movement is now working with figures it has long opposed should be seen as a victory, not defeat. The truth is that the only way to effect change in a country dominated by powerful pharmaceutical and corporate interests is to do so from within. That doesn’t mean MAHA should abandon its principles. But it does require resisting the temptation to frame every compromise as a betrayal, or allowing red lines to congeal into purity tests that leave it isolated from the institutions it is trying to change.

There was plenty of bad blood going into the summit. Days earlier, activists vented their fury online about the proliferation of corporate sponsors paying $300,000 for a seat at the table, while various “medical-freedom” stalwarts were left at home. Why, for example, was there no panel discussion on vaccine injuries? Why was a UnitedHealth representative talking about affordable health care? Why were scientists who lost their career for asking questions not given a hearing?

As one of a handful journalists allowed to report on the summit, I was curious to see if this anger filtered into the crowd. There were some familiar faces: celebrity chef Andre Rush, Del Bigtree, RFK’s former communications director, and Mark Gorton, MAHA Institute’s president, who once said that he was “the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference.” But they did not have any speaking role. In fact, most of the attendees looked as though they had just stumbled out of a boardroom meeting, with off-stage conversations revolving around advances in cancer research and boosted breeding in potatoes. Despite a healthy showing of amber-lens glasses, peptide-grown muscles, and one “vaccine police” T-shirt, this was not a crowd of cranks.

Having covered RFK during his presidential campaign in 2024, I was struck by how much had changed. Back then, Kennedy’s supporters comprised a motley bunch of crusty hippies, vaccine skeptics, and disillusioned Bernie bros. It was, in many ways, an expression of what used to be called the California Left: a blend of serious and kooky critiques of big business’s role in America’s health crises. 

Channeling that spirit, Kennedy was the ultimate outsider candidate, building his campaign around three core issues: ending the forever wars, cutting America’s debt, and fighting chronic disease. It was the last of these issues that really galvanized his campaign, as Kennedy railed against agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, The Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All, he charged, were “controlled by giant for-profit corporations,” and the uniparty was “in cahoots with the big food producers, Big Pharma and Big Ag.” Now, he’s in charge of those very agencies, with the Big Pharma executives he once denounced appearing at his summit.  

Since becoming health secretary, Kennedy has delivered some of the changes MAHA activists had long demanded, particularly on food additives and ultra-processed foods, but some of his bigger promises have stalled. His pledge to identify the root cause of autism within months went unfulfilled, he failed to win funding for a new chronic-disease agency, and his push to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising has gone nowhere. The biggest blow of all was Trump’s executive order to boost domestic production of the weedkiller glyphosate, forcing Kennedy to defend a chemical he’d spent years opposing.

These defeats have understandably angered many of Kennedy’s erstwhile supporters. But his success on food dyes demonstrates why it is best to work with, rather than against, industry. In the last year, Kraft Heinz, Nestle, Conagra, and other major food companies all committed to eliminating FD&C colors, which have been linked to behavioral concerns in children, from their US products. The FDA now runs a “natural-dye-pledge” website that allows the public to track whether companies actually deliver.

Suggested reading

Why you should eat the RFK diet

By Valerie Stivers

Perhaps his greatest success, though, is that the fight today against regulatory capture, and for cleaner food, has become a rare bipartisan cause. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation phasing out ultra-processed foods from school lunches, and by 2029, the state could become the first to label them in grocery stores. Earlier this year, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said that he “absolutely” supports some of Kennedy’s initiatives, including more testing of infant formula for microplastics and a push for healthier foods in schools. And progressive Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed have been trying to drum up support for taking on Big Ag and Big Pharma. If Kennedy wasn’t in the picture, these topics may not have received the same kind of air time.

America’s pharma and food industries are notorious. The drug industry is routinely among the biggest spenders on federal lobbying, and it funds much of the FDA’s drug-review work through user fees, which means the regulator and the regulated are financially entangled by design. Similarly, the food industry is run by a handful of mega-corporations that control most of what fills supermarket shelves. These are fiendishly difficult opponents, and it would be unfair to judge Kennedy on failing to upend a decades-old system after just 20 months. 

In the short term, he can focus on the issues popular with the public — fighting chronic disease, ultra-processed food, pharmaceutical influence, and environmental chemicals — while avoiding those that aren’t (such as his obsession with altering childhood vaccine schedules). Such efforts may not save his party from looming defeat in the midterms, but they would at least allow Kennedy to work across the aisle.

The great midcentury historian Richard Hofstadter once argued that the problem with third parties is that once they have stung, they die. His point was that these movements are often strongest when they are outsiders; once they have acquired power and begun implementing their agenda, they lose the energy that gave them their force in the first place. The same logic might apply to MAHA. Activists upset with the slow pace of change have already started to question if Kennedy really is the chosen one, and what life will look like once he’s gone.

This is no bad thing. For a movement to expand, it needs to shed some of its more eccentric adherents and broaden its appeal. That the summit’s loudest critics are also the supporters of the most unpopular policies is a telling sign that it is moving in the right direction. MAHA is growing up — and its followers should, too.

This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November. 

It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one).

Trumpapalooza was meant to remind Republicans why they had put their faith in the president in the first place. But it had almost the opposite effect, drawing attention to just how different the man standing before them today was from the one they knew 10, or even two, years ago. He could still command a crowd with his impressions of Emmanuel Macron and his pronunciation of Lenin as “Len-een.” But beneath the cheers, it became clear that the populist fire that once drove the Trumpist insurgencies of 2016 and 2024 had greatly diminished, if not been extinguished altogether. Young conservatives, in particular, appeared to have all but abandoned the project, leaving behind a graying bunch.

Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.

More from this author

Trump's Boomer-palooza

By James Billot

Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.

On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech. 

It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. 

Part of their frustration stemmed from the president’s outright denial that anything was wrong. In his two keynote speeches, Trump struck a jubilant tone, celebrating “the most successful two years, financially and every other way, in the history of the presidency.” But it was clear that very few were buying into this narrative. Even Fox’s Laura Ingraham, a longtime supporter of the president, told Trump that he would be “cruising” if he hadn’t invaded Iran, adding that young men were feeling “demoralized.”

They have every reason to be. The same day Trump declared that Iran had been decimated, Tehran-backed Houthi forces seized a major Red Sea port, potentially giving the group greater control over a key oil-shipping route and threatening to destabilize already-shaky global energy markets. Core inflation also grew last month, further squeezing Americans’ finances at a time when gas and food prices were already rising. No one at the convention wanted to talk about these grim developments — it was a convention, not a town hall, after all — and this was about keeping up appearances. 

Still, it was a telling moment on the first day of the convention that young people appeared more interested in sideline remarks from Groyper-courting James Fishback, who lost the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary to Rep. Byron Donalds last month, than in any of the speeches taking place inside the stadium. As he wandered around the arena, greeting fans and even having a tête-à-tête with the far-Right firebrand Laura Loomer, Fishback was trailed by a phalanx of young Republicans hanging on his every word.

“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.” 

This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel. 

Suggested reading

Trump's Boomer-palooza

By Nikos Mohammadi

I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” 

The problem, though, is that the longer these issues are ignored by the GOP leadership, the more space they create for irresponsible actors to exploit them. Israel is the clearest example. In recent years, an overdue conversation about recalibrating US-Israeli relations has curdled into something far uglier on the Right, with the rise of figures such as Candace Owens, Fuentes, and Fishback. Yet this has prompted no soul-searching among party leaders, who refuse to countenance any kind of debate on the issue. Just last night, RFK Jr. randomly pivoted from health issues to praising the Jewish state as a “bulwark of democracy” and “America’s most critical frontline ally.” It was exactly the kind of rote statement that will be clipped, circulated, and mocked among Zoomer circles.

A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.” 

Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”

He has landed on fertile territory. Dismay over the Iran war and the Epstein Files — and a sluggish economy — mean that just 15% of Americans now “strongly approve” of the Commander in Chief. Yet despite the President’s record low approval ratings, a solid majority of Republicans, and an even greater share of MAGA Republicans, remain onside. In practice, that can make leaving the movement as painful as departing an actual church, with friendships ruined and communities torn apart. As Americans digest this week’s primaries, however, and the midterms edge closer, the pain of separation could offer useful lessons for Republicans and Democrats alike.

Steven Francisci knows the struggles of leaving MAGA better than most. A former naval cook, he’d voted for Trump twice. But then, last November, the Virginia resident decided to back Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, in the Old Dominion’s gubernatorial race. Having made his home in Chesapeake, a Republican stronghold where nearly all his neighbors are Trump supporters, Francisci knew this decision would go down poorly. “I didn’t want them to treat me differently,” he tells me. “I didn’t want them thinking ‘oh Steve, you’re not one of those nuts are you?’”

After deliberating for a day or two, Francisci mustered the courage to plant an “Abigail Spanberger for Governor” sign on his front lawn. Spanberger duly won — but, within 24 hours, Francisci sensed something had changed. Neighbors who once asked after his kids became more distant, and conversations grew stilted. “Before I chatted with my friends and neighbors the whole time,” Francisci recalls. “But after that election, it was silent. I felt ashamed.”

This trauma can partly be understood by the depth of Francisci’s former loyalties. Until last year, he stood firmly on the Right, at times venturing into more extreme corners, consuming white nationalist content that included conspiracies about Barack Obama’s citizenship. As an early champion of “birtherism”, Trump gave these views a national platform, turning Francisci into an early convert. A fellow New Yorker by birth, he was also drawn to the businessman’s earthy, confrontational style.

Suggested reading

How MAGA became the war party

By Sohrab Ahmari

After a series of personal setbacks — the breakdown of his marriage and a motorbike accident that left him on disability benefits — MAGA became, in effect, Francisci’s new community. “I felt like I was now part of something bigger than myself,” he explains. “I was part of a movement that was trying to make America better. There was a strong sense of belonging, shared language and community, where I felt a connection with people who shared similar beliefs and perspectives.”

In Francisci’s evangelical church, politics and religion regularly converged. Before and after service, the topic of conversation almost always turned to Trump, with congregants asking whether he was touched by the divine. “We would just start talking about politics and what we saw on Fox News,” Francisci says. “People really felt Trump was the chosen one. We all did.”

At the time, Francisci didn’t see the irony of talking about the chosen one in a house of God. He was so immersed in Trump lore that he genuinely believed that the President was the savior; he was the only one untouched by the stench of corruption that wafted through DC. He really was going to drain the swamp. And yet, by the 2024 election, Francisci’s feelings had started to shift. There was no grand epiphany: rather, Trump’s claims about a stolen election, and his conduct on January 6, slowly began to gnaw at him. In the end, he put up that Spanberger sign, losing friends and family as he went.

Francisci’s journey — from diehard to apostate — can be spotted elsewhere too. In the space of a decade, Carter Brown went from being a QANON-supporting Trumper to leaving the movement altogether. Like with Francisci, the impact was swift and brutal. The day after she broke with Trump, the Georgia native describes feeling like she was in The Truman Show. She struggled to get out of bed each morning and couldn’t keep to any kind of normal routine around the house. “I was experiencing a complete identity collapse,” she says. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to my marriage. I didn’t know what was going to happen to the relationship with my friends, with my family.” Though Brown’s marriage ultimately endured, she says the last few years have been “extremely difficult”, especially as she’s lost several friends. Online, they questioned her, harassed her, even blocked her. “It was,” Brown says, “a complete ego death.”

Of course, these are extreme cases. But they do reflect a wider truth about the strength of MAGA identity. It functions as a worldview, a belief system, and a community, all wrapped up into one. I caught a glimpse of this while covering a Trump rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, in 2024. After Trump finished speaking, I stopped at a nearby bar, where almost everyone was wearing MAGA hats, shirts, and assorted pieces of anti-Biden regalia. I was immediately struck by the camaraderie in the room; bikers played pool with bricklayers, locals bought drinks for out-of-towners, and bartenders shared cigarettes with regulars. Whether they knew each other or not, a baseline of trust had already been established.

“When I supported Trump, there was this kind of camaraderie that you don’t have on the Left,” John, who spoke to UnHerd using a pseudonym, tells me. “We had this bunker mentality where it was us against everyone else because that was the counter-culture during the early 2020s.” John, who was living in Orlando, Florida at the time, said he was drawn to Trump’s outsider appeal, believing that he would disrupt the uniparty consensus. “Until Trump,” he explains, “it just felt like every single politician sounded basically the same. It was just whether you were waving a blue or red flag. At the end of the day, they were still bombing, corruption was everywhere, and they were beholden to special interests.”

John later realized that Trump was no different, though he still enjoyed the fellowship that came with the movement. He tells me about the story of when his boss caught him watching a Stephen Crowder podcast at work, and summoned him to his office. “I thought ‘oh fuck, this isn’t good’”. Yet rather than confronting him, John’s boss revealed himself as a Crowder fan too. “From that point on, we always — under wraps — had each other’s back.”

As recently as, say, 1996, changing political allegiances was as anodyne as switching supermarkets. But as the country has become more polarized, with millions of Americans seeing their political rivals not just as wrong but as immoral, the social cost of abandoning one’s tribe has grown ever steeper. That cost is especially acute on the Right, where most Republicans have spent over a decade rallying around a single figure, with their loyalty hardened by Russiagate, two impeachments, multiple criminal indictments and a pair of assassination attempts.

Suggested reading

Donald Trump: false prophet

By Matt Feeney

Does that make MAGA, as many on the Left argue, a cult? When literal gold statues of the movement’s leader are being erected, there are certainly some parallels. But it is also true that MAGA support for the President is not monolithic, as increasingly vocal criticisms from influential figures within the broader Right-leaning media ecosystem — including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Shawn Ryan — have shown.

Just yesterday, Carlson floated the idea of a “new path forward”, after claiming that MAGA had been “betrayed”. He was pictured alongside other exiles, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Joe Kent and Thomas Massie, all of whom appear to be jockeying for the MAGA throne once Trump departs.

However, the very source of MAGA’s strength could also be the cause of its undoing. As the primary defeats of Massie, Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn vividly demonstrate, today’s Republican party still belongs to Trump. The President does not tolerate dissent, and anyone who challenges him is swatted away by the base. But if MAGA’s fate is so closely entwined with the one man, it has little chance of outliving him. For the fact remains: Trump made MAGA, led MAGA, and to a significant extent, is MAGA. This is something the President himself seems to recognize. Earlier this year, when asked whether his decision to abduct Venezuela leader Nicolás Maduro was a betrayal of his “America First” campaign promises, Trump responded: “MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do. MAGA is me.”

Perhaps polarization is now so entrenched in America that MAGA voters will line up behind any candidate in the Republican column. But it is difficult to imagine a President Vance or Carlson commanding the same level of loyalty among their followers. How would Republicans react, for instance, if Vance said, as Trump did, that he did not think “even a little bit” about Americans’ financial situation on the eve of the midterms?

Trump is a sui generis figure, and any candidate trying to emulate him risks looking like a pale imitation. In some ways, this could benefit the Republican Party. It may force the next generation of leaders to articulate a more coherent political vision, one rooted in MAGA’s original principles: avoiding foreign wars, draining the swamp and reviving America’s industrial heartlands. It may also compel the party to build a broader and more durable coalition, one held together by ideas and interests rather than loyalty to a single man.

Democrats, for their part, can learn from this too. Formerly core constituencies of the party — working-class voters, African Americans, Hispanics — have drifted Right, while Democrats have struggled to find a message that resonates beyond their activist base. The botched release of the DNC’s report into the 2024 election shows that this is still a party riven by internal divisions, as evidenced by the divisive primaries in Maine and Michigan. Until it can find a candidate who can appeal to a broader cross-section of voters in 2028, it will continue to flounder.

Back in Chesapeake, life is easier for Francisci now. Since leaving MAGA — and stepping away from his church at the same time — he has rebuilt his social network, made new friends, and reconnected with family members. He now tries to support others who are thinking about leaving the movement, though he is careful not to proselytize, lest he take on the role of the evangelist once more. “I walked away from Trump and I walked away from Christianity,” he says. “No more conversions for me.”

If the essence of MAGA could be distilled into a single evening, then last night’s UFC Freedom 250 at the White House would be it. Part military parade, part sporting spectacle and part internet fever dream, the MMA fights on the South Lawn marked both America’s 250th birthday and Donald Trump’s 80th. Here, as tens of thousands of Trump supporters descended on DC, was the clearest sign yet of red America stamping its authority in the country’s bluest enclave. Six years ago, on January 6, they had come uninvited to one of the cathedrals of American democracy. Now, they were here by invitation of the state itself.

For those who weren’t offered a ringside seat alongside Trump and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) chief executive, Dana White, there was always the Ellipse: a 52-acre park just south of the White House, to watch the action on giant screens. Passing vendors hawking Trump t-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as “Suck It Up, Buttercup” and “It’s No Mistake, Snowflake”, I shuffled through concentric circles of security to enter the promised land. Moments after walking in, a nearby fan put his friend in a chokehold. The friend’s protestations about losing consciousness went unnoticed until a DEA agent was forced to intervene. “Save it for later,” he warned them.

Suggested Reading

ICE theatrics are getting real

By Malcom Kyeyune

As I walked around the park, it felt like I had stumbled into a MAGA beauty pageant: out were the traditional red MAGA caps (although there were still a few), in were t-shirts reading “red, white and badass” and “so long, autopen Joe”. Others were decked out in Freedom 250 merch, the Trump-aligned group tasked with organizing patriotic celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. Nearly everyone I spoke to had flown in for the event, from states as far as Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona, to catch a glimpse of their favorite fighters — and favorite president.

The fights did not begin until after 8pm, leaving fans to entertain themselves for a few hours. Some queued to test their strength on a punch machine, placing bets on who would land the biggest score. Others climbed into a makeshift ring for photographs or played commentator from behind a mock broadcast desk. But most were content to mill about near the jumbo screens, watching soldiers from different divisions wrestle each other inside the octagon until the real fights began.

It was a surreal scene, not least because the park was topped-and-tailed by two of the nation’s most recognizable landmarks. At one end stood the Washington Monument. At the other loomed the star-spangled “Claw” — a 92-foot-tall, 154-foot-wide, 600-ton spider-like structure through which the White House was just visible in the distance. Built at a reported cost of $60 million and involving seven federal agencies and more than 700 subcontractors, the Claw would serve as the home of the first live professional sporting event ever staged at the White House.

Was it a partisan political event too? No, insisted White in the weeks leading up to the event, declaring that UFC Freedom 250 would be a celebration of all things American. And what better way to mark the occasion than with fighters vomiting by the Ellipse, motorbikers backflipping in front of the White House, and a bald eagle soaring over the heads of thousands of red-blooded, fight-loving patriots?

Such scenes may not have been what John Adams and Benjamin Franklin envisioned when they signed the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. Nor is it likely that William Howard Taft imagined his newly built Oval Office would one day serve as the staging area for a UFC walkout onto the White House South Lawn. To liberals, the event was a gaudy symptom of a late-stage idiocracy. To conservatives, it was a triumphant showing of America’s (and by extension, MAGA’s) cultural might.

Occasionally, Trump chants rippled through the crowd, with one group singing happy birthday to the President. One man, wearing a red MAGA hat and a t-shirt reading “Freedom in the front, party in the back” told me that only Trump would be able to put on an event like this. “We owe him, man,” he said. “Literally no other president would put on a show like this.” Unprompted, he proceeded to chug his beer, most of which went down his shirt, before screaming: “Trump 2028 and beyond! WOO!”

If there were any Democrats in our midst, they were certainly not forthcoming about it. This was no place for a bien-pensant liberal. After all, the event happened at the President’s direction, outside his official residence, and on his birthday. Having been met with a chorus of boos at last week’s Knicks game in New York, he was now back on friendlier ground, with the loudest cheers of the night erupting as he emerged from the White House.

As he walked out of the Oval Office alongside White, the President initially appeared rather wan. His movements were slow and his facial expression barely changed. But it soon became clear that this was an affectation: this was the emperor’s show, and it was unbecoming to display any emotion to the masses. Stepping out onto the South Portico, he stood for a moment to soak in the crowd’s adulation before saluting skyward as military planes flew above.

For all that this event was a show of Trumpian grandeur, there was also something unmistakably American about it. Loud, self-assured, and impossible to ignore, it read as a global hegemon flexing its cultural muscle, while corporate America staged its own parallel spectacle around the “Claw”: red, white and blue lights cutting into the night sky, giant Ram trucks suspended overhead, and a Meta booth promoting its new AI glasses. Never guilty of letting a good business opportunity go to waste, the Trump Organization also commemorated the event with “Freedom 250”-themed silver and gold coins featuring Trump’s face. Some of the coins cost as much as  $12,000. For better or worse, it was difficult to imagine any other country staging something quite like it.

More from this author

Mutants are on the march

By James Billot

This was my first UFC event. Until now, my relationship with “extreme” sports had rarely gone further than a Christmas skate at Central Park. But I was enthralled by the world I had just entered into. Over the course of the evening, I learned that there were eight different ways to choke an opponent into submission, and 12 different ways to break their arm. “It’s all about avoiding lay and pray,” Nick Willey, a former MMA fighter who now competes as a bareknuckle boxer, advised me. “If you get grappled down to the ground, you’re in big trouble.”

The fights themselves were thrilling, with the biggest upset of the night coming shortly after midnight. American Justin Gaethje stunned Ilia Topuria in a brutal 20-minute contest that left the champion’s face looking like a half-deflated football. Gaethje entered the bout as a heavy underdog, only to overwhelm Topuria with a relentless barrage of punches and leg kicks, claiming the lightweight belt in the process. “Never fuck with a real American!” screamed a nearby fan, pumping his fist into the air in triumph.

In keeping with the other fighters, Gaethje then climbed out of the octagon to shake the hand of the President, who commended the fighter on an excellent bout. The scene had an air of a modern-day Coliseum, with the crowd’s roar subsiding into a kind of ritual hush after the violence properly dispensed. Now, Trump could proceed to his next engagement as a satisfied octogenarian, boarding a flight to Geneva to finalize America’s deal with Iran.

In some ways, UFC Freedom 250 represented the worst aspects of American culture: the snobbery of the liberals who sniped from afar, the crassness of the MAGA movement, the shameless commercialism of US business, and the infiltration of politics into all corners of everyday life. Every rational instinct told me the event was silly, ludicrous, and absurd.

But here’s my confession: I enjoyed every minute of it. Perhaps the fighting awakened something more primitive in me. Or perhaps I was simply swept up in the enthusiasm of the night. More likely though, it was the surrender of all pretense to seriousness. Looking out across the crowd — a 20-foot beer snake, fake UFC belts, a giant inflatable fighting glove, and animated debates over Hokit’s technical prowess — I realized everyone was simply having fun. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

What this looked like to the rest of the world lies in the eye of the beholder. Was it a triumph of American spectacle, or a self-inflicted blow to the country’s cultural prestige? As one fan summed it up as we left in the early hours: “Bro, sometimes the best moments in life come when you’re getting punched in the face.”

It was here that Pence resolved to cling to “tried-and-true” conservatism, he explains in What Conservatives Believe, his new book, published Tuesday. In doing so, he broke with his party’s leadership to vote against Bush’s flagship education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act. That moment would harden into a governing conviction: that Republican orthodoxy had been compromised, and that it was his calling to restore it.

In these benighted times, as the “siren song of populism” grows ever louder, the former vice president still dreams of that restoration: a nation that rises up and lives out the true meaning of its creed — low taxes, limited government, and unwavering support for Israel, America’s “most cherished ally.”

That this dream is shared by approximately 16 other Americans, the vast majority of whom constitute Pence’s extended family, hasn’t stopped him. This is an exaggeration, but only slightly. The truth is, that brand of conservatism — it used to be called fusionism, for combining free-market orthodoxy, free-policy hawkism, and “traditional values” — is quite literally dying along with the subscriber base of National Review.  

More from this author

The Corbynisation of the American Left

By James Billot

What Conservatives Believe, Pence’s third book since leaving the White House in 2020, is yet another long-winded attempt at vindication. The book is framed as a statement of principles, rather than autobiography. It offers no insight into the internal machinations of the Trump White House, nor does it attempt a psychological portrait of the most powerful man in the country. It does not even advance a new or original critique of MAGA populism or progressivism — ostensibly the book’s central purpose. Instead, readers are treated to nostalgia politics and a catalog of policy prescriptions that would have seemed dated in the Bush era, let alone this one.

The new book does serve one important purpose, however. For all its denunciations of populism, Pence’s work is a powerful reminder of why Trump emerged in the first place. Before 2016, fusionism was the GOP’s governing philosophy. Its true believers — the likes of Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy — were seen as the future. Likewise, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and John Kasich were all serious contenders for the presidency. It was hardly a golden age — and yet, this is the world that Pence seems to want to return to. 

Trump may be an (extremely) imperfect vessel for working-class America, but he at least recognized that something was rotten in the old order. Pence, by contrast, refuses to grapple with that failure. If What Conservatives Believe reveals anything, it is that Pence still mistakes the consensus that produced Trump for the one that can succeed him.

There is something almost endearing about Mike Pence. A conservative “proudly out of sync” with the times, he is one of the rare few who practice what they preach. A devout Christian married for 41 years, the lifelong Hoosier has lived such a scandal-free life that his biggest “controversy” was converting from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity as a college student. To this day, he never eats alone with a woman unless it’s his wife, and he refuses to attend events involving alcohol without her by his side. (In the post-#MeToo era, many other politicians might have wished they’d adopted a similar approach.)

This rigidity also extends to Pence’s politics. Despite growing up in a Democratic household in which John F. Kennedy (a fellow Irish Catholic) was the poster boy, Pence began flirting with the GOP during that same period, and the opinions he adopted early haven’t changed. In What Conservatives Believe, he describes Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and proto-Reagan, as his intellectual hero. The young Pence found The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater’s statement of principles, “stirring and compelling.”

“Stirring” and “compelling” are not words that immediately spring to mind when reading The Conscience of a Conservative. Its didactic style, however, is clearly something Pence seeks to emulate in his own writing. He writes that conservatives “must begin with moral clarity”; they “must find commonsense solutions”; “they must have faith”; and, most important, they “must never forsake our constitutional principles.” It’s the kind of message that might have had some purchase 50 years ago, but in the age of Trump’s “weave” and rambling Truth Social posts, it struggles to register.

Unlike most other anti-Trump books, Pence’s work is different in that he is willing to take on his own side, even if his attacks on the president remain restrained. 

In Pence’s telling, the specter haunting America is the unholy alliance of progressives and Right-wing populists. He argues that the latter peddle “progressivism in disguise,” warning that they are “fellow travelers on the road to ruin.” Both dream of a collapse in the America-led international order, and seek to enlarge the state to such a degree that it crushes the economic freedom of Americans. No one is spared from Pence’s withering attacks — not even Marco Rubio, whose “common-good capitalism” is dismissed as a “warmed-over version of big-government Republicanism.” 

For Pence, the only answer to the problems of capitalism is more capitalism. He shows little willingness to consider that the system itself may have helped create the very populism he condemns. Across 264 pages, Pence devotes just one paragraph to the causes of the populist revolt in 2016, while Barry Goldwater earns 36 mentions. Though he concedes that globalization “left behind” some regions of the country, he blames big government — rather than trade, deindustrialization, or immigration — as the source of America’s ills. Beyond that, readers are served a steady diet of folksy maxims about how “populism is like a gust of wind” and hollow aphorisms such as: “Populists follow urges, not principle.”

Perhaps we should not expect much more from a man who once described himself as Rush Limbaugh on decaf. Pence’s role during the first Trump administration was largely ceremonial; he was the inscrutable mute who nodded, smiled, and applauded on cue, but rarely spoke out of turn. Unlike JD Vance, who has carved out a far more visible role in foreign policy and other issues, Pence left office without a signature policy achievement to call his own. He surfed the populist wave all the way to the Number One Observatory Circle and never seemed quite sure what to do once he got there.

This is Pence in a nutshell. He was content to ride on Trump’s coattails, claiming the administration’s successes as his own, until the president turned on him on Jan. 6. Crucially, Pence mistook his elevated status in the White House for evidence that he represented a constituency that was loyal to him, rather than the president. In doing so, he misunderstood the movement itself: MAGA was never a coalition awaiting conservative stewardship, but a personal following organized around Trump alone. Pence’s failed presidential campaign in 2024, lasting fewer than five months, proved as much.

Suggested reading

How the Right sold out

By Sohrab Ahmari

If there is an heir to Trump, that person will not be a bible-thumping Christian who preaches a return to civility and fiscal conservatism. More likely, it will be a figure who best channels the values Trump claimed to represent: ending foreign wars, draining the swamp, and reviving America’s industrial heartlands. Trump may have failed in some of these promises, but he at least forced a reckoning on them. That his coalition grew, rather than shrunk, over three elections shows he had a far greater sense than Pence — or any Republican for that matter — of where the country was headed.

Pence, by contrast, believes the problems facing 21st-century America can be found in the 20th century, with the “provable” ideas of Ronald Reagan guiding the way. So how would the former vice president address the very modern problems of social atomization, the breakdown of communities, and the infiltration of technology into everyday life? Pence answers these thorny questions with grandfatherly wisdom: “social media often can feel like antisocial media,” “iPhones transform into what I call ‘iFOMOs’ because users suffer from a ‘fear of missing out,’” and the suggestion that the Founding Fathers might have prefaced the Tenth Amendment with “ICYMI.”

These sparkling insights may read more like a church newsletter than a political diagnosis, but they point to a broader truth. The world that produced Reagan — and the Republican consensus he embodied — has long since disappeared, replaced by economic dislocation, cultural fragmentation, and a crisis of institutional trust that Reaganite platitudes are poorly equipped to address. The tragedy of Pence is not merely that he was eclipsed by Trump, but that he still cannot see why Trump emerged in the first place. The world has moved on from Pence and his ideology; only Pence seems determined to remain behind.

The bar never leaves the ground. After three seconds of agonizing effort, Hooper releases it in defeat. He stands back, meekly waves to the crowd, and slinks out stage left. Even after a three-month regimen of heavy steroid and testosterone use, the synthetic support did not prove enough to get him over the line.

For this was not an ordinary strongman competition. This was the inaugural Enhanced Games in Las Vegas — an Olympics-style spectacle with a distinctly un-Olympian twist: drugs, and lots of them.

Testosterone, anabolic steroids, stimulants, metabolic modulators, and a pick ’n’ mix bag of peptides were just some elements of the “stacks” that these athletes had been taking ahead of the Games. In any other sporting context, it would have resulted in an automatic disqualification and a lengthy (if not lifetime) ban. But at the Enhanced Games, it was almost a prerequisite for qualification.

These competitors were, after all, sporting outcasts. They were rejects, drug cheats, and also-rans. Few had a pathway back into the disciplines they had spent their whole lives devoted to. Now, they had effectively sealed their fate by competing in a tournament that was widely dismissed as a “clown show” by the US Anti-Doping Agency and “dangerous and irresponsible” by WADA.

Suggested reading

The orthodox Jews tripping on toad toxins

By Frederick Kaufman

With so many drugs involved, I made my first trip to Vegas expecting an event as riveting as it was uncomfortable: a Hunter S. Thompson sort of scene, but with steroids instead of psychedelics. I didn’t plan on barrelling down the Strip with a fistful of mescaline and a quart of ether, but I had already been offered to go to a gun range by another attendee before the event had even begun. It was a promising start.

Instead, the Games proved to be a more sterile affair. Like the athletes competing, the crowd appeared to be on their own strict protocol, with tech bros and YouTube influencers flexing their enhanced muscles on camera. Veins bulged out of muscles I did not know existed, and skin stretched across foreheads so tightly that eyebrows were rendered immobile. As I wandered around the makeshift arena, many were happy to share with me the details of their regimens, no doubt taking inspiration from anti-aging guru Bryan Johnson, who was commentating on the Games. One even offered to put me in touch with his “peptide guy”, which I politely declined. As for Johnson, he delivered analysis while sheltering under a black parasol — all the better to prevent his skin from aging.

Ironically, many in the stands looked more enhanced than the athletes themselves. Since his dramatic weight gain last year, the swimmer James Magnussen, a former 100-meter freestyle world champion, had shed the 20 kilograms he once carried. Perhaps to the disappointment of thrill-seeking spectators, he was one of many athletes to have retained the lean, familiar physiques of their former Olympic selves. The contestants were competing across three categories: swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting, with 42 competitors vying for a total prize pot of up to $25 million. $250,000 would be awarded to first-place finishers and bonuses of up to $1 million for “breaking” world records.

By the end of the evening, only one $1 million prize was handed out. The Greek swimmer ­Kristian Gkolomeev swam 20.81 seconds in the men’s 50-meter freestyle, 0.07 quicker than the world record — and 0.05 seconds faster than his previous record at an Enhanced Games-sponsored event in February 2025. It hardly represented the dawn of a new sporting era, but it was nevertheless heralded by Max Martin, the Enhanced Games CEO, as the moment “we changed the world”.  Martin knelt at Gkolomeev’s feet in gratitude; the prize money, evidently, was well-spent.

The millions of dollars in cash was certainly a powerful incentive for these athletes, but the event lacked the intensity of a conventional sporting competition. EDM music blared during races; sprinters were allowed to restart after false starts; and a weightlifter was granted an additional attempt in the snatch. Records or no records, athletes were applauded as if they were returning war heroes. By the end, I half-expected participation trophies to be handed out.

At times, the Games felt more like an episode of Severance: a sealed-off system observed from the outside, its participants acting according to rules that seemed both hidden and self-evident to them. At the end of each race, athletes were routinely asked how enhancement had changed their lives. The responses were uniformly effusive — gratitude directed at the organizers; praise for a newfound lease on life; and carefully rehearsed reflections on the transformative effects of the substances they had taken.

This was, of course, the point. The Enhanced Games is a publicity stunt. The athletes are running, swimming, and lifting advertisements for the long list of the supplements, longevity treatments and specialized regimens promoted on the event’s newly revamped website. But if they were meant to be an advert for a better, faster, stronger tomorrow, tonight’s performances suggest there is some way to go.

Critics have already dismissed the Games as a sideshow, but they are wrong to do so. If last night’s competition revealed anything, it was the glimpse it provided into a future in which “enhancement” is no longer the exception, but the norm. With the use of performance-enhancing drugs on the rise, even as “looksmaxxing” becomes normalized, events like these are helping redraw assumptions about what constitutes a desirable or even normal body. As those boundaries shift, so too may the pressure for people to interfere with their bodies — chemically, medically and permanently — without fully reckoning with the risks.

Enhanced had billed the competition as the beginning of a new era for elite sport — one in which pharmaceutical optimization would render old records obsolete, and bring human potential to new frontiers. Not only was a single world record broken, but three unenhanced athletes ended up winning their respective events. Ben Proud, the Olympic silver medalist and poster child for the Games, improved on his previous personal best, but missed out on the world record by just 0.05 seconds. His dejected look at the finish line made clear his disappointment.

If these results were meant to serve as a rebuke to the old sporting system, the event was a failure. But they also pointed towards a deeper tension that lies at the heart of the organization. On the one hand, its founders present the Enhanced Games as a “new Apollo mission”, testing the limits of human performance and pushing the boundaries of human potential. On the other hand, they argued that there was nothing altogether that different from what today’s enhanced athletes are doing compared to previous generations. Promotional videos invoked the Ancient Greeks, who supposedly used figs, mushrooms and plant seeds to sharpen performance, or the runners of the early-20th century who turned to stimulants and tonics in pursuit of an edge.

It does not take a scientist, however, to understand that there is a difference between eating a fig and injecting EPO (erythropoietin), a hormone which is designed to increase red-blood-cell count, but can also raise the risk of stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, blood clots and sudden cardiac death. While Enhanced athletes underwent medical supervision in the months leading up to competition, the long-term consequences of sustained pharmacological enhancement remain poorly understood. That uncertainty raises a broader question: what happens when these protocols — or simplified, mass-market versions of them — move beyond tightly controlled experimental settings into a wider, commercially accessible market?

The rise of the “looksmaxxing” community offers some clues. Though Enhanced’s founders reject any direct comparison with influencers such as Clavicular, there are notable overlaps: in both cases, the body is subjected to pharmaceutical intervention in pursuit of an aesthetic goal. The language may differ — performance versus appearance, sport versus self-image — but the underlying logic is not. Besides, most of Enhanced’s customers will be less fussed about beating world records than looking good in the mirror, which they can do with testosterone injections for $169 a month, low-dose tadalafil for $80 a month, or semaglutide for $179 a month.

Enhanced’s co-founder Christian Angermayer has himself acknowledged that vanity is no bad thing. He argues that the pursuit of enhancement does need not be morally distinguished by its motivation: whether driven by vanity, ambition or competitiveness, it forms part of a single continuum of biomedical self-optimization. Notably, he sees these Games as a node in a broader cultural campaign to make pharmacological enhancement socially acceptable, arguing that medicine is too narrowly focused on treating illness rather than improving healthy people.

Yet what is most revealing is where he draws his inspiration from: the trans movement. Writing in 2024, he argued that the broader freedoms won through struggles over gender identity would eventually extend to the right to “shape and enhance one’s own body and mind according to individual desires and aspirations”. In his telling, enhancement is not simply a sporting or medical question but a libertarian one — part of a wider rejection of fixed ideas about what constitutes a “normal” body.

It is a revealing analogy. The debate around transgender athletes exposed how fraught questions around hormones, bodily autonomy and fairness in sport can be. In 2022, the 6’1” trans swimmer Lia Thomas won a National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s freestyle title in 2022; the sight of her on the podium alongside smaller female competitors became a lightning rod for public unease about where inclusion ends and competitive advantage begins. James Magnussen’s own transformation — after putting on 20 kilos through pharmaceutical enhancement — provoked a different but related reaction. His enlarged physique, with lats spilling out of his swimsuit, looked disturbingly unnatural, looking more like that of a WWE wrestler than an Olympic athlete.

Perhaps this is part of the appeal. People came to the inaugural Games expecting to see mutants; this time around, mutants were not forthcoming. But as more and more people develop their own regimen at home, that boundary may begin to blur. As for the Games itself, the format will almost certainly return, iterate, expand. And once athletes have crossed the line into enhancement, there is no obvious way back to the old rules without cost — physiological, competitive, or reputational. In that sense, what happens in Vegas rarely stays in Vegas.

It’s the kind of no-nonsense language that the Democratic grassroots have been demanding in recent months. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have swung wildly against Israel, with younger Independents and Republicans also trending in the same direction. According to one poll, only Russia scored worse than Israel when it came to the negative views among young Democrats (even Iran outscored the Jewish state). 

It would seem, then, that Platner and likeminded progressive office-seekers around the country have hit upon a winning issue. But it’s one thing to adopt more Israel-critical policies in response to popular opinion — and quite another to transform the party into a singularly Israel-obsessed vehicle: one in which opposition to the Jewish state functions as the main priority, a source of factionalism, and an ideological purity test. 

That way lies marginalization, a fate not unlike that of ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Your Party in Britain. This, just when Democrats are poised to re-emerge from the political wilderness amid President Trump’s historic unpopularity and a faltering GOP majority in Congress.

The danger for Democrats doesn’t lie in the shift itself — a recalibration in America’s relationship with Israel is overdue, as voters across the spectrum are emphatically telling pollsters. The real threat, rather, is in the way an intensified focus on a single foreign-policy issue risks pulling the party off course, leaving it vulnerable to a vocal activist subset that doesn’t necessarily reflect broader public opinion on other questions. 

More from this author

Graham Platner, gentry liberal

By James Billot

Corbyn offers an instructive cautionary tale. After being expelled from Labour in 2024, the 76-year-old socialist went on to co-found a Left-wing breakaway party the following year. Your Party — the name itself was a magnet for ridicule — promised to be everything that Labour wasn’t: an unapologetically socialist outfit that would tax the rich, nationalize utilities, defend the National Health Service against privatization, and, most importantly, take a strong stance against Israel. During its first week, the party attracted hundreds of thousands of voters disillusioned by the Starmer government, as well as a former Labour member of Parliament and four independent Muslim MPs who were elected on pro-Gaza platforms. 

Yet within days, problems emerged. Before it had even officially launched, a leadership fight between Corbyn and another MP resulted in a mini-schism. What was ostensibly a disagreement over the party’s internal structure quickly spilled into a chaotic membership drive, generating as many factions as it did representatives. The bigger problem, though, was the ideological division between its MPs. Unsurprisingly, Your Party’s socially conservative Muslim MPs took a very different view on issues such as gender identity and trans participation in women’s sports, which ultimately contributed to the departure of two MPs. 

The inherent tension in the “rainbow-and-crescent” alliance of progressive activists and Muslim social conservatives is a problem for Democrats, too. Over the last few years, clashes between Muslim-American parents and local Democratic leaders over school curricula have spilled into courtrooms and onto the streets, largely driven by Muslim opposition to LGBTQ content. For the most part, however, the alliance has been held together by a shared opposition to Israel.

Similarly in Britain, Israel was the centripetal force around which Your Party’s members revolved. Or so they thought. Instead, it turned out to be another source of division. Zara Sultana, Your Party’s erstwhile co-leader, came out as strongly as an anti-Zionist, whereas Corbyn refused to use the term. The result was an ironic dynamic in which Corbyn, long one of Britain’s most prominent critics of Israel, was denounced by elements of his own movement for insufficient purity on the issue. Now, the party can barely muster enough candidates to represent it in next month’s local elections.

The United States has a different party and electoral system than Britain’s, but the parallels are clear: Left-wingers’ competitive signaling on Israel incentivizes candidates to adopt maximalist positions, alienating supporters and cannibalizing other issues in the process. In San Francisco’s House race, for example, Scott Wiener, a liberal Zionist, has faced sustained criticism from activists for refusing to describe Israel as an apartheid state or characterize its military campaign as genocide. Several debates were interrupted by pro-Palestine hecklers, which ultimately led to Wiener resigning as co-chairman of the state’s Jewish Caucus before leaving it altogether.

It made little difference. Wiener’s progressive rival, Saikat Chakrabarti — who has embraced the term “genocide” and called for a ban on both defensive and offensive weapons transfers to Israel — is within striking distance of him in the polls. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayed, who has shared a stage with Hasan Piker and talked openly about how Israel is “just as evil as Hamas,” is now tied for first in the polls to secure the party nomination. Similar dynamics have unfolded in Illinois’s and New Jersey’s special elections, too, which became as much a referendum on the Israel lobby as on any local issue.

None of this is to suggest that Democrats should maintain the status quo on Israel. Under Netanyahu, the Jewish state has become more aggressive and unrestrained in its conduct across the Middle East, not bothering with the pretense of a two-state solution. The Jewish state has rarely stopped to weigh even the costs of wielding the power of life and death — in perpetuity — over some seven million Palestinians. 

But, again, there is a difference between treating Israel as one foreign question among many, on one hand, and turning it into an ideological litmus test that supersedes everything else, on the other. This has created a purity spiral in which Democratic candidates across the country are jumping over each other to prove their pro-Palestine credentials — or at least, to ward off any hint that they are “soft” on the issue. Even Gavin Newsom, ever the tumbleweed in shifting winds of public opinion, went so far as to compare Israel to an apartheid state (a remark he later walked back). 

Suggested reading

Bibi’s ‘existential’ obsession

By Amir Tibon

One major reason for this drastic shift is the rise of independent media. As the influence of traditionally pro-Israel legacy outlets has waned, a new ecosystem of progressive streamers and online platforms has filled the space. These outlets will approvingly repost clips of, for example, Graham Platner calling the US’s relationship with Israel “shameful,” while castigating moderate Democrats for equivocating on the issue. 

For influencers and outlets like Zeteo, the Young Turks, Majority Support, and Hasan Piker, Israel is a near daily fixation (to say nothing of Tucker Carlson and other podcasters on the Right), which creates what Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran call an “availability cascade”: a self-reinforcing feedback loop, in which constant mention of an issue makes it seem more important, urgent, or widespread, thereby further increasing its visibility.

Today, the question of whether Israel is committing genocide has the same political potency (and clippability) as “what is a woman?” for progressives and “did Trump win the 2020 election?” for Republicans. In just the last week, it has been asked of former President Barack Obama all the way down to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg in the New York 12th district contest. And every podcast, speech, and special election primary in which a candidate’s position on Israel determines their standing only reinforces that dynamic at the national level. As a preview of what’s to come, earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee weighed a proposal at its spring conference to condemn the “growing influence” of money in primary elections, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee singled out in the debate; the resolution was ultimately rejected. Without any kind of counterweight in the party, expect more resolutions like these to emerge.

In Britain, Your Party’s launch was meant to signal a new moment of unity for Left-wing dissidents from the Labour mainstream. Instead, it exposed how little consensus there was beneath the surface. Democrats should be wary of repeating the same pattern. Primary season is already drifting into an anti-Israel spectacle; if that dynamic accelerates, Democrats risk a Corbyn-style implosion that hands Republicans an unforced advantage in 2028.

Deep in rural Maine, more than 100 miles away from the state’s verdant coastline, Graham Platner is holding court. In a state with one of the largest per-capita veteran populations, the Democratic Senate contender’s antiwar message carries a particular potency — and it shows. As of this writing, the 41-year-old Platner has raked in nearly $10 million in campaign money, mostly from small donors; signed up some 15,000 volunteers; and clinched endorsements from Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ruben Gallego, and Martin Heinrich — all progressive stalwarts. Even a steady drip of negative stories in recent months about his spicy Reddit history and a since-covered Nazi tattoo has barely dented him. Polls now show Platner ahead of Democratic primary rival, Gov. Janet Mills, and narrowly edging Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, in a general election matchup.

It would be tempting, then, to cast Platner as the face of a renewed Democratic Party — a working-class tribune with crossover appeal. But the more revealing question is how deep, and how broad, his support really is. For all the campaign’s talk of winning over Trump voters and bringing back the popular classes, his coalition is composed mostly of #Resistance liberals, college students, and crunchy retirees. That may be enough to win the primary, and perhaps even the general. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a durable re-realignment, or evidence that Democrats have rediscovered a winning formula for 2028.

“A lot of folks I know who voted for Donald Trump wanted an end to overseas wars,” Platner tells me in a husky voice. “But those people are beginning to realize that this was all nonsense, that they were lied to, and they were swindled. We have had tons and tons of Republicans come to these events to say just that.” 

Here in Trump-supporting Greenville, though, I couldn’t find any Republicans in our midst. Everyone I spoke to was a lifelong Democrat, their first rally likely predating Jimmy Carter. They were less worried about finding common cause with the other side than about Trump putting them in concentration camps. Others even asked Platner, hopefully, if the army might consider mutinying. “The military is not going to save you,” Platner responded. “We are the only ones who are going to save ourselves.” (A strong answer.)

More from this author

The trouble with Tucker Carlson

By James Billot

Platner likes to present himself as a gruff, no-nonsense prole who, like Cincinnatus abandoning his plow, felt compelled to enter the race by the sheer weight of national misery. After bouncing between several schools in Maine, he enlisted in the Marines in 2004 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A brief spell at George Washington University, a stint tending bar, and another War on Terror tour (this time with the private military company formerly known as Blackwater) followed before he returned home to become an oyster farmer. It was only after Democratic consultants “discovered” him — in a video for a local group opposing a Norwegian company’s plan to build a large salmon farm off his hometown of Sullivan — that he entered the political arena. 

What tends to be omitted from this narrative is that his upbringing wasn’t quite so hardscrabble. Platner’s grandfather was a renowned architect, known for his work in modernist interior design; his father, Bronson, is an Ivy-educated lawyer and Democratic donor; his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a local activist and entrepreneur runs a restaurant in Bar Harbor, which happens to be the main client for Platner’s oysters. Thanks to the family largess, he enrolled at the elite Hotchkiss School before moving to another private school six months later — a fact he tries to play down. 

Still, even some Republican operatives concede that Platner has a good story. “His introduction is quite powerful,” Steve Bannon, the podcast firebrand and ex-Trump consigliere, tells me. “He’s got an opening pitch about being in the Marine Corps. And then he’s got a punch line: ‘what was it worth?’ before getting into his populist takedown of the American ruling class.” But, Bannon adds, Platner “still carries the same cultural baggage as the rest of the Democratic Party.”

The baggage in question includes Platner’s calls for abolishing ICE and support for gender care for kids, and his dismissal of the trans-athlete debate as a “billionaire-funded distraction.” While such positions play well with the base, they remain unpopular with the state at large, which may explain why Platner is struggling to make inroads with Maine’s rural and working classes.

According to a survey of likely voters by Pan-Atlantic Research, Platner leads Janet Mills 56% to 32% among those earning more than $100,000, while the race is essentially even among those below that income threshold. The regional split mirrors that pattern: he is ahead in the more urban and affluent First District, while Mills leads in the rural, working-class Second District, which has backed Trump in the past three presidential elections. 

“I do not really trust polling in Maine, even when it says nice things about me,” says Platner. “We have a ton of just regular working folks showing up to my speeches. But I also think there is an access problem. The only way to actually go talk to working-class folks is to go talk to them in their communities, which is what we’re doing.”

To see how Platner’s message was landing in these communities, I drove an hour west to Jackman, a town 15 miles from the Canadian border. Once a hub of the cross-border timber trade, Jackman’s economy was hollowed out by global competition, accelerated by NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements. A former Democratic stronghold, the town abandoned the party during President Barack Obama’s second term and heavily backed Trump in the past three elections. If Platner wanted to make inroads with the state’s working class, this was a good place to start.

At Jackman’s town hall, Platner came with the same message he delivered in Greenville: the system is rigged, working people are being robbed, and the billionaire class is running roughshod over the social contract. It was the sort of populist messaging Trump himself might have shared 10 years ago. The trouble was that only about 10 people were in attendance. And of those, only a few were from the area (one attendee told me that she’d driven four hours to see him). By contrast, thousands had shown up to listen to Platner and Sanders in Portland, a much bluer (and admittedly more populous) city three hours’ drive to the south.

Suggested reading

Inside the Democratic identity crisis

By Ryan Zickgraf

I ask Platner to explain this disparity. “Look, it takes time,” he says. “This is a long-term project. We have to connect with these folks directly, or else you’re just this amorphous thing. And I think as the war in Iran gets worse, and as the incompetent authoritarianism of the Trump administration gets worse — because it will — that’s going to continue alienating more folks.”

This may turn out to be true. With 13 American soldiers confirmed dead and the prospect of boots on the ground growing by the day, even the most die-hard MAGA supporters could begin to waver if the conflict spirals. But that day has not arrived. The MAGA base is still standing by its man, and there is very little to suggest that that might be changing.

It might not matter. The political landscape in Maine strongly favors Democrats, making a win likely regardless of who is on the ballot. Susan Collins is the last Republican senator in a blue state that Kamala Harris carried comfortably in 2024, and she is now facing her toughest battle yet to hold on to her seat. After five terms totaling nearly three decades, the appetite for something new is strong among the Democratic grassroots, which may be enough to push the state into the blue column. As a political neophyte, Platner will likely benefit from this enthusiasm; his primary opponent, 78-year-old Mills, challenged reporters to check her “lipid profile.”

It would be easy, then, to read too much into a Platner win. But even if the oysterman looks, sounds, and campaigns like a working-class reset, his coalition suggests otherwise. I saw as much when I visited the Four Seasons diner in Jackman, one block from the town hall, where a Platner ad flickered on the TV. “I know what it feels like to give everything to this country,” one veteran says, “and come home to feel like it’s giving nothing back,” adds another, before the shot cuts to Platner in fatigues. “Graham Platner knows that feeling, too,” the voiceover concludes.

I turn to the man beside me, who works at the logging-mill down the road, and ask what he thought. “Who’s that?” he grunted.

If that seems like a strange curtain-raiser to the world’s most popular sporting event, it reflects a wider problem: wars overseas and immigration enforcement at home are threatening to overshadow the tournament. Already, fears are growing that ICE will try to flex its muscle during the tournament, with 78 out of 104 games taking place in the US. Add to that the problem of cartel violence in Mexico, another host nation, and this World Cup starts to look less like a football tournament than a theater of geopolitical unrest.

This is the liberal nightmare, or conservative fantasy, of what Trump’s “MAGA” World Cup might look like. Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the United States’s founding, the World Cup is — in Trump’s view — a free publicity hit. He wants as many eyeballs as possible, using the tournament as a vehicle to promote America — and himself. What could be more Trumpian than that?

More from this author

The trouble with Tucker Carlson

By James Billot

Trump has long coveted the World Cup. During his first term, he claimed it took just “one call” for him to take personal charge of the US bid. “When I heard ‘World Cup,’” he said in 2018, “I wanted to do it.” Evidently, he was sold on Fifa’s (slightly dubious) claims that the tournament would create around 185,000 jobs and generate more than $5 billion in economic activity. Then there are the eyeballs. Whereas this year’s Super Bowl drew about 125 million viewers, the 2022 World Cup final had around 1.6 billion. That realization dawned on Trump when Fifa President Gianni Infantino told him last year that the number of tickets on sale were “like three Super Bowls every day for one month”. “I love what he said — three Super Bowls a day for a month,” Trump responded. “That’s what it is. It’s amazing when you think about it, I’d never heard that expression. That’s a lot.”

Unlike other Trump-aligned sports, such as MMA, NFL, and boxing, football isn’t classically MAGA. It’s inherently globalist, with over 211 national associations united under the rule-making aegis of a transnational governing body based in Switzerland. A record 48 of those national associations will compete in this World Cup. Team USA is unlikely to win, but an America First president can still take a certain satisfaction from giving this distinctly un-American sport a patriotic makeover. The makeover will include mooted “freedom” trailer-trucks in America’s host cities, all gleaming chrome and fluttering flags, as well as a Great American State Fair on the National Mall that will “celebrate America’s exceptional history and culture”. 

“There’s going to be a ton of patriotism at this tournament,” Andrew Giuliani, head of the White House Fifa task force and son of Rudy, tells me. “Some people want to politicize patriotism, but it should be apolitical.” Giuliani does not expand on who these people are, but it is difficult to imagine Trump, who has a long-standing habit of blending politics with otherwise apolitical traditions, choosing the World Cup as the one venue in which he nobly eschews partisan politics. More likely is that the president does the opposite. At one end of the spectrum, he might wear a red MAGA cap at the opening ceremony. At the other, he might do something as radical as relocating games from cities he deems to be unsafe — an action he has already threatened to take.

Those in Trump’s orbit are divided on the question of politicizing sporting events: Giuliani is one of several officials who want to frame the World Cup around American pride, while others see the tournament as a stage on which to advance the MAGA agenda in full view of the public. This second camp is exemplified by the likes of Corey Lewandowski, an aide to the Secretary of Homeland Security, and JD Vance. They see big sporting events like these as an opportunity to enforce, rather than shy away from, the MAGA agenda, particularly in relation to immigration enforcement. On the eve of the Super Bowl, for example, Lewandowski warned: “There is nowhere that you can provide safe haven to people in this country illegally. Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else. We will find you. We will apprehend you. We will put you in a detention facility, and we will deport you.” Meanwhile, JD Vance struck a similar note about the World Cup. “Everybody is welcome to come and see this incredible event,” he said. “But when the time is up, they’ll have to go home.” It is a stark contrast from one of the catchphrases of the London 2012 opening ceremony: “This is for everyone”.

Still, in the aftermath of the Minnesota crisis — where a federal immigration enforcement surge sparked protests and multiple fatal encounters involving ICE agents — the White House understands that any overt shows of force, such as dramatic deportations or arrests during a global tournament, would distract from Trump’s starring role as master of ceremonies. Besides, out of any MAGA figure, it is the president himself who has historically been the most willing to relax border control in favor of visiting athletes. As part of the US bid for hosting the tournament in 2018, the president signed a letter that promised “all eligible athletes, officials, and fans from all countries around the world would be able to enter the United States without discrimination”. That even applied to several Muslim-majority countries whose citizens were banned from entering at the time. And last year, when the White House announced a ban on travelers from 19 countries, the president added a specific carveout for international athletes, coaches and support staff attending the World Cup, Olympics — which Los Angeles will host in 2028 — and other high-profile sporting competitions. 

But not all tourists are treated equally. The president’s travel ban carveout does not apply to fans, meaning that Iran, Haiti, Senegal and Ivory Coast face playing without support. The White House might provide an additional carveout for Senegal and Ivory Coast, but the outlook is less rosy for Iran and Haiti 

Even Iran’s footballers might not make it to the tournament. As the war continues, Fifa declared that it will “monitor developments” while Giuliani, more belligerently, posted on X: “The largest state sponsor of terrorism in my lifetime is dead… We’ll deal with soccer games tomorrow — tonight, we celebrate their opportunity for freedom.” Trump, in his own inimitable style, simply said that he doesn’t “really care” if Iran plays or not.

With China, Russia and potentially Iran absent, there will be an almost Roman quality to this year’s World Cup. The emperor’s enemies have been vanquished or sidelined, leaving Trump to bask in the glory. And when the masses tune in for the final, it will be Trump standing on the dais, crowning the victors. 

The question is whether he will stop there. If last year’s Club World Cup in New York is anything to go by, it would seem unlikely. When Chelsea players collected winners’ medals from Trump — after he pocketed one himself — captain Reece James stood ready to lift the trophy. Only then did he notice that the president was still standing next to him, explaining that he wanted to celebrate with the team. So there Trump stood, huddled among a sea of blue kits in his crimson tie, clapping along as if he himself had guided the team to victory. “I didn’t know he was going to be on the stand when we lifted the trophy, so I was a bit confused,” said one player. 

But Trump stands to gain more from the tournament than a gold medal. Since 2018, when, in his first term, the president led the US bid to host the 2026 event, he has developed a close relationship with Infantino, whom he affectionately calls “Johnny”. No world leader has visited the White House as many times as the Fifa president this year, and, at times, the line between personal and professional has appeared blurry. 

Their dynamic, however, is a curious one. When the pair is together, Infantino behaves more like an anxiously deferential maître d’ than one of the most powerful men in sport. At the Oval Office, the Swiss can often be seen nervously hovering behind Trump, smiling unctuously as he watches the president open his latest gifts, ranging from personalized football jerseys to made-up trophies. 

In another move designed to please Trump, Fifa set up a New York headquarters inside Trump Tower, meaning that the footballing body is effectively paying commercial rent to the Trump Organization. Infantino defended the decision by claiming that “Fifa [is] a global organization [and] to be global you have to be local, you have to be everywhere, so we have to be in New York.” 

It would seem that this logic applies to Florida too, where Infantino has made multiple trips to Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this year, for example, the Fifa President was at Trump’s Florida residence to promote plans for a digital currency, dubbed “FIFACoin”. It just so happened that the event was hosted by World Liberty International, a Trump-backed crypto platform, which has faced serious allegations of corruption. Were “FIFACoin” to take off, any kind of deal with Fifa would be highly lucrative — perhaps even for the Trump-linked crypto business. 

Clearly, Infantino understands better than most than the key to Trump’s heart is deference, not defiance. Which may explain why he has a habit of popping up at events that don’t bear any obvious connection to Fifa. Last year, for example, he accompanied Trump on his Middle Eastern tour, which resulted in the Fifa president arriving late to his own organization’s annual meeting. And just last week, he was spotted giggling in a red MAGA hat at a Board of Peace summit on Gaza’s reconstruction.

These appearances are not just photo-ops. Infantino’s Middle Eastern ties — particularly as they intersect with Trump — run deep. Indeed, they played a significant part in helping the US secure the 2026 World Cup bid. After all, it was Trump’s son-in-law and sometime Middle East emissary, Jared Kushner, who courted support from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, helping secure Saudi backing for the bid. Later, his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, attracted billions in capital from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, and Abu Dhabi investors. That confluence of interests means that World Cup‑related engagements could create valuable opportunities with Saudi and Qatari officials whose funds have become key backers of Kushner’s business ventures.

Suggested Reading

The triumph of Brexitball

By Jonathan Wilson

The tournament offers more direct financial benefits too. For Trump’s hotels in host cities such as New York and Miami, the World Cup promises to be a windfall. Room prices at the Trump International Beach resort in Miami jump from $361 per night on 10 June to an average of $662 when the tournament starts. That is, until the final week of the tournament, where average room prices rise to $703 per night. One day after the final, prices almost halve to $361 the following week. It is a similar story with Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York.

There is, of course, nothing nefarious about this: all hotel prices are expected to rise during the tournament. But if Trump follows through on his threat to move games from cities he deems unsafe, will he really target the cities in which he has hospitality venues? “It’s highly unlikely that he is going to move locations,” one Fifa employee claimed. “The level of preparation involved makes that unnecessary. There will, of course, be a security presence, but that is standard for any major sporting event.”

There is no question there will be a significant security presence at this year’s tournament. With an estimated 10 million visitors expected to travel to the United States, that much is inevitable. Yet security is only one part of the spectacle. This tournament will be a carnival. But it will be Donald Trump’s carnival, not Fifa’s.

There is no greater purveyor of “actually” and its new meaning than Tucker Carlson. Tune into any one of his podcasts, interviews or speeches and the adverb’s all-encompassing power is on full display. “Damn you, actually”; “He is evil, actually”; “Who is actually for open borders?”; “If there’s one lesson in American politics, it’s that people in charge lie, actually, they do!”

People in charge do lie, actually. And for many years, Carlson made a career of holding these people to account. His incisive psycho-portrait of George W. Bush as a cavalier, even callous, governor raised early alarm bells about his presidency. His puckish profile of James Carville exposed the lavish lifestyle of a man who claimed to speak for America’s downtrodden. And even in his Fox News days, his grilling of Senator Lindsey Graham over US bomb strikes in Syria gave voice to Republicans and Democrats who were skeptical about further military intervention in the Middle East.

But since leaving Fox in 2023 and starting one of the world’s most popular podcasts, such interviews have grown few and far between. In their place has emerged a far more questionable roster of guests: from Vladimir Putin to a Nazi-curious Groyper, to a former crack addict claiming to have slept with Barack Obama. To Carlson’s supporters, these guests merely signal a willingness to go where others will not. For others, including his former friends and colleagues, it prompts a basic question: what the hell happened to Tucker?

A new book by New Yorker writer Jason Zengerle attempts to answer this question. The aptly named Hated by all the Right People is neither a hit piece nor a hagiography; it is a chronology of Carlson’s ascent and descent, drawing on interviews with those who knew or worked with him. It traces the transformation of a talented young writer into what Zengerle describes as a “noxious talking head”.

Once a fledgling journalist at The Weekly Standard, Carlson soon became CNN’s youngest-ever anchor, later hosting shows at MSNBC, co-founding the Right-leaning news site Daily Caller and rising to become the most-watched host in Fox News history. He has lived many lives and yet in each one, traces of the new Tucker can be found in the old: ideological flexibility, a penchant for provocative ideas, and, above all, a desire to entertain.

As a young writer, Carlson’s stories were eclectic: a weekend with spud gun aficionados, reflections on British colonial architecture, and a trip to war-ravaged Liberia with Cornel West and Al Sharpton. They were nearly all humorous and perceptive, so much so that even Christopher Hitchens was a fan. But compared with today’s darker, more conspiratorial output, they seem almost unrecognizable. In the past month, his podcast has published episodes such as “the demonic rituals to replicate God”, “Diddy, demons and the antichrist”, and “Why are you gay?” (also featuring demons).

How can we make sense of the spud-to-demon pivot? As the book intimates, part of the answer lies in Carlson’s transition from print journalism to broadcast in the early 2000s. In print, ambiguity was an asset: euphemism, color, and nuance were the alchemy of magazine writing. Broadcast punditry rewarded the opposite. “One benefit of hosting a talk show is that it forces you to take a position on virtually everything that happens in the news,” Carlson once said. “That’s also the downside… From ‘complicated’, it’s a short trip to ‘nuanced’. Nuance, needless to say, is the enemy of clear debate.”

He discovered this truth the hard way. Installed as the conservative foil on CNN’s political debate program Crossfire, he was paired with a liberal cohost, the two trading rehearsed blows on the controversies of the day. Then Jon Stewart came. Appearing as a guest in 2004, the Daily Show host humiliated Carlson and his cohost, claiming they were “hurting America”. Turning directly to Carlson, Stewart mocked his bow tie, called him a “dick”, and dismissed the show as performance politics masquerading as journalism. The encounter quickly went viral (by 2004 standards) and Crossfire was canceled soon after.

Although Carlson went on to host another show, this time at MSNBC, the Crossfire episode left its mark. The bow tie (eventually) disappeared and so did his television career, at least for a few years. What stung most, though, was not Stewart’s mockery, but the realization that he was right: Crossfire was combative by design, and it forced Carlson to defend conservative positions he didn’t necessarily agree with.

As Zengerle writes, Carlson’s conservative politics were a direct reaction to the “weird, wild, and woolly hyperliberalism of 1970s California” that he grew up in. But his conservatism was more instinctive than ideological or academic (he flunked most of his classes anyway). There were no Buckley-esque disquisitions on the collectivist nature of higher education or Charlie Kirk-style debating tours. Instead, he preferred to play the troll: when liberal students at Trinity College protested a CIA recruiting event, Carlson scrawled “WELCOME CIA” onto a bedsheet and hung it from his dorm-room window. When he was invited by the protesters to make the case for the CIA, he took to the stage and said: “I think you’re all a bunch of greasy chicken fuckers,” before walking off.

As Carlson confessed in 2011, he was never particularly ideological: “my politics are so complicated I don’t even understand my own politics a lot of the time” — a disposition that helps to explain why he ricocheted across nearly every corner of conservative thought over the past 25 years. When he joined the Weekly Standard in the late Nineties, he was a self-described “Episcopalian neocon”. Then, after the 2001 Iraq invasion, which Carlson initially supported, he moved in a libertarian direction (ably supplementing his income as a fellow at the Cato Institute). Now, he is the country’s foremost national-populist, criticizing America’s cultural decay, forever wars, and mass migration on his podcast.

In some ways, his evolution on these issues reflects the Right’s own realignment from Bush-era conservatism to Trumpian populism. In the early 2000s, the bow-tied Carlson was a cipher for the median Republican voter: an Iraq war-supporting WASP who largely believed in free trade, tax cuts and deregulation. But as the Right moved in a more populist direction under Trump, so did Carlson. In the online parlance, he became “red-pilled”. “He is now like a mini version of Steve Bannon,” a longtime acquaintance of Carlson’s told me. “He’s an ultra non-interventionist. He doesn’t want us involved in any foreign wars, including Venezuela and Greenland.”

According to Ross Douthat, Carlson developed a “deep distrust of all institutions” that was “a transformation of mentality as much as substance” — like many on the Right. Events such as Russiagate, Covid, and the border crisis cultivated a feeling in Carlson that the ruling class was not merely negligent or incompetent, but actively “evil”. This explains why, in a recent episode of his podcast with Matt Gaetz, he asserted with absolute conviction that soldiers were being deployed to the Middle East only to die for the US government and provoke a war on its behalf.

While Douthat’s theory of Carlson’s ideological evolution may be true, it overlooks baser considerations. Following the Crossfire humiliation, Carlson took a simpler lesson from his clash with Stewart: arguments matter less than popularity. In Carlson’s mind, Stewart only “won” their debate because he was more popular. “I didn’t lose that debate,” he later said. “I thought his argument was stupid, but the more popular guy wins… He won because he’s more popular than I am.”

But for Tucker to win, he had to be popular first. After a failed stint on Dancing with the Stars in 2006 (he was knocked out in the first round) and the founding of the Daily Caller, Carlson joined Fox News in 2009. Beginning as a substitute host for Bret Baier and Sean Hannity, he ended the 2010s as the network’s most popular news host in cable TV history. “Tucker covered some really weird shit at Fox,” one former colleague told me. “But his audience loved it, which meant Fox loved it.”

This “weird shit” included a documentary on testicle-tanning, a segment on the sex life of pandas, and a special on cattle mutilations. It also featured attacks on his own party alongside praise for liberals such as Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Tucker was his own island at Fox,” a former Fox employee told me. “He had his own team and they were very tight-lipped about what they were going to talk about on the show,” she said. “No one else at Fox would have any idea.” That culture of secrecy extended to fellow Fox hosts too, which occasionally resulted in clashes on air. When Carlson criticized then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for adding $13 billion to his fortune during Covid, Sean Hannity responded: “People can make money. They provide goods and services people want, need and desire. That’s America.”

These attacks helped to crystallize Carlson’s new persona: the preppy populist in a gingham shirt and repp tie, happily scolding elites on both sides of the aisle. But beneath the political posturing, he knew that his primary role was to entertain. Whether ululating in a high-pitched voice or staring at guests with bovine incomprehension, Carlson perfected what Charles Pierce called authentic artificiality, crafting a sarcastic, excitable persona.

Behind the easygoing façade, however, Carlson was monomaniacally focused on ratings. Unlike other cable news networks, Fox tracked viewership minute by minute, allowing hosts to see precisely how each guest or segment performed — a system he monitored closely. If a segment performed poorly or a guest overstayed their welcome, he would bristle with anger. In 2017, after learning that a guest had run long, Carlson screamed “Fuck!” in front of a visiting New Yorker writer. “Ratings at Fox are everything,” said the insider. “He would have felt that.”

That obsession didn’t end when he left Fox. If anything, it has grown stronger. Running his own podcast, unconstrained by network guardrails, and knowing what feeds the beast, Carlson burrows ever deeper into rabbit holes about who did 9/11, whether Brigitte Macron is a man, and the rise of globalist death cults — all the while raking in millions of views and lucrative sponsorships, from MyPillow to telemedicine services for pets. At the same time, he became a staunch critic of Israel (and a big fan of Qatar), flitting between legitimate criticisms of the Jewish state to more unsettling rhetoric. As well as welcoming a Holocaust denier on the show, Carlson references men “eating hummus”, Putin “kicking money changers out of the temple”, and professes a greater hatred for Christian Zionists than Nazis and jihadists.

None of these remarks individually meet the threshold of antisemitism, but each one nudges closer to the precipice. Just this week, for example, Carlson claimed that there has never been a real antisemitic movement in America — a plainly ahistorical statement that ignores events like Charlottesville in 2017, when demonstrators chanted “Jews will not replace us!” as well as the existence of groups like the National Alliance, Aryan Nations, and the KKK in the 20th century.

To his fans, Carlson is “just asking questions”, but this framing masks the cumulative effect of his commentary. By repeatedly raising topics related to Israel and, by extension, the Jews, his questions take on a rhetorical weight that goes beyond curiosity. Indeed, this was precisely what he criticised Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative founder of the American Conservative magazine, for. “It’s this kind of relentless bringing up of topics related to Judaism,” Carlson noted in 1999: “I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah!”

Unlike Buchanan, Carlson has — at least publicly — not expressed an interest in running for office. If he did, there is every chance that he would perform well. All the raw materials are there: high name recognition, a huge platform, and a keen understanding of how Washington works. “If he wanted to, Tucker could easily scoop the GOP nomination in ’28,” said one acquaintance. “The base loves him.” What kind of candidate might emerge then? A MAGA-style isolationist or something new? For the first time in his life, he would be responsible for answering the very questions he has spent his career asking. That might be the most dangerous proposition yet, actually.

Back in 2024, the President’s gains in neighborhoods like Corona were widely taken as evidence of a new Republican coalition: multi-racial, working-class and culturally conservative. But with Mamdani’s victory, that coalition appears to be under threat. For not only did these voters abandon the Republicans, they spurned the moderate choice, Andrew Cuomo, too. In fact, Mamdani made significant inroads with the very electorate that propelled Trump to victory just 12 months ago. 

There were an estimated 60,000 New Yorkers who voted for Trump and Mamdani. In a city of eight million, that may not seem like much, but they exemplify a broader trend across the country. As this month’s special elections showed, America’s non-white population is becoming ideologically promiscuous, flitting between both major parties, and shedding long-standing partisan loyalties in the process. When I visited some of the neighborhoods where the Trump-Mamdani swing was most pronounced, the overall message was clear: the status quo was not working. With next year’s midterms looming, this restless, unpredictable bloc could prove decisive in shaping the balance of power in Washington.

Here in New York, sandwiched between La Guardia airport and the Mets’ baseball ground, Citi Field, is Corona, one of the most Hispanic corners of the city. Next to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the streets are lined with vendors selling roasted corn, fresh tamales, mangoes, and empanadas. The residents, mostly first- or second-generation immigrants from Latin America, are blue-collar, Catholic and entrepreneurial, with many working two jobs, or sometimes three. 

More from this author

Laura Loomer: Trump’s muckraker-in-chief

By James Billot

In 2024, Trump won six election districts here (up from zero), and made double-digit percentage point gains in dozens of others nearby. It was the best performance of any Republican nominee in Gotham since 1988, fueled by anger over rising grocery prices, the cost of living, and declining public safety. But within a year, voters turned away from the 79-year-old, two-term president and voted for the 34-year-old newcomer Mamdani instead.

“Trump brought too much chaos, man,” says Ramon*, whom I met outside the Guatemalteca Deli on Roosevelt Avenue. “My bills are still high and my wife can’t afford no groceries.” A part-time car mechanic by day and cleaner at the new JP Morgan office by night, Ramon says that he voted for Trump in 2024 because he thought he’d bring down the price of gas and groceries, but “that ain’t happened”. “I don’t know if Mamdani’s going to make things better or worse,” he said, “but we need something different from this.”

The despair felt by Ramon wasn’t confined to Roosevelt Avenue. Ten minutes north of Corona lies East Elmhurst, another Queens neighborhood that saw a similar Trump-to-Mamdani swing. Unlike Corona, there is no subway line here, and the Manhattan skyline barely pokes out in the distance. At the local park, I spoke with Carlos de Cruz, who told me that he didn’t vote this month, but said that many of his friends followed Ramon’s lead. “They wanted something different with Trump,” he said. “Now they’re angry with him because the prices are still high. The ICE stuff is scary. Now they think Mamdani will bring something different.”

Mamdani certainly is bringing something different. He has promised free buses, free universal childcare, public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, and a rent freeze for roughly one million rent-stabilized units in the city. It’s a platform that jives well with New York’s “commie corridor”, which stretches from northwest Queens down through Brooklyn, but it took longer for the city’s outer boroughs to warm up to it. When Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, he did so without much support from the city’s immigrant and working-class communities. But by the mayoral election this month, he built a rainbow coalition of Muslim, black, and Hispanic voters as well as renters and progressives. 

Suggested reading

The war on America’s radicals

By B. Duncan Moench

Bronx local Yahay Obeid is a new member of this rainbow coalition. A two-time Trump voter, the air traffic controller was so “disgusted” by the racism he saw on the Right that he ended up voting for him. “There are a lot of people like me who are not socialists,” he said. “They are moderates who found the racial slurs and racist bigotry so disgusting and disturbing that they decided to vote for Mamdani.” Then why, I ask, not vote for Cuomo? “Cuomo shut down houses of worship during Covid and I’ll never forgive him for that.”

Obeid, the director of the Bronx Muslim Center, is a practicing Muslim. He admitted that many in his community had reservations about Mamdani, particularly over his liberal positions on prostitution and public safety. Previous statements including “defund the police” and describing the NYPD as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” had unnerved his members. That was, until, Mamdani met with them on several occasions to assuage their concerns. “We were getting backlash that he wanted to legalize prostitution,” Obeid said. “But he told us that was DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) policy, not his. We also asked him about defunding the police, but he said that he’s not looking to cut down on police and that he’s keeping the same police commissioner, so that changed the mood in the room.”

In 2024, Trump claimed roughly 30% of the Muslim vote nationally. But in this month’s election, Mamdani secured around nine out of every 10 of New York’s Muslim votes. He did this by leaning into his Islamic identity, producing campaign videos in Urdu and Bangla, and fusing it with an economically populist message. In one of his earliest (and most popular) campaign videos, for example, he railed against “Halalflation”, a nod to rising street‑food prices, which quickly spread through WhatsApp groups and local mosque networks. 

“Mamdani understands the difference between ethnic politics and identity politics,” said Renu Mukherjee, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “There was no grievance — he just immersed himself in various local cultures, which Cuomo completely failed to do.” That was evident when Mamdani took the unusual step, for a non-Latino candidate, of releasing a full Spanish-language ad. And it was evident when I visited Jamaica Hill, central Queens, where stray Mamdani flyers in Bangla fluttered past bridal shops selling affordable saris and sherwanis.

Last year, Jamaica Hill swung nearly 25 points toward the GOP last year, only to flip to Mamdani by an even larger margin. In several districts, he captured more than 70% of the vote, highlighting the success of his outreach campaign. But there was also something simpler at work: many voters saw him as one of their own, a sense that only deepened as Right-wing attacks intensified. In one notorious case, Mamdani was attacked online for eating rice with his hands, with one GOP Congressman telling him to “go back to the Third World”. Except when I stopped for lunch at Khalil Biriyani House, at least half of the customers were doing the same. 

Clearly, he was more in step with the neighborhood than his critics were. New York has long had a large foreign-born population, but unlike other multicultural cities such as London, it is far less assimilationist. Here, many immigrant communities remain distinct, as evidenced by the 40+ ethnic enclaves across the city. Harlem has “Le Petit Senegal”; Queens has “Little Manila”; and in the Bronx, where Obeid lives, there is a little Yemen. In recent years, however, assimilation has slowed further, driven in part by the arrival of new immigrant groups, such as Bangladeshis. In the Jamaica district, where the South Asian population has exploded, new arrivals have brought cultural habits from their countries of origin — such as eating rice with hands — which Mamdani himself mirrored.

The interesting question this all poses is whether Mamdani’s brand of ethnic politics can lay a template for Democrats elsewhere. Despite his campaign’s strengths, it was also clear that a strong anti-incumbent feeling drove many New Yorkers to “vote blue no matter who”. Fear and fury over high grocery prices, a needlessly showy deportations campaign, and cuts to Medicaid and SNAP have turned voters against Trump. “There was definitely an anti-Trump backlash in some of these neighborhoods,” said Michael Lange, author of the Narrative Wars Substack. “If Kamala Harris and Trump reran this year, Trump isn’t winning neighborhoods like North Corona or others in Queens.”

But Democrats have also found limited success running as the perma-scandalized anti-Trump party, a strategy that minority communities, as 2024 demonstrated, do not respond well to. As a result, these voters — who are more pragmatic than ideological — remain up for grabs, which helps explain why some of the biggest shifts in these special elections occurred among the country’s non-white population. For example, New Jersey’s two counties with the biggest moves towards Democrats had the largest concentrations of Hispanics. Meanwhile in Virginia, Hispanic and Asian voters swung 20 and 42 points, respectively, towards the Democratic governor’s candidate compared with the 2024 presidential election. Taken together, these results show that non-white voters are far from a captive electorate.

This presents a problem — and opportunity — for both parties. Over the past decade, Democrats have become whiter, wealthier, and more college-educated, increasingly oriented toward suburban and professional constituencies. That shift has alienated the non-white, working-class voters who once formed the backbone of the party’s coalition. But as shown by the election successes of Mamdani, Mikie Sherill (New Jersey’s governor-elect) and Abigail Spanberger (Virginia’s governor-elect), a renewed focus on affordability can at least work some way towards restoring some of that lost trust.

Mamdani’s focus on economic, rather than cultural, grievances was a vindication of this strategy. In the early 2020s, the then Queens assemblyman’s views were a grab-bag of BLM politics: Covid maximalism, defunding the police, ending capitalism, and promoting racial identitarianism. By contrast, his campaign focused on New York’s cost of living crisis and extending an olive branch to Trump voters. Similarly in Virginia, more than half of all the GOP’s political ads were about trans issues, which did not strike a chord with voters struggling to pay their electricity bills.

For Trump and the Republicans, the warning is just as stark. The same results show that they do not have as strong a grip on these voters as once thought. With the midterms less than a year away, any overreliance on Trump’s prior popularity risks undoing the gains Republicans made with Latino and Asian communities. In states such as Texas, where Republican gerrymandering relied heavily on Trump-era support among Latino voters, at least two seats may now be in jeopardy. Given that Latino voters are more likely than any other ethnic group to cite the economy as their top concern, improving the health of the economy has to become a central focus of the Trump administration.

Next year’s elections, then, could shape up to be the most unpredictable yet. With a strong anti-incumbent sentiment spreading across the country, Democrats are well placed to capitalize on this voter disaffection. But if there’s one thing this party excels at, it’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Should Mamdani fail to deliver on any of his ambitious promises, it could tarnish the Democratic brand for years. If public safety deteriorates or cost-of-living pressures rise, New York’s new mayor will become the embodiment of Democratic urban failure, a cautionary symbol for voters nationwide.

More broadly, the Trump-Mamdani overlap illustrates a wider trend: that American politics is becoming increasingly volatile, localized, and issue-driven, rather than strictly tribal. This shift is especially evident among immigrant populations, who lack the same kind of tribal loyalty to parties often found among white voters. The constant cycling between Democrats and Republicans suggests that there is now a widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, creating a fertile political terrain for insurgent candidates like Mamdani. 

Crucially, Mamdani represents the beginning, not the end, of this insurgency. In other blue cities, progressives and socialists are gaining ground, with New York’s mayor-elect serving as a blueprint for their campaigns. But the lessons of the early 2020s should not be forgotten: veer too far into cultural politics and you risk alienating the very voters who put you in office. It was, after all, the former cop and moderate Eric Adams who replaced the progressive mayor Bill de Blasio in New York’s last mayoral election.

At a state and federal level, voters have shown they are willing to buck party allegiances if there is something new on the table. Paradoxically, they are voting for change in the hope of returning to some semblance of normality. As Ramon succinctly put it: “The world is crazy right now… I just want to get on with my life.”

*Ramon’s name was changed 

This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, would thrive. Buildings rarely exceed three stories, and the streets are lined with repair garages, laundromats, and mid-price food stores. It’s more blue-collar, Catholic, and Trumpy than the rest of the city, where Latino immigrants mix with older white-ethnic families with surnames like Temkin and Kowalski. 

In his trademark red beret and a crisp blue suit, Sliwa looks rather tame compared to those standing next to him: a KFC chicken, two baby dinosaurs, one ghost, and several Minions. In some ways, though, the scene is the perfect encapsulation of his campaign: comical, attention-grabbing, even endearing, — but fundamentally unserious. Even so, to dismiss his bid as a sideshow ignores the very real effect he has had on this race. 

Crucially, he has thrust issues like subway safety and public order into the spotlight, giving voice to outer-borough New Yorkers disillusioned by the choice between a socialist newcomer and a disgraced former governor. And by rebuffing former mayors, hedge-fund billionaires, and establishment Democrats who have been calling on him to step aside, he’s also exposed the anti-democratic maneuverings of the city’s elites, winning him respect on both sides of the aisle. 

Critics argue that by refusing to drop out, Sliwa has paved the way for New York’s first socialist mayor. But as I trailed Sliwa last weekend — from the GOP’s HQ in deep Staten Island to Greenwich Village, Manhattan, and then Astoria, Queens — many of the people I spoke with had no intention of backing either Cuomo or Mamdani, regardless of whether Sliwa remained on the ticket. Few said that they could bring themselves to vote for a governor who supported cashless bail, took away qualified immunity for cops, and undercounted nursing-home deaths during the pandemic. For them, it’s Sliwa or nothing.

“I have the same net favorability as Barack Obama,” Sliwa tells me after the Halloween parade. “Obama was loved by Democrats — and I’m loved in New York.” At six feet, the square-jawed 71-year-old still cuts an imposing figure, even if the costumed children playing nearby somewhat undermine that image.

“I’ve been shot, stabbed, and beaten on these streets, but the people love me,” he adds. “It’s like the TV program Everybody Loves Raymond, except it’s called Everybody Loves Curtis.” 

Suggested article

Why Gotham’s bad old days are back

By Michael Alcazar

A lot of people do love Curtis — and have done for many decades. Sliwa first caught the public eye in 1970, when, as a 16-year-old paperboy delivering the Daily News to his neighbors in Brooklyn, he spotted a building on fire. Without hesitation, he rushed inside and rescued several people, a feat that earned him an “International Newspaperboy” award — and even a visit to the White House. 

That early brush with heroism gave Sliwa his first taste of public adoration and a lasting commitment to civic engagement, which eventually led him to establish the Guardian Angels at age 23. The group, originally known as the “Magnificent 13,” was formed in response to New York City’s soaring murder and crime rates in the 1970s. They would patrol the subways to promote public safety, acting as unarmed civilian watchdogs to prevent crime.

They didn’t have much of an impact on the city’s crime levels, but their distinctive red berets and bomber jackets provided a sense of security to New Yorkers. Then-Gov. Mario Cuomo was a fan, remarking at the time that the Guardian Angels were a “better expression of morality than our city deserves” — a comment his son may not appreciate today.  

Members of the group, mostly Latino and African-American, were unarmed but trained in karate. Sometimes, however, the bigger threat came not from would-be criminals, but the police. NYPD officers didn’t take kindly to these wannabe-cops patrolling their streets, and often there were clashes between the two groups. In 1981, a police officer fatally shot a Guardian Angel after mistakenly seeing a threat in him unzipping his jacket to show the group’s emblem. 

Yet nothing did quite as much to damage the group’s credibility as when the founder, Sliwa, confessed that many of the Guardians’ tales of heroism proved to be untrue. “I was wrong, but we were in a sprint for survival,” Sliwa claimed in 1992. “We were just little people trying to get recognition for doing good work. In a sense it was like being Don Quixote.” The Guardian Angels are still around, but their visibility has waned since those reputational hits.

Sliwa’s supporters remember those days fondly. It’s the reason so many of them support him now. “He protected the people when the city wouldn’t do anything,” said one Glendale resident. “His heart has always been in the right place.” Even in deep-blue Manhattan, Sliwa was treated more like a beloved court jester than a political enemy. “I don’t support Sliwa or any of his policies,” said one resident. “But he is entertaining.”

Sliwa acknowledges that the “love” he gets hasn’t yet turned into votes. The latest RealClearPolitics poll of polls has him at 17% — the lowest vote share of any Republican mayoral nominee in 40 years — and nearly 20 points behind Mamdani in first place. “There is fear and fright hanging over this election,” he says in his gruff Brooklyn accent. “This is the most dystopian election I’ve ever seen. … Cuomo’s an angry curmudgeon predicting the end of the world, which guilts people into voting for him.” 

This race is Sliwa’s second bite at the cherry. In 2021, Eric Adams, a former cop and a Democrat, trounced him by nearly half a million votes. Dogged by corruption allegations, Adams has dropped out and endorsed Cuomo. Pressure on Sliwa to follow suit has come from the soon-to-be-former-mayor, billionaires like Bill Ackman and John Katsimatides, several local newspapers, and Cuomo himself.

Sliwa has — thus far — refused to back down, saying that he would only exit the race if “they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under.” In Sliwa’s mind, he is a Republican standing on the Republican ticket. If anyone should drop out, it should be Cuomo, who, after all, lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani and chose to run as an independent. “Cuomo would put the last nail in the coffin of New York City like he did in destroying New York state,” he tells me. “Then he fled, fearing impeachment from his own Democrats, and then hung out with his billionaire friends in the Hamptons until he decided to somehow revive his career by trying to be mayor.”

Nevertheless, if Sliwa were to drop out, his chunk of votes might put Cuomo within striking distance of Mamdani, who is running a campaign far to the Left of either candidate. Public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, universal childcare, and free public buses make Mamdani’s proposals more radical than either Cuomo’s or Sliwa’s — but the need to save Cuomo doesn’t seem to trouble the Republican’s supporters. “He’s a lifelong New Yorker; he lives, breathes, and loves New York,” says Richard Huber, a Queens local. “Choosing between Cuomo and Mamdani is like choosing between cyanide and death by hanging.”

More From This Author

Will New York abandon the Democrats?

By James Billot

To his detractors, though, this stubbornness is vintage Sliwa, a character streak (or flaw) that has stuck with him since high school. Even then, he clashed with authority: he was expelled from Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit school, for refusing to fulfill the school’s jacket-and-tie requirement. He then dropped out of his next school, Canarsie High School, because all the kids were “doing acid and smoking reefer.”  

In adult life, this intractability has led to more serious, nearly lethal, consequences. During his career as a popular New York radio host in the 1980s and ’90s, Sliwa regularly attacked mobsters like John Gotti, who went to trial for charges including racketeering and murder in 1992. After Gotti’s conviction, three men jumped Sliwa outside his apartment, breaking his wrist and elbow. The next morning, he was back on air, adding Gotti’s son to his list of polemical targets. 

But that meant the next punishment was more severe: two months later, he climbed into a cab near his home — only for a gunman to spring from the front seat and shoot him in the groin and legs. Sliwa hurled himself out the window of the moving car, later recalling the sting of “pebbles shooting into my face off the tires.” Compared to that, Sliwa tells me, “a mayoral race ain’t so bad.”

When the cameras are off, Sliwa seems frail. His head swivels like a restless figurine, and his hands tremble. A sharp tan line from his beret cuts across his forehead, lending it a weathered, sun-beaten look. All this was on view moments before Sliwa appeared on stage at the GOP Staten Island rally. But once the show started, the radio persona emerged. “Cuomo’s like the grim reaper — he’s so cold-hearted,” he warned. “He’s a dirtbag.” 

Sliwa clearly relishes his time in the limelight. Over the course of the campaign, he’s delivered some of the most memorable lines — Cuomo “slapping fannies and killing grannies,” in reference to the nursing-homes scandal and sexual-abuse allegations — and telling Mamdani, in Gen Z-speak, to stop “glazing him.” This is why Sliwa has won himself a cult following online, some of it driven by Mamdani’s supporters. 

But on a deeper level, Sliwa’s attacks on the Democratic establishment and the donor class have tapped into a very real anger that many New Yorkers feel toward the city’s elites. Amid record inequality and a persistent affordability crisis, that resentment helped fuel support for President Trump in the 2024 election. It’s a sentiment Mamdani has also capitalized on, despite sharing almost no ideological ground with the former president.

Ironically, Sliwa takes inspiration from Mamdani for his own campaign. Despite struggling to pronounce his first name (Zor-han instead of Zoh-ran), he commends Mamdani for coming from “almost zero” in the Democratic primary to beating Cuomo. “That’s why I say you can’t believe the polls,” he says. Many of his voters seem to agree, as does another well-known Republican, Rudy Giuliani. 

At the Staten Island rally, Giuliani appeared by Zoom to say, “When I first ran for mayor, I lost by 1% when the polls had me down by 12. And the second time, I was down by six and I won,” said Giuliani. “So don’t give up! Curtis is the best candidate by far.” The speech, however, had a slightly tragicomic quality to it, reminiscent of when Giuliani ended up hosting a news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping instead of the hotel after Trump’s 2020 loss. A combination of patchy connection and poor audio forced Sliwa’s handlers to hold a laptop up to a microphone so people could hear the former mayor speak.

Giuliani, along with former New York Gov. George Pataki, is Sliwa’s role model. As mayor, Giuliani revitalized the city and presided over a significant drop in crime. He was also fairly liberal on social issues like gay marriage and gun rights. Sliwa, for his part, has run a conventional conservative campaign focused on public safety and promising more police officers on the streets. The only difference is that he’s also running on an anti-animal-cruelty platform, which includes a ban on kill shelters. 

More From This Author

The return of the American Left

By James Billot

I ask Sliwa whether he should be following in Giuliani’s footsteps to broaden his appeal to New York’s liberals. “I am very liberal!” he exclaims. “Well, not a liberal, but I’m liberal in some things, like gay marriage and gun rights. I also don’t like Medicaid and food stamps being cut back. There are poor people who will be hurt by this.”

Sliwa has also criticized his own party for vilifying Muslims. With the likes of Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon, and even the president himself fretting about the Islamization of New York (Mamdani is a Shiite Muslim), Sliwa defends the city’s almost million-strong Muslim community. “I condemned the national Republicans early on,” he says. “I told them: you’re attacking the Muslim religion and the way the culture is, like, eating with your fingers. I told them to back off, because Muslims are very conservative. They’re even way too conservative for me!”

Labeling himself a “populist but not MAGA,” Sliwa believes that one of the reasons Trump has not endorsed him is because he can’t be put in a “cookie-cutter box.” “You never know the position I’m going to take because I’m open-minded,” he says. I ask him what, if any, issue he has changed his mind on. He takes a long pause. “Well, there’s still some issues I haven’t quite come to grips with. Obviously, I don’t want sex-change surgery for teenagers,” he says. “But for adults, I haven’t come to a conclusion yet. I’m not opposed to it, but I really think it’s really more of a private concern.” 

A large number of New Yorkers may never forgive Sliwa for staying in the race. But as the Republican nominee, why should he? It isn’t his responsibility to champion a Democrat, let alone one accused of sexual abuse by multiple women. And unlike Cuomo, Sliwa actually won his party’s primary.

There is also something oddly endearing about this aging street tough. He is a classic New York eccentric, the last of a dying breed of why-I-outta fighters with a surprisingly big heart (at one point, he was fostering 16 cats). He’s shown a willingness to buck the Republican line on a range of issues and cares a great deal about the city he’s spent his whole life in. After Tuesday’s election, the Everybody Loves Curtis show will be over, and with it, an older New York will fade away — for good and ill. 

No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries. 

Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.

Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public. 

Suggested reading

Laura Loomer is degrading politics

By Kat Rosenfield

Loomer’s life, though, has been characterized by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fueled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.

When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.

Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologizes when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labeled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.

Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”

Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalization of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.

Loomer reveled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.

“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks. 

Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.” 

But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”

Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. 

Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.” 

All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command center for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learned from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.

Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponized opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.

Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart. 

“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RFK? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.

She will even criticize the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”

Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless. 

More from this author

Steve Bannon is ready for war

By James Billot

But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.

Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”. 

Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”

Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.

So says Steve Bannon, speaking with me on the second day of the latest National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC. The former Trump strategist and MAGA firebrand was scheduled to address the gathering at the Westin Hotel the following day — but he shares his fiercest lines offstage in conversation with UnHerd. “These people aren’t fighters,” he says. “They have achieved nothing.”

The comments open a window onto the civil war roiling the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement. Despite President Trump’s victory in 2024, the mood at this year’s conference was a curious mix of triumph, defiance, and outright dismay. There were, of course, rote speeches about the radical Left, DEI, and Islam. But the bromides failed to mask the growing divisions elsewhere in the coalition. Especially on foreign policy, and doubly on Israel.

The Jewish state’s multiple wars in the Middle East have exposed deep fault lines within NatCon between pro-Israel hawks and those who call themselves realists, restrainers, or prioritizers — advocates for pivoting toward China and the Pacific over other adversaries. At a moment when NatCon seems at the peak of its influence, these internal divisions threaten to unravel the movement from within.

Founded in 2019, NatCon styled itself as the intellectual engine of Trumpism. Its early speaker lineups spanned the full spectrum of the Trumpian Right: neoconservatives, establishment Republicans, Christian post-liberals, and MAGA populists, from John Bolton to Tucker Carlson to the Claremont crowd. It was like the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, gathering, but with more brains and less Botox.

As the conference gathered strength and attention, the New Right’s various factions found common space — and a common cause in opposing the then-culturally ascendant Left and in promoting a conservative vision rooted in national sovereignty. The movement quickly went global, staging conferences in London, Rome, and Brussels (that last iteration was shut down by the Belgian capital’s mayor last year, handing the NatCons a perfect illustration of the censorious progressivism they sought to overthrow).

More from this author

The return of the American Left

By James Billot

All along, however, the movement was haunted by a question: Did NatCon represent a genuinely new and positive vision for the Right? Or had it merely reconstituted the old “fusionist” conservatism — resting on the triple foundations of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and cultural conservatism — only now under a banner of “nationalism” and with woke substituting for the Soviet Communism that galvanized its predecessor?

This week was the sixth installment. With National Guard troops patrolling the streets above, Washington’s conservative elite descended two floors beneath the Westin Hotel to debate the future of the movement. As interns from the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation buzzed around between stalls, orthodox Jews rubbed shoulders with portly academics from the country’s lesser-known campuses.

The dress code, ostensibly business casual, featured an astonishing range of windowpane suits and winklepicker shoes. If this was the “terrifying” face of the American Right that New York Times columnist David Brooks once warned of, I must have wandered into the wrong hotel.

The event began with a heartfelt plea from the organizer, the Israeli academic Yoram Hazony, urging participants to “feel gratitude” for this “unbelievable moment”. He added: “We’re doing so much winning that we say, ‘Please Mr. President, no more winning! I can’t take it anymore.’ There are an awful lot of people among us who are outraged — it’s like howling rage. Many of us can’t stand the idea” of actually being in power.

In short: Stop bickering — we’re in charge now.

If this was a call for unity, the next three days proved it a failure. Notwithstanding a parade of crowd-pleasing tub-thumpers railing against wokeness, lingering tensions on foreign policy spilled out into the open. In a breakout session, the pro-Israel hawk Max Abrahms mocked realists as Tucker Carlson-loving “MAGA isolationists” who had gone “insane” in their push to disengage from the Middle East. Curt Mills, the editor of The American Conservative, a restraint organ, shot back: “Why are these our wars? Why are Israel’s endless problems America’s liabilities? Why should we accept ‘America First’ — asterisk Israel? We shouldn’t.”

Reconciling staunch pro-Israel advocates with realists were always going to be an uphill battle. But it wasn’t until the wars in Gaza and then Iran that this fragile coexistence became more strained. Hazony had promised to provide a “balanced” conference and the Mills-Abrahms fracas certainly lived up to that ideal. Elsewhere, though, it was more disappointing. During “the Trump doctrine” talk, for example, speakers mostly spoke past each other, expressing vague platitudes (“you screw with us, we’re going to finish you”) and making limp attempts at triangulation (“realists and interventionists are a false dichotomy”).

The tensions carried into the evening. At the upstairs bar, a handful of realists in their 30s vented their frustration over cocktails: “Why do we keep coming to this conference expecting something different?” “It’s the same baby boomer Old Guard, which is totally blind to what is happening in front of us. Netanyahu has been to the White House more times than Melania.” “Yoram [Hazony] didn’t offer a solution to these divisions. Strategically, if you want a rapprochement, one side has to give something — and he hasn’t offered any olive branches.”

To be sure, the realists were given a bigger platform at this year’s conference. In previous years, Israel had been largely relegated to the sidelines. This time around, the Jewish state and its wars couldn’t be avoided. “Nobody said to be a good NatCon, you have to love Israel or you have to love Jews,” Hazony announced in his opening remarks. “That’s not what NatCon is for. It’s for restoring America and the spirit of national independence, interest, traditions, and God.”

If only the realists agreed. As members of the group swilled the last remnants of their cocktails, some plotted more extreme measures. “This alliance is becoming untenable,” said one. “If we end up supporting [Israel’s] military occupation of Gaza, we are going to be pulled into another Middle Eastern quagmire.”

I put these comments to Steve Bannon, who expressed sympathy for the position. “National conservatives are very neoconnish,” he said. “We saw through it at the beginning. It was neocons trying to make sure this new populist movement was still backing the American empire…. The only reason they exist is because they were worried about the rise of President Trump and wanted to nullify the populist tendencies of the movement.”

Bannon, who has taken an increasingly dim view of the Israeli leadership in recent months, came out swinging in his NatCon speech. The War Room podcast host laid into familiar targets in front of a sparse crowd: China, broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and impending civil war in Britain. But then he tackled a topic that he warned would be “unpleasant” to members of the audience. “Israel is a sideshow,” he boomed. “And Israel’s greater expansion [in the Middle East] is a sideshow to the sideshow… The existential threat to Israel is not in Tehran — it is in New York City.”

Suggested article

Can the NatCon revolution escape the past?

By Kathleen Stock

He was referring to the city’s Democratic mayoral nominee (and likely shoo-in) Zohran Mamdani. “Mamdani is a Marxist and a jihadist,” Bannon fumed. “He’s a better-programmed version than Barack Hussein Obama” (emphasizing Obama’s middle name as if he were providing a clue in a puzzle). “He’s going to win in November and have control of the most important city in the world. Do you think he’s going to give it back? Do you think Sadiq Khan is giving back London? Or is Paris going back to France?”

The audience did not applaud or react to these remarks. But fears of Islamization, spurred by the asylum crisis in Britain, the rise of Mamdani, and events in the Middle East, were more pronounced at this conference than any before. As Jack Posobiec, a conservative activist, summed up in his speech: “These people are not American, and they don’t want to be American. If they don’t want to be a part of this country, they can go home.”

It felt, once more, like a desperate search by conservatives to find a new enemy that would allow them to paper over their own internal differences. After all, woke is on the wane, and at least in 2025, the Democratic path to national power looks arduous. The siege mentality that defined earlier conferences — when conservatives were being censored, corporations were bending the knee, and Trump was facing years in prison — had evaporated. 

Today, America’s most powerful institutions — universities, banks, Big Tech — bow to Trump, not Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi. This perhaps explains why so much of this year’s gathering rang hollow. A speech denouncing white guilt (“worse than any problem America faces today”) or one in which the literal Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, griped about the deep state, simply lacked the punch these topics carried in 2021.

Wielding enormous power and with their Leftist enemies on the backfoot, the NatCons failed to overcome their divisions, much less articulate a positive account of nationalism in the 21st century. But this time around, they had a new license to say “retard” — a privilege they exercised with gusto.

This is the state of the Democrats in 2025. Bereft of ideas and riven by internal division, the party is no longer in control of itself. That has left it open to challenges from the ideological fringes, with a new wave of socialists and progressives emerging in America’s cities, from New York to Minneapolis to Albuquerque. Led by a new generation of young primary challengers, a broader realignment may be taking shape in the party — one that is more progressive, economically populist, and unapologetically pro-Palestine.

The forceful return of the Left has exposed the fecklessness of centrist Democrats, whose efforts to reclaim the party after President Trump’s victory last year have utterly failed. Back in November, moderates promised a sober reset: a return to pragmatism, competence, and electability. But they have since been out-organized, out-communicated, and increasingly out of step with a base that no longer sees triangulation as a virtue. With the midterms looming, it’s clear that the center isn’t holding, and the Left is on the march.

Over the last two months, a pair of Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates, Zohran Mamdani and Omar Fateh, have surfaced as contenders for mayor in two blue cities. In June, Mamdani — a democratic socialist who campaigned on city-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free buses — won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. His victory was followed by that of Fateh, who received a major boost when the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the state’s version of the Democrats) endorsed him over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey. It was the Minneapolis DFL’s first endorsement in 16 years.

Like Mamdani, Fateh’s pitch to voters focused almost exclusively on cost-of-living issues. He promised to implement widespread rent control, raise the city minimum wage to $20, and implement free transit. He is now well-positioned to win the general election later this year — even if Gov. Tim Walz has endorsed his rival Frey.

Progressives elsewhere are taking note. In Seattle, Katie Wilson looks set to defeat Mayor Bruce Harrell in a Democratic primary by promising affordable housing and better public transit. In a written statement, Wilson sounded almost like a MAGA Republican with her promise to take on “career politicians backed by corporate interests,” who have “presided for years over skyrocketing costs of living and out-of-control homelessness.” Similarly, in Albuquerque, NM, Alex Uballez is challenging Democratic Mayor Tim Keller on a progressive platform to combat income and housing inequality.

“Cost of living has for several years in a row now been top of mind for voters at all levels of elections,” says Michael Baharaeen, chief political analyst at the Liberal Patriot newsletter. “For better or worse, this new contingent of socialist and progressive candidates has a message on this stuff. They are speaking about things — whether they’re workable ideas or not — that people really care about.”

Many remain skeptical. Citing Mamdani’s plan to tax “whiter” neighborhoods harder or Fateh’s pledge to expand city funding for progressive causes (including a “Trans Equity Summit”), they claim that these figures merely represent a “new phase” of wokeness — not a rejection of it. To them, the populist gloss is just that. “When I hear a politician being described as economically populist, I want to see if the working class is actually voting for them or not,” says the political economist and UnHerd contributor Michael Lind. “The public grocery store idea does not come from the working class — it comes from the nonprofit sector. It’s a classic case of ‘pity charity liberalism.’”

Given that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo beat Mamdani by a wide margin among lower-income and black voters — the only two groups he won — it is difficult to cast Mamdani as a tribune of the working class. Still, there are signs he is trying to address that weakness. After the Midtown Manhattan shooting, for example, the Democratic nominee went directly from the airport after his wedding trip to Uganda to visit the family of a slain police officer. Later that day, he walked back past posts calling to defund the police, which he admitted were “out of step.” This may not sound entirely convincing, but it is a significant, if cautious, course correction.

Suggested reading

It’s springtime for progressives — again

By Ross Barkan

Cuomo, for his part, tried to run a conventional campaign focused on public safety in the primary. But Mamdani, despite starting with almost no name recognition, succeeded in shifting the conversation. He reframed the race around housing, affordability, and the cost of living, which proved so effective that Cuomo, in his campaign relaunch, mimicked both Mamdani’s visual style and his economic focus. What was meant to be a law-and-order referendum has since become a debate on rent, wages, and whom the city is for.

The fact that Mamdani remains a viable candidate speaks to a deeper shift in the Democratic Party. Ten or even five years ago, it is doubtful that figures like him or Fateh would have emerged as serious contenders for office. In any other Democratic leadership contest, a candidate who refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” or who declined to support then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary — over his stance on Israel — would have been dead on arrival.

But these are different times. Democratic voters have undergone a dramatic shift on Israel — so much so that even former senior Barack Obama advisers are now calling for a re-evaluation of the party’s position. Chris Van Hollen, a US senator from Maryland, declared it was a “big lie” that Hamas has systematically stolen UN aid, while 24 Democratic senators supported blocking the sale of more than $675 million in arms sales to Israel. Meanwhile, in the House, 13 progressive lawmakers have signed onto a letter urging the Trump administration to recognize a Palestinian state, and at least one plans to introduce a pro-statehood resolution.

It would be a stretch to credit Mamdani and his fellow progressives for this shift, but their refusal to tone down criticism of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has forced once-taboo positions into the mainstream. This dynamic was in full display during a mayoral debate, at which the candidates were asked to name the first foreign country they’d visit upon being elected mayor. Nearly all the other candidates named Israel, offering effusive praise for the Jewish state. Mamdani, however, indicated that he would stay put in the Big Apple, visiting local synagogues to connect with Jewish New Yorkers. The stance won him applause from the Left — and even many on the MAGA Right.

In fact, Israel’s blocking of aid to Gaza has twisted centrist Democrats into knots, with fears spreading that the war in the Middle East could become a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries. In the face of mass starvation and an IDF push to take over the entire Gaza strip, the only consensus the party’s moderate wing has managed to reach is this: criticize the Netanyahu government, but not the Jewish state.

This stance has produced some painfully tin-eared moments online. Challenged on a popular YouTube show on why she wasn’t taking a stronger position on Gaza, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan deflected, insisting, “I would offer that Democrats own nothing in Washington,” before shifting the conversation to the difference between sending offensive and defensive weapons to Israel. Even on that point, she struggled. Asked whether she would support a ban on offensive arms to Israel, she meekly responded: “That, to me, would certainly be a place to look.” In the end, she skipped the vote on the offensive-weapons resolution for an appearance on the Stephen Colbert talkshow.

The center, then, is no longer setting the terms of the debate; it’s struggling to keep up.

More from this author

Steve Bannon is ready for war

By James Billot

The upheaval is playing out at the ballot box, too. In safe blue districts across the country, a new generation of candidates — almost all under 40 — is mounting primary challenges against long-serving Democratic incumbents. In New York, a 26-year-old Jewish democratic socialist is taking on Rep. Dan Goldman, drawing inspiration from Mamdani’s high-profile run. In California, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is facing a challenge from a onetime aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In Illinois, a progressive content creator is running to unseat a 14-term congressman. And in a pair of open Senate races, Gen X and Millennial Democrats have launched bids to fill seats vacated by retiring Boomers in New Hampshire and Michigan. As Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive physician endorsed by Bernie Sanders who is running in Michigan, told Politico, his position on Gaza is a “symbol for something greater. Gaza, unfortunately, has become a Rorschach test for values. Do your morals apply anywhere and everywhere?”

What these races show is that the anti-establishment feeling that fueled Trump’s return is moving in both directions. As polling analysis by the election-data site Split Ticket illustrates, Democrats now view their party about as negatively as Republicans viewed theirs from 2009 to 2015, when Bush-Romney neoliberal dogma ruled the GOP. That insurgency reshaped the GOP from the ground up, dragging the party toward populism. A similar dynamic may now be unfolding on the Left. Polling in June found that roughly half of Democrats are “unsatisfied with current leadership,” with 62% calling for the “party leaders to be replaced” — a level of disaffection that suggests something bigger is stirring inside the party.

The Democrats have yet to find their own answer to Trump. But the most obvious contender is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has successfully straddled both wings of the party, serving as a bridge between the establishment and progressives. She has the highest net approval out of any Democrat not running for president, and she is still young enough to position herself as an outsider candidate.

Unlike most of her colleagues, AOC has also cultivated a political identity that operates largely independent of the Democratic Party’s institutional machinery. But the real test will be whether she can break through beyond the progressive base and win over moderates and independents — the very voters needed to beat Trump’s successor.

She is also exactly who, like Mamdani, Republicans want front and center in the Democratic Party. Just as Trump painted her and The Squad as the face of the party during his first term, the president is now targeting Mamdani in a similar fashion. This could have a deleterious effect on Democratic efforts to win back independents and moderates ahead of next year’s midterms. As Karl Rove aptly put it on Fox News last weekend, “the more that we get people like this representing the face of the Democratic Party, the harder it is [for them] to win back voters in the middle of American politics.”

For that to happen — to win back a national majority — these progressive challengers actually need to win their races first. Beyond that, a lot will also depend on the progressives’ ability to stay singularly focused on issues like the cost of living and Republicans’ attacks on hugely popular entitlements, while eschewing “peak woke” slogans like police abolition and “queer liberation.”

Still, their success so far signals a deeper shift underway in the party. What once looked like fringe discontent is beginning to coalesce into a coherent, organized revolt. Far from being isolated local phenomena, their victories would legitimize a new template for Left-wing politics: one rooted in economic populism with a deep skepticism of the party establishment. In a few years’ time, it may not be Mamdani, Fateh, and others who seem like outliers — but the party leadership, scrambling to catch up.

In a normal race, the prospect of a Muslim-American socialist (not to mention anti-Zionist) candidate running America’s largest city would be seen as fanciful. But these are not normal times. The incumbent, Eric Adams, has been forced to run as an independent amid corruption allegations. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, is the unloved frontrunner. And the city, which has experienced sweeping demographic changes over the last 10 years, has become Trumpier. This has fuelled an anti-establishment feeling that could, paradoxically, benefit outsider candidates like Mamdani.

As voting starts on 14 June in the Democratic primary, the result of this race will ripple far beyond the city’s five boroughs. Should Mamdani pull off an upset, progressives elsewhere in the country may challenge incumbents in their own states, using the victory as a chance to reshape the national party and pull Democrats to the Left. Meanwhile, if Cuomo wins, it will be seen as proof that voters don’t want radicals — just a “return to normalcy,” to borrow Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan.

As things stand, the odds remain stacked in Cuomo’s favor. Despite the sexual-harassment allegations that led to his resignation as governor in 2021 and a federal investigation into his handling of nursing-home deaths during the pandemic, the 67-year-old maintains a prohibitive lead over his opponents. The latest polls put him around 10 percentage points ahead of second-placed Mamdani, and in a projected run-off, he would win with 56% of the vote to Mamdani’s 44%.

The gap, however, has been narrowing. In March, Cuomo enjoyed a nearly 30-point lead over Mamdani, but as that advantage has shrunk, fears are growing that he may be getting complacent. Instead of hitting the campaign trail, the former governor has adopted a Bidenesque basement strategy, eschewing the media in favor of a few limited public appearances across the city.

More by this author

Test article

By James Billot

Mamdani, meanwhile, has run a sophisticated grassroots campaign that bears an uncanny resemblance to AOC’s original bid for the House of Representatives. Through a combination of intensive door-to-door canvassing and buzzy policy proposals like Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a Green New Deal, the then-28-year-old bartender pulled off a huge upset by unseating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary back in 2018.

Taking a leaf from her book, Mamdani touts free buses, city-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. He promises to fund these initiatives with higher taxes on the extremely wealthy and corporations, even though there is little sign that the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is receptive to such plans. Yet even so, Hochul is up for re-election next year. If Mamdani does win, she may feel obliged — or even pressured — to offer something up.

Cuomo, by contrast, has made public safety the centrepiece of his campaign. In his announcement video, he gravely indicted the city’s leadership for its anti-anti-crime stances: “We know that today our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway.”

It is a strong message — but one that might have landed more effectively during the 2021 election than today’s. For while those concerns persist, they aren’t felt as acute as they once were: the migrant crisis is subsiding, violent crime is down, and tourism has rebounded. “Cuomo is running a crisis campaign when people don’t feel that way,” says Dan Turrentine, a Democratic strategist. “New Yorkers want a more positive message.”

The relative improvement in the city’s mood has created space for Mamdani’s more expansive (or panglossian) economic proposals. Ironically, his Left-populist message may have been bolstered by Trump’s win last year. “Trump has actually made things easier for a democratic socialist,” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “When the president says Walmart can eat the cost of tariffs, it makes Mamdani’s idea of government-run grocery stores seem less crazy. Trump says things no one from either party has dared to, which gives the extremes on both sides license to go further.”

That a city as blue as New York increased its support for Trump consistently over three election cycles shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader conservative shift. Rather, it is a sign of growing frustration with the establishment, which has hurt Cuomo’s campaign more than the others. Even though he has never been mayor, progressives have framed Cuomo as the incumbent and tied the city’s failures to him. During last week’s debate, the 67-year-old faced relentless attacks from his opponents about his decade as governor. At times, he was left on the backfoot.

“Cuomo has been battered — the Left is determined to break him down,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran strategist who worked on the campaigns of Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. “It’s a bad time to be an establishment centrist Democrat because everything is changing. And when everything changes, that hurts those in the middle the most.”

Recognising Cuomo’s weakness, progressive candidates have been doing something they almost never do: cooperating. Learning from their mistakes in the last mayoral election, progressives have launched a concerted ABC (Anyone But Cuomo) campaign, which could negatively impact the former governor under the primary’s ranked-choice voting system. The push was epitomised by AOC, who told voters in her Mamdani endorsement: “do not rank Andrew Cuomo on your ballot at all. Leave the bubble next to his name blank.”

Mamdani’s late surge means that it’ll be more likely for progressive voters to coalesce around his candidacy. But his shortcomings are hard to ignore. His legislative record is thin — he has passed a grand total of three bills during his time in the New York state Assembly — and his free-bus pilot scheme was not renewed. Then there is his ferociously anti-Israel stance, which risks alienating many of the city’s 1.3 million Jewish residents. Asked about whether he supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in last week’s debate, Mamdani could only offer a mealy-mouthed response. “I believe Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he said.

There is also another inescapable truth that becomes all too evident at Mamdani’s rallies. Ironically for an Indian-American born in Uganda, his supporters are almost exclusively white, largely concentrated in the gentrifying neighbourhoods of Queens and Brooklyn. This was confirmed by the recent Emerson poll, in which Mamdani leads white voters with 57% support, compared to Cuomo at 43%. Among black voters, however, he pulls less than 26%, and Hispanics are even colder on him.

Suggested reading

Why Gotham’s bad old days are back

By Michael Alcazar

For a candidate who claims to represent the city’s (largely nonwhite) working class, this is a glaring disconnect. It’s a testament to the tension between whom progressives like Mamdani claim to speak for versus who actually shows up to support them. After all, it was the city’s voters of color — long a moderating force on the Democratic Party — who handed former NYPD captain Eric Adams the mayoralty and who, by wide margins, tell pollsters they want the same or more policing in their neighbourhoods, not less. Mamdani, by contrast, supports community-led alternatives to public safety — a stance that very few working-class New Yorkers would likely support.

Cuomo’s base is far broader. He’s backed by Jews in Manhattan, black churchgoers in Brooklyn, Latino families in southeast Queens, and older homeowners across the boroughs — the coalition that forms the bedrock of the city’s electorate. He has also promised to add 5,000 additional NYPD officers, which would likely be well received by these communities.

Taken together, these factors give Cuomo a clearer path to victory than Mamdani, but the implications of this race stretch far beyond New York. For the rest of America, it could offer a revealing lesson about the Democratic Party’s unresolved identity crisis. Whichever faction prevails will claim a mandate: a Mamdani victory might embolden progressives like AOC to pressure establishment figures — including Sen. Chuck Schumer, who faces re-election next year — to shift further Left or risk a primary. A Cuomo win, meanwhile, would strengthen the hand of moderates arguing that the party must reclaim the centre to stay competitive. With party figures across the country jockeying for consideration in the 2028 presidential race, all eyes will be on how this one turns out.

In fewer than two weeks, voters will find out who will lead the Democrats into the general election at the end of this year. But as Hank Sheinkopf, who has worked on some 700 campaigns around the world, said, all bets on this race are off. “One given in New York politics,” he says, “is that nothing is predictable.”

The men, mostly from West Africa, are the latest arrivals at a 2,200-bed, male-only migrant center that opened two weeks ago. Some have come from other parts of the city, where shelters are closing down; others from out of state, with one telling me he was sleeping on the subway for two weeks until he heard about the new opening. “I was kicked out of the last shelter for getting in a fight, so I had to find somewhere new,” he says.

It’s conditions like these that have triggered a massive backlash among working-class communities of color in New York. The South Bronx, where I visited, saw a significant red shift in the 2024 election, along with several other neighborhoods in New York’s outer boroughs. This shift has prompted some soul-searching — and shape-shifting — on the Democratic side. Most notably, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rebranded himself from a pot-legalizing progressive to a law-and-order moderate in his bid to become the next mayor of New York City.

Given his clear frontrunner status, Cuomo’s “clean-up-the-mess” campaign has already attracted a number of key endorsements. And with the incumbent Eric Adams’s approval rating in the drain, it is likely that Cuomo will clinch the June primary (which would make him a shoo-in for the general election come November, in light of the city’s Democratic tilt). The question, though, is whether his hardened rhetoric will translate into real policy — or if, like Adams, he’ll find himself trapped between an angry electorate and an uncooperative party.

More from this author

Steve Bannon is ready for war

By James Billot

New York’s migrant crisis is not over. An estimated 44,000 newcomers are still being housed and sheltered — the same number that the city’s entire homeless-shelter system served just three years ago. To date, it has cost the city nearly $7 billion (more than all emergency services combined). According to a poll last month, more than half of Gotham’s residents believe that the situation is “less under control” than it was four years ago, while 32% believe it is “about the same”. Just 9% believe conditions have improved.

It’s true that some shelters are closing, and 188,000 migrants have, according to the mayor, been “helped… to take the next steps in their journey”. It is not exactly clear, however, what these next steps are. No measures have been taken to track or monitor those who have left, and many have been found living in squalid conditions.

Some have crammed into apartments in New York’s outer boroughs, while others have slept outdoors, on trains, or in houses of worship. Last month, for example, the New York Fire Department discovered 70 migrants living in the basement of a Queens furniture store, followed by another discovery of dozens more living in a commercial space in The Bronx.

“They’re either on the street or selling items illegally,” Robert Holden, a Democratic member of the City Council, tells me. “They’re selling food illegally, they’re selling drinks in traffic, they’re on the expressway. And they commit crimes, because many can’t work.”

Holden, who represents a district that swung for Trump in last year’s presidential election, says that residents were tired of the “anarchy” during the Biden administration. Border crossings soared under the Democratic president, averaging two million per year between 2021 and 2023, the effects of which are still being felt today. “Everyone knows people that have moved out over the last five years,” Holden says. “They see the quality of life of their neighborhoods around the city dropping. Everywhere was affected but it hit the working people the hardest.”

Suggested reading

Why Gotham’s bad old days are back

By Michael Alcazar

Then there are the shelters that still exist. The mayor’s office states that a total of 53 shelters will close down by June 2025, but new ones, such as the converted storage facility in the South Bronx, are still popping up. “No one told us this was happening,” Alejandro Lopez, a South Bronx resident, says, “so now we have hundreds of jobless men hanging around the neighborhood. It can’t be good.”

“I want them gone — all of them,” says another passerby. “All they do is bring trouble.”

Over the past three years, city leaders struggled to cope with the influx of migrants into their neighborhoods. From deep-blue neighborhoods like Clinton Hill in Brooklyn to more Trump-supporting areas like Staten Island, the message was the same: get them out. But as frustration grew, it created an opening for the ghosts of New York’s past to return.

Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor over sexual-harassment allegations in 2021, leveraged the crisis to quietly tiptoe back into the limelight. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, he described the migrant crisis as a “tipping point” for Gotham, suggesting that the city was stuck in a “death spiral” — a point he doubled down on two months later. And in last week’s announcement video, he tapped into similar themes. “You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person,” Cuomo said. “Or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway … the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence — the city just feels threatening.”

This marks quite the turnaround for a man who once proudly described himself as an “undocumented person”. In a decade as governor, Cuomo pushed or acquiesced to a raft of progressive measures to support illegal immigrants. In 2019, he strongly backed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and signed the New York DREAM Act, which provided illegal students access to state financial aid for college. That same year, he passed the Green Light Law, granting illegal immigrants the right to obtain driver’s licenses in the Empire State.

As part of the first anti-Trump #Resistance, he issued executive orders opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and sued the Trump administration over policies like the Public Charge Rule, which aimed to deny green cards to immigrants using public benefits. Most famously, when he announced his opposition to the then-president’s so-called Muslim ban, he declared: “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. As a New Yorker, I am Jewish. As a New Yorker, I am black, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices, because, as a New Yorker, we are one community, and the New York community is composed of all of the above.”

Yet the Big Apple in 2025 is vastly different from what it was when Cuomo left office in 2021. Public fatigue with traditionally liberal policies on immigration, public safety, and crime allowed Trump to expand his support across nearly every neighborhood, particularly in districts with sizeable migrant populations.

In The Bronx, for example, where there was (and still is) a big migrant presence, 27% of the borough’s residents backed Trump — almost three times the share in 2016. “Most migrants are good, hard-working people,” says Lisandra Martinez, who lives 10 blocks away from the new South Bronx migrant center. “But there are always one or two who cause problems. If the shelter closes, where are they gonna go? What are they gonna do? We are a close community, and I don’t want them doing bad things around here.”

This, in large part, explains Cuomo’s own transformation from progressive governor to a law-and-order moderate who now says that he will “work” with Trump. New polling shows that 81% of New Yorkers support deporting illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes, versus just 16% who oppose it.

Suggested reading

America's post-apocalyptic cities

By Ryan Zickgraf

But New York’s status as a sanctuary city, combined with resistance from progressive Democrats, has made even this straightforwardly popular initiative difficult to accomplish. Adams in recent weeks has endured heavy attacks from members of his own party for cooperating with ICE in deporting criminal illegal immigrants. Recently, he issued an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, which prompted calls by House Democrats that he was “selling New York out”.

The question then, is whether Mayor Cuomo would continue in the same vein as his predecessor. As governor, Cuomo was not afraid to take on the progressives in his party when dealing with relatively “safe” issues like taxing the rich, universal health care, and education reform. But on immigration, he marched in lockstep with the Left, even criticizing the ultra-progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio for failing to do enough to protect illegal immigrants from federal enforcement. And when de Blasio maintained that city law enforcement would not cooperate with ICE unless absolutely required, Cuomo went further by threatening legal action against ICE during Trump’s first term.

All of which casts doubt on Cuomo’s rebrand as a border hawk. If the Trump crackdown turns ugly, and ICE deportations accelerate, Cuomo may find it politically expedient to return to his previously progressive positions. Ever attuned to shifts in public sentiment (and among his own party), he will not want to be seen as bending the knee to Trump.

But it is not Cuomo or any political leader who will suffer as a result. As Robert Holden tells me, it is New York’s forgotten class: “My constituents are middle class, and the illegal immigrants are threatening their very existence. They’re making New York less affordable to live in and it’s driving people away. For the past four years we’ve been losing our city. We need to get it back.”

The triple-shirted architect of old-school Trumpian populism, briefly a White House advisor during Donald Trump’s first term, has emerged as the counterpole to Elon Musk, whose ultra-libertarian agenda has come to dominate the President’s second term. To Bannon, the billionaire X owner is more forceful and, perhaps, more dangerous than any figure on the Left. “Musk is the one with power at the moment,” he says. “The Democrats are nowhere to be seen.”

Less than a month into the Trump presidency, Musk has established himself as a core fixture in the White House. He holds news conferences in the Oval Office with his four-year-old; hosts foreign leaders in meetings that strikingly resemble head-of-state bilaterals; enjoys access to virtually every federal department; and, most importantly, has the ear of the President.

Bannon, meanwhile, must settle for a microphone. The 71-year-old’s War Room podcast beams out to hundreds of thousands of MAGA ultras six days a week — despite being purged from platforms including Spotify. In his studio, stacks of old Financial Times papers, archival documents and recording equipment are strewn across the table, overlooked by countless religious icons and memorabilia. “We have not yet begun to FIGHT,” reads one sign on his mantelpiece, beside a wooden crucifix labelled “full armor of God”. Top of his agenda: a third Trump term.

We met last Thursday, just days after Bannon pleaded guilty to skimming money from donations intended to privately fund the border wall, charges he nonetheless dismisses as “politically motivated” and “lawfare in the extreme”. But on that day he is in an ebullient mood: just before our meeting, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. “This is a historic day,” Bannon reflects. “If you weld together the MAHA movement with MAGA and add in Hispanics, African-American men, and conservative Right-wing Asians, we have a 1932 coalition” — a reference to FDR’s sweeping first victory. He takes a long pause. “And yes, we have the tech bros too.”

Since promising, and failing, to run Musk out of the White House by Inauguration Day, Bannon’s view of the world’s richest man and his fellow “tech bros” hasn’t softened. He claims that he was willing to give Musk and his DOGE team the benefit of the doubt — “I have to give the devil his due” — for taking on the administrative state. But so far, he says, it has yielded disappointing results, as evidenced by the House panel’s budget blueprint: “DOGE is sitting there with the budget, but where the fuck are the DOGE cuts? We are 30 days away from approving a budget for the entire year with $2 trillion already baked in, and not one penny of anything that DOGE found. It’s ludicrous.”

Musk’s DOGE team has instead elected to focus on several bêtes noires of the Right: the US Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, and DEI programs across the government. At the Department of Education alone, DOGE claims to have made nearly $900 million in cuts, but as yet — and despite Trump’s permission — it has not made a move on the Pentagon, which failed its seventh audit in a row last year.

“I notice there is a hesitancy to cross the Potomac and go to the Pentagon,” Bannon says. “I would like to see $100 billion taken off the $900 billion budget right now, which is really a trillion.” Bannon goes on to describe DOGE’s efforts as “performative”, but for now, he is not ready to dispense with Musk. “It’s pretty evident the President’s using him as an armor-piercing shell that’s delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state.”

This is a curious posture. On the one hand, Musk is, according to Bannon, an “agent of Chinese influence”, a problem “not just to the MAGA movement, but a problem to the country”. On the other, Bannon can countenance granting Musk access to the private data of nearly all government employees. Were Musk truly a threat to America’s national security, why would Bannon not be calling for his removal? “President Trump says Musk doesn’t do anything that he’s not on top of. I take him at his word.”

That feels like a lot of trust to place in one man, but to Bannon Trump is a “providential” figure. In his mind, Trump is facing something much harder than anything FDR dealt with and as a result, he should only be compared to the two other “top-tier” presidents: Washington and Lincoln. If there is an FDR comparison to be made, Bannon thinks, it’s that Trump should get a third term. He’s “exploring” options for this, he tells me.

Bannon knows that what he is proposing is unconstitutional, but if it further ingratiates him with the President, he’ll do it. “I don’t have right now a tremendous amount of support on this legally,” he says, “but remember, I faced longer odds on many other topics in my life.” It is also what happens when you turn a president into a god: politics becomes a holy war, creating a permission structure for a “by any means” approach to governance. On what basis would he even make the argument? “I’m working on making sure they have a correct interpretation of the Constitution,” he says. “I believe that President Trump’s eligible for one more term because I think it says consecutive.” It doesn’t. As the 22nd Amendment clearly states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Trump has been elected twice.

Legality aside, does the country really need another octogenarian president? “You give me a guy at 78 years old that’s coming in and working 18, 20 hours a day and dropping bombs like he’s dropping every day,” Bannon says. “Every day for me is Christmas morning, so why would we want to stop it?”

These “bombs” include turning Canada into America’s 51st state — it would grant the United States greater access to the Arctic — and acquiring the Panama Canal (a “great geostrategic move”). He also commends Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s efforts to bring an end to the conflict in Ukraine (“it’s historic”). But when it comes to Trump’s plan to “clean out” Gaza and turn it into the riviera of the Middle East, the two men don’t seem entirely aligned. There is “bigger thinking on there that, quite frankly, I don’t understand”, Bannon tells me. “He’s thinking out loud, right? He’s outside the box on so many things, we just have to trust President Trump.”

Once again, we just have to trust him.

On the question of Europe, however, Bannon is in line with the administration. A day after Vice President J.D. Vance browbeat his European counterparts over free speech and mass migration, Bannon struck a similar note. “The message was clear: Europe is no longer going to be treated like a protectorate,” he says. “To me the Atlanticists are quite frankly the most racist people in the world because they only think about white people in Western Europe and the United States. They don’t have any other broad perspective.”

There is, though, a danger in pulling too hard on this thread. Leaders like Emmanuel Macron have been calling for strategic autonomy for some time, warning the continent to not “be a vassal” in a US-China stand-off. Is Bannon not concerned that the US may be pushing Europe into Beijing’s arms? “I am worried about that,” he says, “but the Chinese have already infiltrated Europe. The British elite are totally bought and paid for.”

Suggested reading

Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

Singling out the new British ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, Bannon warms to his theme: “From our mother country that we have a special relationship with, I can’t think of a worse individual to be sent over here that hates MAGA and that’s trashed Trump.” He adds: “They send him to Fox to grovel and say that he didn’t mean what he said before, but it won’t wash. Plus he’s on the payroll of the CCP.”

On domestic policy, meanwhile, Bannon offers a more subtle critique of Trump’s plan to extend the provisions in his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced tax rates for corporations and individuals. “I don’t think this should be renewed at all,” he says. “I’m mad about that.” He even expresses disappointment at the rate of deportations, which, despite all the noise, is moving at a similar rate as the Obama era. “We have to deport the 10 million illegal aliens who are here. Right now, we can’t even get the criminals out of jail.”

This is, in Bannon’s mind, not Trump’s fault, but the Deep State’s — the same Deep State that stole the 2020 presidential election, incarcerated him for four months, and is now working to undo the Trump agenda. It’s a convenient foil. Blame the Deep State if something goes wrong and claim victory if Musk does his job. For this reason, Bannon is happy for the president to “wrangle” the tech bros. “The enemy of the enemy is my friend,” he says. “This country is being destroyed by the Praetorian guard of the administrative state… Elon is helping expose this.”

Though neither would care to admit it, there is a certain symmetry between Bannon and Musk. Bannon joined Trump in the final stretch of his 2016 campaign, and then took on a high position once he entered office, while Musk did much the same in 2024. Both men had their turn on the cover of TIME magazine, a moment that precipitated Bannon’s downfall from Trumpian grace shortly after.

“Sloppy Steve”, as he became known, likes to talk. He was ousted from the White House for being one of the primary sources in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, and was repeatedly accused of leaking while in office. This habit made him even more of a nuisance once he was out, with a recent New York Times story noting that the administration was getting “hammered by Right-wing media” almost immediately after.

All of which is to say that Bannon can cause problems if he wants to. And in making an enemy out of Musk, what may appear like a squabble between two egotistical men could spill out into open warfare. Because at the heart of this conflict is a battle over the philosophical direction of the Trump presidency and, by extension, the country. That Vance even felt the need to address this “civil war” between the “populists and techies” — which he said was overstated — nonetheless shows that the tension in this coalition is not immaterial.

Despite Bannon claiming to be in regular contact with the White House, is Musk’s presence there a sign that the techno–libertarians are winning? “Absolutely not. Look at who he has put in: Neil Ferguson at the FTC, Gail Slater on antitrust, and Mike Davis on the White House counsel,” he responds. “Trump is sending a signal to tech bros, saying, ‘You don’t own me,’ and he’s also saying, ‘I’m not buying your techno-libertarian stuff.’ That was a huge fuck you to the broligarchs.”

The populists, then, are securing enough appointments to keep Bannon happy for now. But Trump has also gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and crippled the National Labor Relations board — hardly pro-worker moves. There is also the looming budget, which may include cuts to Medicaid, a federal health insurance program for over-65s. After we spoke, the War Room host fired out another warning shot at Musk on his podcast. “There are a lot of MAGAs on Medicaid,” he said. “I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are dead wrong… Just can’t take a meat axe to it, although I would love to.”

“You’re not going to win every fight,” Bannon says. “You’ve got to pick the fight you want to win.” So what happens if he loses one of those fights? He draws three red lines: China, AI, and visas. The last of these already caused a major rift in the MAGA movement shortly after Christmas — before Trump even took office — with Elon Musk threatening to go to “war” with other parts of the MAGA coalition, not least Bannon, over-expanding the guest-worker programs beloved of Silicon Valley. It resulted in the now former DOGE executive Vivek Ramaswamy going into “witness protection” — a scalp claimed by Bannon and the MAGA base. “It shows that Trump doesn’t believe in any of this techno-libertarian stuff.”

China is a different story. Bannon describes himself as a “super hawk”, and he calls for a “hemispheric defense” against Beijing, which stretches from Greenland all the way down to Javier Milei’s Argentina. Together, this vast landmass would be a bulwark against communist influence, with tariffs protecting North America as a “premium market”. For this reason, Ukraine must sign a peace deal with Russia so that the unholy alliance of Putin and Xi does not strengthen any further.

For Bannon, though, the AI threat is greater still. At last week’s Paris conference, Vance promised a “pro-worker growth path for AI”, but the War Room host is convinced this will simply empower the Chinese state, as well as oligarchs in the US. “We have let the wealthiest people in America soar to the commanding heights of the algorithmic age with no controls,” he says. “They have created an apartheid state. You don’t have to hire any blacks or Hispanics in this country. Or even American citizens.”

Bannon worries that the rise of AI will not only take blue-collar jobs but entry-level jobs at a technical and administrative level too. “We can’t let these techno-vandals randomly hop from one core institution to another, spray-painting garbage graffiti with no intention of ever cleaning it up.” Were Musk to make further encroachments on his red lines, Bannon promises that he would “pound” him every day on the podcast.

Would Musk even care? Despite all of Bannon’s attacks, Musk has limited his response to a single tweet, describing the War Room host as “a great talker, but not a great doer”. Nevertheless, Bannon assures me that he has “pretty good political connections” on Capitol Hill and in the White House. He also claims that his recent Manhattan court case inspired new Attorney General Pam Bondi to file a lawsuit against New York over immigration, which feels like a stretch. “This is not a brag, it’s just a fact,” he says.

Still, Bannon must surely resent that he is no longer inside a movement that he helped to create. Instead, the tech bros, who had their “Damascene moment at 11pm on November 5”, are now in charge. With the Democrats in disarray, it leaves open the question of who will take ownership of the movement after 2028. “The bench is deep,” says Bannon, without naming names. He stresses, though, that future leaders from both political parties won’t be politicians, citing Stephen A. Smith, a sports TV presenter, as a contender for the Democratic Party. “Democrats will defer to MAGA-type, Trumpian personalities,” he says. “Smith has an ability to communicate to the American people.”

“New leaders are going to emerge,” he assures me. “Remember Sherman was considered a nut case. Grant was a drunk. Lincoln was a failed congressman.” Does that list include ex-convict podcasters? “No, no, no, that’s ridiculous — I’m not a politician.” Nor is Stephen A. Smith — and nor, once, was Donald Trump.

This is not Trump country — far from it. But despair in Hunts Point, where almost half of residents live below the poverty line, and where drugs and prostitution are rife, is forcing a rethink. One shopper here stops to tell me why Biden lost her vote. “What did he give me?” Rosaria asks. “My groceries now cost a bomb, my gas is up and I’ve never felt less safe here in my life.” Just a few days ago, she tells me, her son’s best friend got “snatched up” — kidnapped — and they still can’t find him. He was last seen buying a drink inside the local bodega, but nobody has heard from him since. Rosaria believes it could be gang-related. “I don’t want my children outside after dark anymore.”

In this year’s election, 27% of Bronx voters plumped for Trump, almost three times more than in 2016. And in Hunts Point, right at the heart of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 14th district, the Rightward lurch is even starker. In this neighbourhood, Trump increased his share of votes by 50% compared with four years ago — one of the biggest pro-Trump swings in the country. Nor was this trend unique to the Bronx: Queens, Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn are all becoming redder too. Yet as the electoral post-mortems begin, one big question remains: can New York’s conservative resistance grow?

More from this author

Trump launches his New York heist

By James Billot

New York City hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Michael Bloomberg (before he switched allegiances) in 2005, and the state hasn’t voted for a GOP president since 1984. But dissatisfaction with the status quo has been rising since 2020 as crime, the migrant crisis and housing all worsen. No wonder, then, that 573,000 New Yorkers abandoned Harris. While she might have won the city comfortably, securing over twice as many votes as Trump, her margin of victory was 16% lower than Joe Biden’s four years earlier.

For the Republicans, the main challenge here is less the Democrats, and more voter apathy. Of Hunts Point’s 11,000 or so residents, only around 2,774 voted (2,039 for Harris, 735 for Trump). This means that if Rosaria is the face of the GOP’s new coalition — urban, working class and Hispanic — then it is people like her who Republicans need to rally to their side. And while she has reservations about the President-elect (the “Mexico is sending rapists” line still rankles), she says she’s more willing to vote Republican than ever.

Other voters in AOC’s district are more bullish about their support for the President-elect. In the heavily Hispanic neighbourhood of North Corona, a corner of Queens where nearly half of residents went for Trump, a group of Latino barbers explained why they voted red. “Our neighbourhood is a wreck,” says one. “No one is trying to fix anything around here.” Another says that in the past two years, four of his close friends have lost their jobs due to rising costs. He wonders if he’ll be next. One pulls out a phone to show me his two young boys wearing the full MAGA uniform: red cap, red t-shirt and camo trousers. They all went to the President-elect’s rally in the South Bronx. “He came out here to speak to us,” he says. “I’ll never forget that.”

One reason for their discontent muscles out all the others: crime. Like Rosaria, they felt disorder in their neighbourhood was “out of control”. And migrants — North Corona has taken in a big chunk of 200,000 arrivals into the city since 2022 — are getting the blame for the concurrent spike in law-breaking. Yet it was in the Bronx that I saw the city at its worst. As I walked west from AOC’s district into New York’s poorest, a fight broke out by a McDonald’s between two groups of schoolchildren. The brawl was eventually broken up by security, but moments later three undercover police officers escorted a boy in handcuffs to a van. Here was the tale of two Bronxes: rowdy locals scrapping outside of boarded up shops and battered police vans while the new Yankees stadium, which cost some $2.3 billion, loomed behind. The stadium was meant to be a symbol of the borough’s rejuvenation, but it acts, instead, as a constant rebuke.

Certainly, Republicans in New York have increasingly understood the electoral power of disorder. Last year, Trump laid out his “plan to restore law and order”, which he said includes a “record investment in hiring, retention and training” for police officers nationwide and bolstering liability protections for law enforcement. More locally, it formed a core part of Lee Zeldin’s 2021 gubernatorial campaign, where he compared the city’s streets to a “combat zone”. In the end, the Trump loyalist lost to Kathy Hochul, but he nonetheless outperformed expectations — a trend for Republicans in almost every election cycle since Covid. The real test for the GOP, though, will be the mayoral election of 2025. Trump, after all, won’t be on the ballot, meaning that Republican candidates will not be able to ride on his appeal in quite the same way. And already, the odds are heavily stacked against the party. For one thing, the city remains heavily blue, with the number of registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans by around six to one.

At the same time, Harry Siegel explains that the Republican ground operation in New York is basically non-existent. “I am not seeing any sort of serious effort for people outside of the Democratic Party machine to build organisations, structures, and a compelling case to take on the party,” says Siegel, a writer at The City. For that reason, Siegel continues, New Yorkers will once again be left with a choice between the “corrupt centre” and the “crappy progressives”. “There are no serious Republicans throwing their hat into the ring,” he laments. “Those in the running have given no thought to how they would actually run the city.” It’s no wonder that it’s hard to get the vote out.

More from this author

Is Tucker Carlson aiming for the White House?

By James Billot

Yet if a “serious” Republican wanted to run, or an independent like Jim Walden could be persuaded to take the ticket, now would be the time to jump in. Eric Adams, the current mayor, is under investigation for bribery and campaign finance offences, while polls show a majority of New Yorkers want him to resign. If Adams were forced out, or else resigned before the end of his term, that would trigger a special election whereby candidates from any party could challenge the Democrats. It’s a small window of opportunity. But an insurgent candidate campaigning on three key issues — crime, the migrant crisis and housing — could surely energise enough voters and turn those historically low turnouts into a strength.

The 2024 election, after all, was a story not of Republican triumph, but of Democratic passivity. Trump may have added nearly 100,000 votes to his tally from 2020, but over half a million Democrats simply stayed at home. And for those who did vote red, their decision was often deeply personal. Nearly everyone I spoke to said Trump was the first Republican they’d gone for, and many remained loyal Democrats further down the ballot. They don’t see Trump as a Republican, but an outsider, meaning that GOP gains here are by no means guaranteed after the President-elect finally leaves the stage.

New York, then, is for the Democrats to lose. And right now it feels like that’s exactly what’s happening. Between a housing emergency, a migrant crisis, and crime that’s barely back below its Covid peak, fury with the city’s liberal leadership is bubbling over. Those half a million voters who didn’t exercise their democratic right were sending a message to the party. And if they continue to feel ignored, they’re bound to abandon the Democrats. “What more do I have to lose?” Rosaria asked me. In next year’s election, we’ll see if anyone can be bothered to agree.

This is the Republican message of 2024. And it is best articulated by the most important man in the conservative movement, after Donald Trump: Tucker Carlson. Over the past month, Carlson has been travelling America on a speaking tour, visiting 16 different cities with guests including Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Kid Rock, and Russell Brand. The shows have not toured the liberal bastions like New York City or Los Angeles, but cities where the Trumpian message of decline is not only seen and heard, but felt, too.

I see him in Reading, one of the most dangerous cities in Pennsylvania, where violent crime is significantly above the national average and rising. Its school system is failing and buildings are collapsing. At the 7,000 capacity Santander Arena, unhappy residents cram in for Tucker: if there’s a uniform, it’s MAGA regalia, camo vests and Infowars Ts. One member of the faithful tells me that he had already been to three of his shows. “He just understands us,” Chris, clutching two beers, says. “He’s not a politician.”

Tucker isn’t in a t-shirt. He stands out in his own uniform: blazer, chequered shirt, beige chinos and loafers. But he speaks for the crowd. “A leader’s only job is to take care of the people he leads,” he declares. “It’s not to defeat climate change or to defeat Vladimir Putin — or anybody else.” The audience is enthralled, buttressing Carlson’s comments with chants of “USA!” and “Survive till ‘25!”.

His rhetoric is earthy and vulgar, describing the state’s governor and former V-P contender, Josh Shapiro, as “evil”, “creepy” and a “ghoul”. Comparing the governor with a father who abandoned his family, Carlson doubles down on the character assassination. “I don’t care what story he tells you about himself,” he says, “he is a bad father and a bad man.” He’s appalled by a picture of Shapiro signing an artillery shell bound for Ukraine with Zelensky at hand.

Ukraine is a Carlson fixation — representing, as it does, his metamorphosis from Iraq-war supporting neocon to isolationist firebrand. It mirrors a similar evolution on the New Right. Disturbed by the Iraq war and its fallout, Carlson and the new Right became foreign policy radicals, with their outlook defined more by alienation than patriotism. Carlson describes a visit he made to Iraq that precipitated this change of heart. It is also why so many Trump voters in Pennsylvania voted for Obama in 2008, before switching. They did not like Obama per se; they just hated George W. Bush and his foreign-policy adventurism more.

At his best, Carlson is a tribune for the disenfranchised and disaffected, criticising elites for neglecting the interests of their own population in service of the military-industrial complex and other targets like Big Pharma and the banks. At his worst, he is bitter, vindictive and more interested in owning the libs than telling the truth. As Andrew Ferguson described of his days on Fox: “You get some poor little columnist from the Daily Oregonian who said Trump is Hitler, and you beat the shit out of him for 10 minutes.”

His gift for oratory, however, is undeniable. In Reading, Carlson speaks for 25 minutes without notes, playing several different characters at once: the nation’s healer (“I’m trying to cool the temperature”), the patriot (“American citizens are your brothers and sisters”), the flame-throwing populist (“our leaders hate you”), the Republican surrogate (“Biden voters have no skills”) and the family man (“a father’s job is to watch over his family”). He works the crowd into a frenzy, creating a carnival atmosphere. “He speaks from the heart,” one raved. “He was talking about this stuff way before anyone else did.”

Carlson never graduated with a diploma or college degree, admitting that he was a straight-D student, which might explain his militant non-conformity. He did, however, love to read, becoming something of an autodidact. But the problem with autodidacts is that they don’t have anyone to tell them when they’re wrong. Perhaps this is why, since losing the institutional guardrails of Fox News last year, Carlson’s interviews have taken on a more conspiratorial flavour, featuring Second World War revisionist historians, gay crackheads claiming to have had sex with Barack Obama, and, of course, Alex Jones.

Jones joined Carlson in Reading this week. During a live show, you don’t watch Jones — you experience him. He marches onto the stage like a WWE wrestler, grabbing the microphone and speaking into the camera as if he was about to challenge John Cena for the world heavyweight title. “When we get President Trump elected,” he booms, “all of us are going to lift the curse off of this country and we’re gonna send the globalists to prison!”

This is not politics. It’s performance art. And watching through this lens, Carlson’s soft-ball questions begin to make more sense. Rather than challenge Jones on his Sandy Hook denialism, for which the talk show host must pay $1 billion to the parents of the shooter’s victims, Carlson instead plays the role of fluffer. “What is it like to always be right?”, “How does it feel to be totally vindicated?” and “I would make fun of you but every word you said is true” are his most common refrains. That is because Carlson understands something about this audience that his liberal critics don’t: they don’t come for a Crossfire interview, they come for entertainment.

Despite liberals’ best hopes, Carlson is not “fading away”. If anything, his influence has grown. His new podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show, has had 26 million downloads since its December launch and regularly features in the top five of Spotify’s weekly podcast rankings (sometimes even beating The Joe Rogan Experience). He is one of the few men to have Donald Trump’s ear, having persuaded the former president to secure RFK Jr’s endorsement, and pushed him to nominate JD Vance as his running mate.

Such is Carlson’s power in conservative circles that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the dog is wagging the tail or the other way around. On Vance’s last visit to Pennsylvania in late August, he attracted a few hundred people to a rally in Erie. Yet during his appearance with Carlson in Hershey last week, he spoke to thousands. And much of what Vance talks about on the trail — deindustrialisation, drug deaths, immigration and opposition to foreign wars — Carlson has been saying for years.

So why doesn’t Carlson run for office himself? Despite being one of the most popular conservatives in America, he has explained that he is just “a talk show host”. Yet to be so closely involved in GOP power politics and have no ambition to enter the fray stretches belief. This man is touring the nation and meeting world leaders — it certainly looks like a dress rehearsal.

The White House would be quite the final destination for Carlson in light of his journey over the past 20 years: from bow-tied geek on CNN, to Rachel Maddow mentor on MSNBC, to uninhibited populist on Fox, and now the truth-seeking conspiracist on his own podcast.

As he gazed out into the Reading crowd, there was a glint in Carlson’s eye that suggested that he had a taste for this. The chanting, the applause, the attention. This is a man, after all, whose whole modus operandi is attention, doing whatever he can to provoke, excite and anger. Wouldn’t the White House be the perfect venue from which to mastermind all those things?

Democrats, by and large, were welcomed. Republicans were not. When Ronald Reagan visited in 1980, he was heckled to such an extent that he cut his visit short. Indeed, his experience was so scarring for the party that few followed in his footsteps for the next 50 years. Some 44 years later, however, no such treatment was visited upon his successor. Just a stone’s throw from Charlotte Street (now a tree-lined road populated by bungalows and 4×4 trucks) lies Crotona Park, where the former president is due to speak.

Thousands are queuing, impatiently, to squeeze through the five makeshift security gates to make it into the main area. Notwithstanding a few secret service personnel attempting to part the red sea of MAGA hats, the crowd is already boisterous. In typical New York fashion, local salesmen are haggling with supporters over the cost of various pieces of Trump merchandise; one offers to sell his Trump-on-the-cross shirt for $50 before slyly upping the price to $60 for his next customer. Another hawks a t-shirt reading “If u still hate Trump after this shitshow your commitment to stupidity is impressive” to a gleeful teenager.

This is Trump’s first rally in his hometown of New York in eight years. But Joe Biden’s lead in the state has slipped from 23% to single digits (9%) this year and there is little sign he is clawing any of that support back. Although the state — and the Bronx — remains solidly blue, it may only take a few seats in the House to give Republicans control of the lower chamber of Congress. Evidently, Trump smells blood.

“I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, but I’ve had enough,” Emilio says. “I stayed at home during the last election, but food prices are so bad now there is just no way I’m voting for Biden. I feel betrayed.” Emilio is here with his wife and three young children, who all hold their own “Never Surrender” placard featuring Trump’s mugshot. They’ve managed to secure a prime viewing spot for Trump, who takes to the stage after his day in court in Manhattan.

He is greeted by hordes of supporters, soaking in the adulation with his familiar half-pout. “I’m a New Yorker,” he proudly booms. “Out here, you had to have smarts, grit, and energy — and you had to have heart.” “This is where you came to make it big,” he continues, “but now it is a city in decline.”

It is a point not without merit. Crime may be falling in some areas, but major felony charges which include murder, rape, robbery are on the rise. New York also has the highest per capita government debt in the country, with the state projecting a budget gap of $4.3 billion in fiscal year 2025. This has been turbocharged by the influx of migrants into the city, which is estimated to cost $12 billion over three years, more than the city spends on fire and sanitation services combined. It’s no wonder, then, that the state has the highest emigration rate in the country.

But is Trump the man to fix it? “Name me another politician that would come to deep Bronx like this” Wayne, who is holding a “New York is TRUMP country” sign, says. “It shows that he actually gives a damn — unlike AOC and Biden.” I ask how Trump can fix the city if it is run by Democrats. “Because he’s a goddamn businessman and he knows how to get things done” — a point Trump repeats himself on stage.

Like Wayne, the Bronx crowd is loud, profane and assertive. They are, after all, New Yorkers. They may not look like Trump, but they certainly sound like him. His is the kind of voice that these locals would tune into on a drive home from the Yankees game on a Sunday afternoon, bemoaning the team’s lacklustre performance. Which is why, as Jamie Kirchick of the Brookings Institution accurately observed, everything makes a lot more sense when Trump’s comments are prefaced with “‘Donny from Queens, you’re on the air.” Giving his hot takes on everything from men in women’s sports to New York’s “third-world” subway system at the podium, Donny sees himself as New York’s everyman. He’s the guy who’s going to fix everything. “If a New Yorker can’t save this country, no one can,” he says. “Obviously, only I can save it”.

Suggested reading

A Trump dynasty will swiftly implode

By Malcom Kyeyune

Although Trump lost the Bronx by more than 300,000 votes in 2020, the swelling crowd suggests many more are now willing to hear what he has to say. He is speaking in the poorest congressional district in the country, and residents here seem tired of decades-long Democratic rule. Juan Ramirez, who works at a nearby bodega, says that his living situation became so serious last year that there were days where he had to choose between paying for fuel or food. “If I wasn’t able to get some food from my bodega, I’m not sure how I would have fed my family.”

Amid Trump’s growing support among ethnic minority groups, Ramirez is one of many Latinos abandoning the Democratic flock. “They took our votes for granted for too long,” he says. “They deserve to be punished for all the pain they’ve put us through.” And if the latest polls are anything to go by, he’s not alone. Some now show the former president edging out Joe Biden among Hispanic voters, with 46% supporting Trump versus 40% in favour of Biden — another reason why Trump may find favour here: the Bronx is 57% Hispanic, 28% black and just 8% white.

Ramirez has more to share, but he is distracted by a ruckus nearby; a group has caught wind of a roving New York Times reporter, who is trying to slink back into the press pack. One of the men confronting the reporter — a friend of Juan’s — is accusing her of furtively filming his exchange with friends. “I said I DID NOT WANT TO TALK to crooked media,” he screams at her. The message is received.

The crowd might have once been the Democrats’ rainbow coalition: in addition to Latinos, African-Americans and white voters, there are native Americans, Orthodox Jews, and even Albanians dressed in traditional clothing. All punctuate Trump’s speech with “let’s go Brandon!” and “USA, USA!” as he detours into an extended tangent about the importance of brine in ice rinks or starts reading lyrics from Al Wilson’s ‘The Snake’. And just as he feels that he might be losing them, Trump dials up the enthusiasm. “What a crowd!” He says. “This is like a love fest — I love you! Who said we’re not gonna win New York? We’re gonna win New York and win the whole thing!”

Suggested reading

Why America needs a monarchy

By Michael Cuenco

It is highly unlikely that Trump will, in fact, win New York. It has been 44 years since a Republican won the state and Biden won it handily in 2020. But green shoots for the GOP are starting to emerge: for the first time in 40 years, a Republican was elected to a city council seat in the Bronx. In Queens, the incumbent Republican Vickie Paladino was overwhelmingly re-elected against a Democratic challenger whom she beat by only a few hundred votes in 2021. Trump may not be the ultimate beneficiary of these changes, but he is certainly an accelerant.

Back in 2020, Biden ran a successful campaign by promising a return to normality. Most of the country, Democrats included, would concede that, on this score, he failed. Stubbornly high food and gas prices, two costly wars, and a crisis on the border, it is now Trump who claims to be the “common sense” candidate. As the only candidate to face 92 felony charges in an election year, this is a tall claim. But given that Biden, who has record low job approval polling, is trailing in nearly all of the swing states, Trump fever now appears to be spreading to the Democrats’ innermost strongholds. Even if New York doesn’t turn red, this rally was the surest signal yet that Republicans are feeling increasingly confident about parking their tanks on the Democrats’ lawn.

Fifty years later, aged 70, Robert F. Kennedy has finally thrown his hat into the ring. He wants to return America to its Camelot era — that brief period of hope and promise during his uncle’s presidency — amid widespread disillusionment with the two main contenders for office. It’s a hard task. No third-party presidential candidate has received over 10% of the vote this century. But with RFK currently polling at 11.7% in the RCP poll of polls, could this election be different?

To carve out a path to power RFK must gather a vast number of signatures to enter the ballot in each state; in New York, which has the most stringent ballot laws in the country, he has to obtain 45,000 signatures in 45 days. But that’s what he’s hoping to do in Long Island. “No other presidential candidate in history has got this many signatures in such a short space of time,” he says. “We must vote out of hope — not fear.”

Invoking Franklin Roosevelt, he continues: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — is anyone here going to vote out of fear?” The massive crowd, crammed into the opulent Villa Lombardy, obligingly responds with a collective “No!” Some of the thousand-strong throng are long-time devotees, while others are merely Kennedy-curious. Yet what they all share is a political promiscuity that draws from both Left and Right. Steve, a musician, tells me that over the past three elections, he has moved from Bernie Sanders (until the DNC “rigged” the selection) in 2016 to Trump in 2020 to RFK Jr in 2024. “Kennedy talks about issues that the other two candidates totally ignore,” he says. “This is Kennedy against the uni-party — something I thought Trump did until he became President.”

It’s a sentiment that Kennedy himself has tried to tap into. He insists that Biden and Trump may appear different as far as disposition and ideology are concerned, but these differences only exist in the “culture war” space. When it comes to the real, or as he puts it the “existential”, issues facing the country — America’s debt, forever wars and chronic disease — there is very little to distinguish the two.

Suggested reading

Why RFK Jr is the Silicon Valley candidate

By Daniel Kalder

But there is a chink in the Kennedy armour: his position on Israel. Despite claiming to be the anti-war candidate, he has offered full-throated support for the Jewish state, calling Palestinians the “most pampered people in the world” and questioning the purpose of a ceasefire.

“The Israel stance is problematic,” says David, a student who volunteers on the RFK campaign. He agrees that it is a position which sits uncomfortably with his candidate’s dovish worldview: “I’m not part of the whole ceasefire, pro-Palestine movement but I do see the need for that war not to be expanded and for the US not to get involved in it.” He believes that Kennedy Jr would still be a better bet than Biden, who has “promoted the war machine” and “weaponised federal agencies”.

Students, though, are not the only ones fed up with America’s forever wars. Suzanne, another Bernie-Trump-RFK supporter, admires Kennedy for his commitment to prising the US out of “foreign misadventures”. “He’s not an America First-type like Trump,” she says. “His positions are much more considered — he doesn’t want to withdraw us from the world, but merely thinks that we should not be funding all these wars abroad.” Along with various other people I speak to there, Suzanne has particular ire for the man she voted for in 2016. “Trump talked a big game, but the debt blew up under him and he was the one that implemented all the Covid shutdowns…I’ll never forgive him for that.”

While RFK’s views on Covid are well-documented, ranging from the credible to the crankish, it would be misleading to characterise all his supporters as militant anti-vaxxers. Many would rather emphasise the importance of medical freedom in general. “I was vaccinated but I was against the shutdowns and mandates,” John Myers tells me. “But this isn’t just a Covid thing — it’s about the right to choose what’s best for you and not have the government tell me what to do.”

This libertarian streak runs through all Kennedy’s supporters. They clutch signs reading “restore the constitution”, “farms not pharma” and “LIBERTY!”. And they believe in him. His heterodox worldview means that he can appear to be all things to all people: to progressives, Kennedy is the great environmentalist who took on Monsanto and cleaned up the Hudson river; to conservatives, he is a God-fearing Christian who believes in the constitution (including the second amendment), small government and individual liberty. And as a result, he attracts people from both sides of the political aisle. People such as Darleen, who is a lifelong Democrat, and Bruce, who would never vote for Biden. “I’ve never been happier to support a candidate than Robert F. Kennedy Jr,” he says proudly. Darleen, meanwhile, is simply grateful that there is someone running for the presidency who doesn’t just talk a good game on the environment, but has the CV to show for it too. “The world is on fire — literally sometimes,” she says. “Bobby is the one to put it all out.”

The crowd is certainly more Mega than Maga. Some doff their green “Make Earth Great Again” caps to each other, while others sashay around in tie-dye T-shirts looking for people to add to the ballot. Kennedy himself remains an ardent environmentalist (nine years ago, he claimed to have called for a law that “punished” people who are sceptical of global warming), touting his record as a Riverkeeper prior to running for office. This New Age vibe in the room contrasts vividly with the few Boomer liberals who came for a quick hit of Kennedy nostalgia. “I loved his father so much,” says 81-year-old Francis. “Bobby is made from the same stuff — that’s why I’ll be voting for him.”

Camelot nostalgia surely plays some role in Kennedy Jr’s popularity. But RFK takes inspiration from a different myth: Sisyphus, who was consigned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity. This is who Kennedy directly compared himself with on a podcast, saying “for me to have a concrete task that I know is right. I feel like it is a gift…the more people heap abuse on me, the bigger the gift is”.

And the abuse is piling up. Most recently by Donald Trump, who castigated RFK as a “Radical Left Liberal” after new polling revealed the independent was stealing more support from Trump than Biden. But Democrats are worried too, with advisers going after Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, warning that a vote for Bobby is a vote for Trump. “Democrats should use every tool available to them to expose the truth about Kennedy and Shanahan,” said Doug Gordon, a Democratic operative. “Expose the fact that both Kennedy and Shanahan have peddled conspiracy theories for years. Expose the fact that their run is helping [former President Trump] return to the White House,” he added.

These threats may speak more to the paranoid mindset of campaign managers, though, than the reality on the ground. It is not uncommon for independent candidates to poll well until the election draws nearer, whereupon voters tend to get cold feet. And unlike fellow challenger candidates, Jill Stein and Cornel West, Kennedy Jr is not party affiliated, making ballot access a great deal harder.

But there is something different about Kennedy. Two decades ago, he was a liberal darling: he had been named one of Time magazine’s “heroes” of the planet, described by Rolling Stone as one of “100 agents of change” and called “America’s toxin avenger” by People magazine. In 2008, Barack Obama was even urged to select Bobby for head of the Environmental Protection Agency to “endear” the new President with liberals. Now, he is persona non grata in Democratic circles, but his journey from Left to political homelessness is one that many other Americans shared too.

He is the avatar of a newly emerging political and cultural climate, a mood even, that is distrusting of those in power. Burned by the 2008 recession, dismayed by the Great Awokening, and radicalised by Covid, many in the country are seeking something different. That both of the two leading presidential candidates have devoted resources to attacking the outsider candidate underscores just how unpredictable his effect on the race could be.

For now, Kennedy has made the ballot in nine states, and this week, he is expected to announce a further three. Given the tepid levels of enthusiasm for both of the main candidates — and a desire for something new — there might just be a tiny window for an insurgent candidate to exploit. For his part, Bobby will be hoping that the task will be Herculanean, not Sisyphean.

Schnecksville might seem like an odd choice of venue: barely 3,000 people live here and until recently, the land was home to 1,800 acres of apple, pear and peach orchards. The politics of the area, though, are far from conventional. Schnecksville is in Lehigh County, a swing region in a battleground state that Biden won by roughly 80,000 votes in 2020 and Trump won by an even smaller margin (45,000) in 2016. It is so competitive that the neighbouring Northampton County voted for Obama, Trump, and then Biden in 2012, 2016 and 2020 respectively. What happens in this region could presage what happens elsewhere in the country later this year.

The mood here is buoyant. I arrive at 4pm, roughly four hours before Trump was due to speak but at least eight hours after his most devoted followers arrived. “I got here at 6am,” Sarah Wyncer tells me. “But there were still a good few hundred people ahead of me”. Wyncer points to a queue snaking through muddy fields lined with pick-up trucks draped in Trump regalia, which range from the heroic (Trump superimposed onto Rambo’s body) to the profane (“#FJB”).

Reports of Iran’s drone strikes on Israel slowly filter through the crowd, but the news does not dampen the mood. If anything, it gees them up. “Fuck Joe Biden” chants ripple down the line moments before Trump takes to the stage. Those who can’t get into the main area climb on top of gravel heaps, JCB diggers and pick-up trucks to get a better view of their man.

Suggested reading

The myth of MAGA's working-class roots

By Les Leopold

At around 8pm, an hour late, the former President finally takes to the stage. Blaring from every speaker is Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless America” and a sea of red Maga hats bob from side to side in unison. Ambling on stage, more bronzed than usual, he raises a fist of defiance to one section of the crowd and applauds another. He milks the atmosphere, shuffling from one side of the stage to the other, until he slows to a standstill. “The people of Israel are under attack right now,” booms the former President. “That’s because we’ve shown great weakness. It would not have happened if we were in office”. 

He chews on every syllable, repeating words he fears may not get a reaction: “they said inflation was transitory… they said it was temporary — temporary, they said”. Everything is in the superlative — Biden is the “worst president of our lifetime”, Trump is the “greatest” — and the tangents remain as delightfully esoteric as ever. “Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was,” he drawls. “It was so interesting and so vicious and so horrible and so beautiful in so many different ways… Gettysburg — wow.”

Any time Trump, ever the impresario, senses that he’s losing the crowd, he quickly returns to the classics: inflation, crime, the border and, of course, “crooked” Joe. “Everything he touches turns to shit,” he states. “We’re like a house that’s burning down and it all happened in the last three years.” The crowd howl in agreement, splintering Trump’s comments with whoops, jeers and screams of “USA”. Megan (not her real name) nods along solemnly. She is standing next to me with her puppy called January (named after the 6th) nibbling at her ankle. I ask why she thinks the house is burning down. “Globalists took over,” she says. “And if Trump loses, then they’re going to be back in power once again. The streets will be lawless.”

Megan says all this with a kind of casual insouciance, as if the prospect of civil unrest was just another item on her shopping list that she needed to pick up. The 56-year-old tells me that she’s been in and out of prison, but likes Trump because he “lays down the law”. “Look, I’ve had my issues but I’ve always respected the police,” she says. “During the BLM era, the police were treated like dirt and that appalled me. Trump was the only one trying to bring back some respect for our men in blue.” 

Suggested reading

My night out with the Proud Boys

By Ian Birrell

Megan introduces me to her fiancé, who works in roofing. He used to run his own business, but claims he was undercut by cheaper — and illegal — Mexican labour. “During Obama’s presidency, I had a pretty good business,” says Jake (not his real name). “But during the second term I could see all this cheap work coming through and it was hurting my bottom line. Everyone kept telling me to just use the Mexican workers and save on costs. But I didn’t think that was fair to my American workers.” Eventually, Jake had to close the business. “Nobody seemed to care about how bad the problem was — until Trump came”. 

As voters in Pennsylvania, people like Megan and Jake will have an outsize influence on the election. The state has 19 electoral votes, but it remains a toss-up as to where those votes may go in 2024. According to the RCP poll of polls, Biden has the slenderest of advantages over Trump: 0.1%, which is why the President will be making three different stops of his own across the state this month. 

Both men will be fighting hard for the overwhelmingly white, working-class vote in the state. Historically, Lehigh Valley was populated by the Pennsylvania Dutch, described by one local historian as “the most conservative people in America”. But, in recent years, the make-up of the region has begun to change. Over the last couple of decades, the Valley has become the East Coast’s “supply-chain empire” for transporting one-click goods on interstate highways. Given its proximity to New York and Philadelphia, the Lehigh Valley serves as a node for 100 million people living on the eastern seaboard to receive their deliveries, bringing new jobs and revenue to the region. 

That has also caused a population boom, much of it driven by Latinos who moved to the area in search of work. Allenstown is now a majority-Hispanic city — a demographic that Trump has been actively trying to court. A recent poll found that the GOP contender now edges out Biden among Hispanic voters, with 46% supporting the former president. A separate poll shows that 42% of Latinos now support a border wall — up 12 points from December 2021. In a state where Latino political power is growing, this could pose a threat to Biden’s re-election prospects.

But it is not his appeal to Latinos that makes Trump rallies so different from any other. It is how he electrifies a segment of the population in a way that no other politician can. These are people who weren’t interested in politics before Trump and, troublingly, won’t be interested in it after him. In some respect, it is a revolt of the disenfranchised. So much was confirmed by Megan, who told me that she hadn’t cast a single vote for a politician until Trump arrived in 2016, and she likely wouldn’t cast another after he left. “No one can replace him,” she says.

Unfortunately, though, someone does have to replace him. Standing among the Trump faithful on that chilly Pennsylvania night, I asked several supporters who they would vote for after Trump left the Oval Office for the last time in January 2029 (assuming he won). A few murmured “Vivek”, while others mooted — semi-seriously — a third term. “The forces of evil are circling, but Trump can at least delay it if he’s in office,” Megan said. “I’m a Christian and I believe that the forces of good will ultimately prevail. So even after he goes, I have faith the good will prevail.” Yet what form this “good” would take remained unclear. 

Not everyone’s here for Trump. One man wearing a Maga hat cautiously beckons me to one side as I am leaving. “I heard your accent — why are you here?” I tell him, before he confesses to me that he’s an undercover Biden fan. He pulls off his Maga hat as if it is some great disguise: “but I’ve got to admit — this guy can talk”. And even though he talked for over an hour, it wasn’t long enough for some. “That was one of the best speeches I’ve ever listened to,” a father told his son, while another stood transfixed, as if trying to commit the whole thing to memory. 

Despite the festive atmosphere it was hard to ignore an element of despair that seemed to flow through the crowd too. Nearly everyone I spoke to expressed doubt that “they” would let Trump win, and even if he did, “they” would be working to bring him down. “Whether it’s in the courtroom or at the ballot box, they will never let it happen,” Cindy, a bartender, tells me. “It’s just too important to leave to chance”. But what will she do if Trump loses — or isn’t allowed to win? “Go back to serving beer, I guess.”

So this is how the world ends: not with a bang, but a whimper. If we really are on the cusp of civil war, then few soldiers-in-waiting were to be found in this crowd. Once the show was over, the crowd quietly made its way home. The same surely won’t be said of Trump. 

Cheney was referring to Saddam Hussein, but it is not difficult to imagine the current President saying something similar about his Russian counterpart. Just last week, Joe Biden stated that Vladimir Putin was “not joking” about the use of nuclear weapons, warning that “we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis”. Cheney’s hawkish worldview has been reinvigorated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This time, however, those advocating restraint — the “realists” — are no longer just opponents, they are now enemies too.

In the past fortnight, the realists have been described as “intellectually bankrupt”, “pro-fascist” and “Putin apologists” — and that’s just in one article. It is a continuation of a trend that became prominent during the Covid era, in which it was no longer enough to question the argument, but to question the morality and the motives of the person making them too. Rather than being just wrong, proponents of realism — like the lockdown sceptics before them — are viewed as dangerous and morally flawed.

A diffuse network of intellectuals, think tanks, commentators, and politicians (on both the Left and Right), realists do not form any kind of cohesive bloc. All hew to a vague notion that America should act with restraint abroad, but have little else in common. There is neither a value system they wish to impart, nor a broad, all-encompassing ideology that holds them all together. This makes realism a modest doctrine; it doesn’t lend itself to extremism and Manichaean world-views.

Unlike idealists, who emphasise the importance of spreading democracy and human rights abroad, realists believe that countries are guided by self-interest, not abstract values. They eschew the Disneyfied view of the world of the kind recently expressed by President Biden, in which he characterised the escalating Ukrainian conflict as “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force”.

Suggested reading

Is China about to turn on Russia?

By Nathan Levine

Such enthusiastic support for Ukraine is a natural symptom of the moral absolutism he displayed during the pandemic. It forgoes rational debate in favour of a moral impulse to be seen to be doing something, even if the costs of those actions are not fully considered. However noble the intention may be, the results are often tragic, as Afghanistan (cost: $2.313 trillion), Iraq ($2.4 trillion), Syria ($1.2 trillion) and Libya ($567 billion) attest. Likewise, the cost of pandemic mitigation is still being calculated, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the economic and social consequences were seriously underestimated.

Yet for all their policy failures, America’s idealist wing appears to have suffered few professional setbacks. Joe Biden’s foreign policy team isn’t all that different from Obama’s; Thomas Friedman, who once boasted in 2003 that “we could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could”, still lunches with the President.

Compare this to the almost immediate backlash realists faced after the Ukraine invasion. Until 24 February 2022, John Mearsheimer was a relatively anonymous IR professor at the University of Chicago who gave scholarly lectures on the clash between liberalism and nationalism in America. As one of the country’s foremost realists, he had been interested in the Ukraine question for some time, arguing that Nato enlargement was to blame for Russia’s antagonistic relations with the West. In 2015, he gave a lecture on the subject, which subsequently went viral after the invasion.

Mearsheimer turned into an overnight pariah. Weeks after the lecture was dredged up, students at his university signed an open letter explaining that they were “deeply pained” to learn that Mearsheimer was “propagating Putinism” and asserting that his actions were “extremely detrimental for our country”. They even demanded to know if he was on the Russian payroll. Meanwhile, other prominent realists such as Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky were roundly condemned for suggesting that Ukraine may have to cede territory to Russia in order to prevent further bloodshed. In Chomsky’s framing, Ukraine had to make concessions because Russia was like an incoming hurricane. “You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, ‘I don’t like hurricanes’ or ‘I don’t recognise hurricanes’,” he said.

Suggested reading

Who will stop Putin from going nuclear?

By Philip Cunliffe

In response, Chomsky and “other like-minded intellectuals” were subjected to an open letter which accused them of “adding further fuel to the Russian war machine by spreading views very much akin to Russian propaganda”. Kissinger, who proposed the handover of Luhansk and Donetsk to Russia, was even admonished by Suella Braverman, who argued that the former diplomat was “appeasing” Russia. “People like Henry Kissinger believe that if we give the Russian dictator some of what he wants,” she wrote in June. “He’ll stop the war and we can return to normal.”

Such efforts to discredit the opinions of these academics bear a striking resemblance to the freighted criticisms thrown around during the Covid era. Following the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration, questions about the group’s funding were swiftly raised. In the same way that students believed that Mearsheimer was funded by Russia, the implication was that these scientists, Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Battacharya, did not hold their views sincerely — they were merely a trojan horse for a wealthy libertarian think tank (Gupta even felt the need to profess her Left-wing credentials afterwards).

Implicit in all these charges was a conviction that these people were not just wrong, but on the wrong side of history too. Just as Conservative politicians who entertained lockdown scepticism were denounced for their “dangerous” beliefs, those who now outline a plan for peace in Ukraine — be it Elon Musk, the Pope, or Roger Waters — face a similar reaction. The lockdown sceptics were willing to sacrifice at-risk humans to save the economy; the realists were willing to let a country perish in service of great-power politics.

None of this is to suggest that realists have always been right. Predicting that Kyiv would fall in 72 hours, for instance, many underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian army and the incompetence of Russia’s. More recently, the claim by some realists that the US was behind the Nord Stream pipeline attack seems to have been disproved. And for every lockdown sceptic that slips into Covid denialism, there are realists who start off by asking legitimate questions about American military aid to Ukraine, and end by having to delete tweets that teeter on Holocaust revisionism.

Suggested reading

My 'free speech' college is silencing me

By Christopher Nadon

On the bigger questions, however, each passing day adds succour to the realist argument. The fear of an escalation continues to grow, with politicians such as John Bolton calling for Putin to go and Tobias Ellwood MP claiming that strategic ambiguity is “no longer a deterrent”. Add to that former US National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s assertion that we are already living through a Third World War, and it’s easy to see why realists are urging caution.

Putin and Covid are both malevolent forces, but how we respond to them is — and should be — a contested subject. In the same way that our response to Covid benefitted from having lockdown sceptics in the tent rather than out, the same must apply to realists. They are, after all, raising important questions about Ukraine’s interests versus our own, and the degree to which it is escalating beyond our control. Absent that, America is almost certain to repeat the same foreign-policy errors as before. And when a nuclear power is in play, that adds an entirely new — and potentially catastrophic — dimension.

But in Washington, the seeds of today’s political discontent were already being sown. Two years after Clinton had swept to power, the Republicans took both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Never again, battle-hardened Republicans promised to themselves, would they stay locked out of power for that long.

In its place spawned a new grassroots conservatism that was angry and uncompromising, finding its voice in a conservative “under-media”, as Andrew Breitbart termed it, that included Drudge Report (1995), Fox (1996) and Newsmax (1997). But it was Fox, which first aired 25 years ago today, that dominated, providing an outlet to a white Middle America that felt neglected and ignored by Washington and the established media.

Politics was indeed becoming angrier, but a deeper, spiritual malaise had also been spreading beneath the surface. The cultural and sexual revolution of the Sixties, Vietnam, Watergate and the oil price crisis chipped away at the post-war building blocks of American society, particularly in the heartlands where wages were stagnating and jobs were moving offshore. By 1994, trust in the Government sunk to its lowest point ever.

This was the environment into which Fox was born. Its benefactor, Rupert Murdoch, was so desperate to seize it that he offered to air Fox for free — and even paid cable companies $20 a subscriber.

Suggested reading

Can the South escape its demons?

By Joel Kotkin

But to fully understand how Fox became the news empire that it is today, you need to understand the man central to the entire operation. His name was not Rupert Murdoch, but Roger Ailes. The Chairman, as he became known, was a grotesque figure whose jowls would expand like a toad’s vocal sac when he was irate (an employee once put a frame around a hole in the wall and wrote: “Don’t mess with Roger Ailes.”).

This anger — part pathological, part driven by what he saw as a corrosion of American values — informed much of Fox’s coverage. This became clear from the very first sequence of the channel’s launch: criminals, flag-burning, and protests formed the basis of Fox’s nightly news coverage. These were topics that the liberal media refused to cover, argued Ailes, and America wanted to hear them. As he later said:

“I’ll tell you what television didn’t do at the time. … It didn’t reflect what people really thought. I mean, they’re sitting there saying, ‘Wait a minute, New York’s going broke, Los Angeles is broke, the United States is broke, everything the government has run is broke, Social Security is broke, Medicare is broke, the military is broke… Why do we want these guys making all these decisions for us?’”

A former Nixon operative, Ailes learned from his boss how to mine and re-package feelings of resentment back to his base. He cultivated an us-vs-them mentality among viewers (and voters) that put them on a permanent war footing. Using tough, earthy language, news anchors would speak to viewers like they were foot soldiers, warning them that Christians were under attack, liberals were starting a war and the media was out to get you.

Crucially, there was always an enemy, which again stemmed from Ailes’s own paranoia. In fact, so petrified was the Chairman of being attacked by gay rights activists in the 1990s that he installed bomb proof glass in his office window. When Fox was first established, he situated its newsroom in a windowless bunker replete with an in-house research unit — known as the “brain room” — that required special security clearance to gain access. “The brain room is where Willie Horton comes from,” said one Fox insider. “It’s where the evil resides.”

Suggested reading

How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

Indeed, there was something faintly ridiculous about the whole thing. On the Fox sofa would sit a chopstick-thin blonde wedged between two Irish-American walruses telling viewers that their country was under threat. They were, in effect, trying to mobilise a patriot army, even though the median age of that army was 65. Programmes would therefore be interrupted by commercials (of which there were many) that were largely geared towards class action hip-replacement lawsuits and wonder drugs for erectile dysfunction. It was like an army general having to remind his soldiers to check their catheter bags before going to battle.

But there was a scintilla of self-awareness too; a nod and wink to the camera that this was entertainment as much as it was news. In fact, Fox had one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN, and the organisation did very little in the way of original reporting. Instead, it decided what the news was, telling its viewers what to care about, and sometimes even waiting for Democrat leaders to respond to a story before it took the opposite line (as it did with Obama and the George Zimmerman shooting).

All the while, Fox’s influence grew, far outstripping that of its rivals. By 2008, it had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, pulling in over two million viewers a night. Politically, it was pushing viewers to the Right, too. One study showed that in districts where Fox News was available, there was a Rightward drift in voting patterns while another found that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.

Such was Fox’s influence that Republican leaders would beg Ailes and other executives to ordain them; even Barack Obama — who faced grim levels of racist coverage before and during his presidency — held a behind-closed-doors meeting, agreeing to do more interviews in exchange for dialling down his coverage. “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us,” said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. “Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.” Having tipped the electoral balance in George W. Bush’s favour by prematurely declaring him president in 2000, this was undoubtedly true. Ailes, too, was keenly aware of this fact. By 2010 Fox’s power was so great that the chairman declared that he wanted to “elect the next president”.

Yet it was not until Trump that Fox and the White House became almost inextricably linked. Throughout Trump’s presidency, it was never quite clear if Fox was the tail wagging the dog or the other way around. Between 2018-2020, Trump live-tweeted Fox news programmes 1,100 times, so much so that Fox and Friends began talking to Trump rather than about Trump. On one occasion, the hosts of Fox and Friends asked the President to flash his lights on and off in the White House if he was watching.

More from this author

You can't cure racism

By James Billot

This close relationship between the President and network was bound to turn ugly if and when the two fell out. This occurred after the 2020 election when Trump deemed Fox to be insufficiently zealous in toeing his stolen election line. He called on his supporters to instead watch OAN and Newsmax, two Right-wing insurgents that made Fox look like C-Span: in one viral OAN clip from last month, a presenter pulled the plug on an interview with a veteran for criticising Trump, as well as his predecessors, for the country’s military problems in Afghanistan. He then pledged his allegiance on camera to the dear leader.

But Fox’s rivals were not just queuing up on the Right. During last year’s election, moderates and Democrats also flocked to MSNBC and CNN, which led to Fox suffering its worst ratings in 20 years. For the most part, though, Fox remains dominant. In recent months, it has restored its position at the top of the leaderboard, securing an average prime time audience of 2.4 million nightly viewers.

And so Fox News remains king of Red America. It’s certainly helped that every week, liberal late night talk show hosts laugh at the dumb rubes featured on Tucker Carlson Tonight or the Ingraham Angle. But what they don’t understand is that this mockery and condescension were the basis for Fox’s birth: a platform for disenfranchised, disillusioned conservatives who felt looked down upon by coastal elites and Washington. Every sneer, jibe and insult since only justifies Ailes’s project. This is Fox’s world; America just lives in it.

The outbreak of this second virus was confirmed earlier this month by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, which issued a statement declaring racism an “epidemic” that posed a “serious public health threat”. Citing a “growing body of research”, the CDC director called on her agency — and America at large — to “confront the impact of racism”.

This is, on the face of it, a peculiar focus for America’s leading public health agency; one might think it would be preoccupied with the other pandemic ravaging the country. And yet the CDC’s statement was all too typical of today’s medical establishment. The American Psychological Association recently announced that America was “living in a racism pandemic”; the American Medical Association has called racism an “urgent public health threat”; and The Lancet has declared it  a “public health crisis we can no longer ignore”.

It is easy to dismiss such rhetoric as “woke” nonsense, typical of “progressive” America’s obsession with race. But there is something striking — and troubling — about the way in which racism has evolved from a social problem into a medical one. For it is not simply a case of well-meaning medical practitioners parroting the language of social justice to “assuage their liberal guilt”, as a former member of President Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board put it. From a public health perspective, it has potentially fatal ramifications.

Take, for example, the “anti-racist agenda for medicine” recently published in The Boston Review by two Harvard doctors. In it, the pair argue that, because colour-blind solutions have failed to achieve racial equity in health care, they have had to introduce “race-explicit interventions” in their Boston hospital. These have culminated in a pilot programme of preferential care for black and “Latinx” heart failure patients, due to launch this spring; instead of triaging their patients according to the seriousness of their condition, race has become a mitigating — and deciding — factor.

In effect, it will mean that a black person with a less serious condition could be prioritised over a white patient on account of their skin colour. “Building on calls for reparations,” the two doctors explain, “we call this a vision for medical restitution.” Here, writ large at the heart of the medical establishment, was Critical Race Theory — the idea that the US is a fundamentally racist country and that race is a social construction designed to oppress and exploit people of colour.

More from this author

How cartoons survived the great awokening

By James Billot

In many ways, it was only a matter of time. As far back as 2010, the American Journal of Public Health published an article titled “Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis”, in which two Professors of Public Health argued that only a “race-conscious” approach to healthcare would be able to combat racial inequities. Based on “race equity and social justice principles”, they encouraged the development of solutions that “bridged gaps” in health, housing and employment.

In the years since, this medicalisation of Critical Race Theory remained purely academic, largely confined to Professors looking to rack up a few journal citations and bask in the warm glow of approval from fellow Left-wing academics. But after the death of George Floyd, that changed overnight.

As Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country, politicians began likening the scourge of racism to a health emergency, calling it a “pandemic on a pandemic”. The mood was captured by Austin’s mayor, who cried out: “Racism is literally killing black and brown people. It’s a public health crisis, and it’s beyond time to treat it as such”.

Suggested reading

It's all America's fault

By Ed West

Public health officials agreed. “While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid,” said one infectious disease expert, “there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes”. Meanwhile Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President who had previously denounced anti-lockdown protests, was decidedly more equivocal about BLM: “It’s a delicate balance because the reasons for demonstrating are valid, but the demonstration puts one at additional risk.”

Soon after, America’s public health bodies began discussing racism in terms formerly only used to describe Covid-19. The American Medical Association, for example, recently announced that it wanted to increase funding into the “epidemiology of risks and damages related to racism”, while the CDC’s new Racism and Health Program seeks to “build a healthier America for all” by confronting racial and health disparities.

Yet the most striking feature of these statements is their similarity. Each one promises to “acknowledge” the damaging effects of structural and systemic racism and supports the “development” of policy to combat racism.

But what does this mean in practice? In New York, for instance, the City Department of Health, in an attempt to address low testing and high positivity rates among minority communities, launched a hyper-local testing programme. It proved a success and resulted in 8,730 tests across the two postcodes. So far, so sensible.

However, compare that to the approach of the Milwaukee Health Department, which, in order to “own the work of racism being a public health issue”, devised its own “health equity initiative”. Contained within a “three-step process”, it proposed the introduction of racial equity training, the development of “a racial equity framework” and the creation of safe spaces and a “welcoming, inclusive” organisation.

This latter approach is characteristic of Critical Race Theory, which disregards evidence-led specifics in favour of ideology-based generalities. But in the field of medicine, this is particularly dangerous. American medical insurance companies, for example, now attribute lower levels of depression among black people and Latinos to under-diagnosis, even though suicide rates among white people are three times higher. Yes, depression doesn’t always manifest itself through suicide, but it is strange, as Wesley Yang notes, that Blue Cross, which provides insurance to a third of Americans, “sees ‘not enough depressed black people’ as a problem that has to be fixed”.

Suggested reading

How Critical Race Theory captured the Church

By Giles Udy

Elsewhere, certain states are adopting race-prioritised vaccine rollouts — a move first mooted by the CDC last year. These states, including Vermont and Montana, claim that, even after controlling for income, underlying health conditions and other variables that potentially affect the disease, there is still a racial disparity.

Put to one side the disturbing historical parallels of dividing Americans by their skin colour — it is not even clear that this racialised approach to vaccines makes sense from a public health perspective. After all, there are a number of other issues — such as education, access and outreach — that are also hindering the vaccine rollout to non-white communities. Moreover, as one former Biden official warned, it could even have the opposite effect and deter uptake if minorities fear that they are being treated like “guinea pigs”.

In reality, all that has resulted from this policy is a racially distorted vaccine rollout that is likely to fuel resentment in an already divided country. Today’s doctors are, of course, doubtlessly well-intentioned in their attempts to cure America’s societal ills. But shifting attitudes on race is a long and difficult process — and not something that can be remedied with a three-step public health initiative.

Morty tries to wriggle free, but the stranger’s grip tightens. Growling into his ear to “let this happen”, the stranger thrusts Morty against the bathroom sink and then into a bathroom cubicle. Morty’s cries for help go unheard — it is only when he throws a lucky punch that the stranger is caught off-guard, and ends up head-first in the toilet, unconscious.

If this scene makes for difficult reading, viewing it is not much easier. But it is also extremely funny — principally because the assailant is an oversized, anthropomorphic jellybean. Still, this is quite heavy stuff for a cartoon show — a far cry from the light-heartedness of The Simpsons— and yet it is becoming the new norm in animated comedy. Edgy content including substance abuse, sexual impropriety and depression have all come to define the latest wave of adult cartoons, which are flourishing in an industry that, ironically, can no longer take a joke.

Suggested reading

Who called the fun police?

By Richard Godwin

Save for a few small but ultimately inconsequential acts of insurrection, a culture of conformity has quietly swept through comedy. The fear of losing one’s career to a bad joke or a past transgression has left comedians afraid to take on risky material, and forced directors to leave the genre altogether. Just look at Will Ferrell’s career, an actor who went from Blades of Glory and Anchorman to films like Daddy’s Home and Holmes & Watson, to track comedy’s precipitous decline. With a few exceptions, Hollywood hasn’t made a genuinely funny film in the last 10 years.

Adult cartoons are filling this comedic vacuum, thanks to shows such as F is For Family, which centres on a dysfunctional 1970s Irish-American suburban family; Bojack Horseman, a talking horse dealing from the fallout of his TV career; and Rick and Morty (which returns to screens on Thursday), whose eponymous characters travel to different galaxies for a series of zany adventures. By refusing to subscribe to the narrowing confines of ‘acceptable’ comedy, they are fronting a counterculture that is providing a safe haven for disaffected comedy fans around the world.

To some degree, cartoons have always played this role. Shows such as South Park and Family Guy revel in causing as much outrage as possible while also airing on mainstream networks. That is largely due to the form: cartoon characters are detached from reality in a way that actors are not, allowing them to push harder against the boundaries of acceptable discourse. It would take a brave actor to sing ‘I need a Jew’ or play the Queen killing herself, particularly in today’s hyper-politicised, knee-jerk climate.

Suggested reading

Why the woke can't make jokes

By Gareth Roberts

Shock is a common currency in adult cartoons. But when overused, it becomes redundant and ineffectual. So in its singular pursuit of controversy, South Park regularly strays into this territory: jokes can come across as crass and boorish, and viewers grow numb. But as we follow the lives of Frank Murphy and Bojack in F is For Family and Bojack Horseman, this shock is deployed for pathos, not humour, which gives these two-dimensional characters a more 3-D feel.

Both protagonists, haunted (and taunted) by memories of poor life decisions decades earlier, are deeply unhappy: this manifests through depression in Bojack and rage in Frank. The latter even strikes his children. In one confrontation with his son, this anger unravels to reveal a deep self-loathing. On confronting his son about failing school, Kevin retorts that he hates school, and Frank responds: “Well I hate my life but I keep on doing it; I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got dependents and I’ve got to go downtown every damn day to run that airport.” Dismissively, Kevin replies: “Please, you’re just a baggage handler”, before Frank squares up to him and says: “What the fuck did you just call me?”

Taken out of context, there is not much humour in this scene. If anything, it is an all-too-real display of what goes on behind the closed doors of a family home — so much so that we might forget that we are watching a cartoon. And yet, it is this visceral sense of the real in the unreal — this cartoon realism — that makes the show so funny.

Similarly in Bojack Horseman, never mind that the character is a talking horse, he still suffers from human vices — narcissism, substance abuse, and sexual infidelity. Over entire seasons, we watch the side effects of this destructive behaviour play out. So, for instance, when an old friend dying of terminal cancer refuses to accept Bojack’s apology for abandoning him many years ago, our hero is left without closure. Throughout the remaining seasons of the show, the shadow of incidents like these hang over nearly all of his interactions with other characters. And in refusing to exculpate Bojack, the writers ask us the same questions of its protagonist as they do of our own culture: will we forgive Bojack and more importantly, should we?

Suggested reading

Why coronavirus is a laughing matter

By Giles Fraser

Neither Bojack Horseman nor F is For Family provide any kind of moral guidance. Part of their appeal is that they are non-didactic, which is rare today. In recent years, late night comedy shows like the BBC’s The Mash Report and SNL have sounded more like political rallies than satirical programmes. Since 2016, opening monologues have descended into virtue-signalling rants attacking Brexit, Trump and pretty much anything mildly Right-wing. Even figures inside the BBC have expressed their displeasure at pastiche shows like The Mash Report, describing it as “self satisfied, self adulatory, unchallenged Left-wing propaganda”.

Of course, there are clear commercial incentives at play — audiences are typically urban, liberal and middle-class and networks will cater to that — but it is a troubling indictment on the health of our comedic culture when clapping during these shows is more common than laughter.

That is not to suggest that Trump and Brexit aren’t fair game. It might be low-hanging fruit, but those sides won and comedy’s golden rule is to never punch down. Yet while there is a tacit acknowledgement of the political ascendancy of the populist Right, it is a different story when it comes to the cultural power of the progressive Left.

Some comedians, like Dave Chappelle, have tried to address this. In his  ‘Stick and Stones’ special on Netflix, Chapelle went after some of the Left’s shibboleths: the LGBTQ community, the #MeToo movement and cancel culture. His reward was a vicious backlash calling him “cruel”, “transphobic”, “misogynistic”, saying that he had “lost his comic touch” (in spite of winning a Grammy for the performance). The chasm between critics and audience could not have been more stark on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes: the former giving the show a 0% rating while fans gave it 99%. Chapelle survived the criticism, but as he wryly noted in the special, “this is the worst time ever to be a celebrity”.

Adult cartoons are an igloo of shelter in this blizzard of hysteria. Even so, cracks do appear. Most notably when Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian-American character from The Simpsons in the character was removed from the show because of its negative perpetuation of South Asian stereotypes. The cancellation of Apu marked a new step in the culture wars: that cartoons, like words and people, could be removed from the public sphere as easily as they entered.

With 2.5 million people expected to tune in to the mid-season return of Rick and Morty next week, the show’s success could serve as an example for others to follow. The health and vigour of the adult cartoon industry shows that the appetite for comedy remains as strong — if not stronger — than ever. For now, the comedy industry is on life support. It is cartoons that are keeping it alive.