MAMDANI WINS: Trump’s Worst Nightmare Comes True

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This offer for new business customers in the US, UK, Australia and Ireland, fees and terms and conditions apply. Welcome to The Rest is Politics, US, live from London, actually in person. You exist as a real person, Anthony. Who knew? I exist as a real person. Wow, we hardly ever actually spend time together. This is a treat. You're a real media team here and you're not wearing a "I'm with stupid" shirt, so I think I'm going to be okay. So you're feeling good today? Yeah, I'm feeling pretty good. I'm feeling robust. Are you feeling as good as the Democrats are feeling today? I'm feeling my intellectual security back. Okay, good. I'm feeling insecure for the last two weeks, but I like what happened for the Democrats. Do you like what happened for the Democrats? I would be very happy if I was a Democrat. I think it's not just, so we're doing this emergency episode on this Wednesday morning after the results of the elections from New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and I think you could throw in California where Democrats had a very big night. And it's not just that the Democrats won in those elections, because you and I had predicted that they would win in New York and in those governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia. It's the size of the wins that Democrats are excited about. I'm getting texts from Democrats from the States. We're in London, but I'm getting texts this morning from Democrats who are saying these are huge numbers. And I think it's that they overperformed expectations in all of those races, particularly that one in New Jersey where we'd said she might be tight. So these are Northeast mid-Atlantic elections. So these are generally coastal populations, generally, right? They've got some rural populations on the coast, right? Yeah. But I guess what I'm saying is these are liberal-ish, bluish states? Or am I wrong? No, I think you're right. They're liberal-ish, bluish states, but Democrats have been concerned about New Jersey because Donald Trump had overperformed in New Jersey in the 2024 election, so they thought that one might be closer. I would say Virginia is a purplish state. It did swing for Kamala Harris, but she didn't have huge numbers. But if you look at all of these races and if you look at the turnout and the groups who turned out for Democrats in all three of those races, young people who had swung to Donald Trump in 2024 swung back to Democrats. Black and brown voters who had swung towards Donald Trump in 2024 swung back to Democrats and gave them big margins. Let me play the orange-minded individual and say, "This is great for me because I'm going to use Zoran Mondami as a socialist punching bag." Communist, he calls him. Communist for the next three years, I'm going to put his face out there. He's a brownish face, and I'm a white supremacist, and so this is going to be good for me because I'm going to scare the living daylights out of my very white wonderbread base, and I'm going to drive my wonderbread base out to the polls and crush everybody in the midterms and then go on to have a Republican electoral success for the presidency in 2008. Is that going to happen? I think the other thing that he's saying is that he hasn't really sent out very many posts about this. You know what I love about you lately? I said white supremacists. You didn't even push back. White supremacists is okay with you, but fascists is not okay with you. Push back. I think authoritarian white supremacists, that's okay. That's okay. That's okay. We got that. Fascist is the one I have. Patty Kay, the official political score here for those of you that are playing at home, white supremacists, white national supremacists were okay with. Go ahead. Okay, look, the other thing that he's saying, and he hasn't spent a lot of time tweeting about this, but we know he's watching, and by the way, Mamdani knows he's watching because he told him to turn up the volume on the television set. He's saying when I, Donald Trump is saying, "Look, what happens when I'm not on the ballot? When I'm on the ballot, like in 2024, the Republicans have big wins. When Donald Trump is not on the ballot," he's saying, because he's right though. I don't know that this is because Donald Trump was not on the ballot. I think this is a repudiation of some of the stuff that has happened since Donald Trump was inaugurated, two things in particular, particularly with Hispanic voters, but also with working class voters and young voters, they don't like the fact that things cost too much still. There's a huge affordability crisis. I mean, listen, he's getting, Mamdani got 40 points more. He won by 40 points in New York amongst young men. There'd been a whole load of stories about how young men were drifting right in America, were drifting towards the Republicans and were becoming Trumpy. To win by, as a Democratic strategist texted me this morning, for a brown Muslim candidate to win in New York by 40 points amongst young men is a huge deal. And I think that's a repudiation of prices being too high, and he ran on that. And I think amongst Hispanic voters, there's some pushback against all of the ICE rates, what they've seen in other cities over. You and I have spoken about it. Yeah. Well, listen, I think you're seeing the start of the decline of MAGA. That is my opinion. We both share this opinion on our podcast, but I think what's interesting about this race in New York, let's focus on New York for a second. If you took Slewa, the Republican candidate, and you took the independent candidate Cuomo, and you added those two together, you didn't get to Zoran Mondami's total. Now, I don't know who voted. What do you read into that? Well, I don't know who voted for Adams or not, because Adams was still on the ballot. Maybe there was a few people, but I would imagine that Zoran beat all of them combined. And I think this is a fascinating thing. And what I read into it is probably three or four things, but let me just name a few of them. Number one, this is a phenomenal grassroots movement by this young man. And he worked tirelessly. And this is something that AOC did. Okay? AOC, when she beat Joe Crowley several years ago, she was taking pictures, Cady, of the soles of her shoes. And she was putting them on Twitter and Facebook, and she was saying, "I'm burning through my shoes to knock on doors to get these votes." Yeah. Okay? And he did that. It's a good message. Okay? Secondary message is we don't care. This is the opposite of the right. We want to smash into the institutions in New York that are not working for us. Financial services, accounting, advertising, whatever's living in New York right now that's doing well, we're not doing well. We don't like that, and we want our new mayor to smash into you. So orange wrecking ball of Donald Trump on the national level, somebody like Mondami on a local level or an urban level. And then the last thing, which I think is the most important thing, which has me troubled because I think that the Blasio was incompetent, particularly compared to Bloomberg. I think Adams had a better message, but he was also managerially incompetent, and he's surrounding himself with the Blasio people. So and he's never run anything before, and he's never had a job, and he's never managed a process or organized and delegated to people. So I think we're heading- Well, he had a job as an assemblyman. Yeah. But he was a representative job. He's under the executive position. No, I agree. And one of the concerns actually, you even see that amongst his supporters in the last few days, you had stories there was a story in the New York Times about how even some of his supporters have concerns about his management capacity, given that he's never run anything this big. I mean, he's now going to be in charge of how many employees are there in the New York? Three hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand. One hundred and ten billion dollar budget. I think at the moment, he's in charge of six people. That's pretty much what an assemblyman is in charge of. But his campaign had several hundred, and they were very, very effective, and they were well organized. And they were very disciplined of being on message because you and I tried to interview him a few times and we couldn't even get hold of him. Yeah. If you'd like to come on. Yeah. No use for us, Cati Kay. Mayer-Elect. If you would like to join the rest of his politics, U.S., we'll make you an honorary founding member. It may have had a lot to do with me bashing him every single day, honestly, whenever that could have been the reason. It may have been to do with the fact that you and Andrew Cuomo support. But I hope that he is big enough now to put those past and relationships behind him and have good relationships and reach out. But I want to say something to you, and please react to this. And I feel like this is another seasonal, generational change. Andrew's message was an old school democratic message from the '80s. It was an old school Bill Clinton-esque message from the '90s, and it was off key. It wasn't playing from a sheet of music that new, younger, generational Democrats wanted to bring into them. No. Am I right about that? I think we are seeing a shift in what people are calling the K economy, where people who are doing well and are older are maximizing their assets at the moment and looking at the stock market and feeling they're doing really well, a K-shaped economy. And the people who are not doing well, who are often younger, particularly in New York City, are losing money and losing assets. I'm smiling because you're actually using the – you're like a Wall Streeter now a little bit, right? I mean, the K is such a Wall Street verbiage. Very impressive. And I had it on point, right? I came in early with it. But I think you're seeing that split between older people who are basically doing reasonably well in the middle class and younger people who aren't doing reasonably well. I'm doing interviews at the moment on the BBC for an interview series that I'm doing on the New Normal. And a ton of them are about how young people can't find jobs, young people can't afford to pay rent, young people can't have children because they can't afford to buy a house. And I think this election last night reflected how pissed-off people under the age of 30 are about the state of their economy. Generational struggle. And they are turning out in elections. So we agree on all of this. But let's go to these other two races because these people, to a Republican, are hard left. Okay? Yeah. Okay. They may not be relative to Zoran Mondani. You mean Spanburger and Mikey Sherrill? Yeah, to a Republican. They are. They're very liberal. Going through the – I would say they are not to old school Republicans, to MAGA. MAGA. MAGA. MAGA. They are hard left. Okay, okay. MAGA. To a George W. Bush Republican. Centres. A John McCain Republican, a Mitt Romney Republican. House centrist. Yeah. But hear me out for a second. The reason I'm saying this is now I am the media guru – it's interesting because I had breakfast with Mark Thompson and hopefully he wouldn't mind me saying this, but he said something brilliant about Trump. And if he does mind, he's saying it anyway. And if you do, Mark, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But he said something brilliant about Trump that I want to share with everybody because it was a very big insight and I want to footnote him. He said that when he did the preparation, the CNN debate, Trump came to the stage. He said, "Where's my camera? And if I want to get the attention of the moderator, what do I do? And how do I know when I'm done speaking? Is there a timer?" He was looking around the stage. He wanted to test the lighting. He knows television. Okay. He stood behind the podium. He said, "Can I see the monitor?" And he went back. He said, "No, no. I want the light at this aperture. And I want this." Great. So, Biden came on. He looked over at Mark and said, "Hey, can I -- you want a picture with me?" He didn't look at anything, didn't focus on anything. And the reason I'm bringing this up is not only that he knows television, he actually knows messaging. Do not underestimate this man as a messenger. And so, go ahead, Caddy Kay. What is the Donald Trump message back to his base? What is the message to rebut what happened last night? The election was rigged. I mean, so far, that's been pretty much the sum total of his message. The election was rigged, and I'm not on the ballot. And the problem for the Republicans, now -- Are you like those, like, tachycardia things in here, like where you can shock somebody's heart back to life, and you're like, "If I drop dead?" A defibrillator. Yeah, defibrillator. I mean, is this -- the election is rigged? That's -- that seems to be his only answer at the moment. The election was rigged, and I wasn't on the ballot. Okay. You also actually said the government was shut down, which makes me think this is day 36 of the shutdown. I think the government's going to reopen is my prediction pretty soon, because the wind is behind Democrats' backs. Well, they're going to close the air traffic. The Secretary Duffy, the transportation's agree, said, "We're going to have to close large portions of the airspace over the United States as a result of the government shutdown." Yeah. You're going to let that happen? They can't. They can't. So here comes the Epstein files. Here comes the government reopening, and so -- so -- so -- go ahead. Give me Trump's -- give me Trump's narrative. So Trump's narrative now that he is on the back foot, and it's interesting that he is meeting with Republican senators the morning after these results come in, which is going to be a pretty awkward meeting, because I think you now start to see Republicans push back against Donald Trump on all of the things they have been supine about for the last nine months, particularly things like tariffs. They're going to start saying, "Actually, you know what? We don't like this," because his hold over the party, as of today, weakens. Whether or not that he -- whether or not Republicans lost because he was not on the ballot, and it's possible that, you know, him being on the ballot, would it have turned out more Republicans? Possibly a bit, but this was such a decisive win for Democrats. You have to think this is a referendum on all the things that are going on in government at the moment, and all the things that are going on in the country at the moment, and people don't like -- clearly, people don't like them because they turned out in huge numbers in New York, right? Record turnout in some of these places for an off-year election. I think his message has to -- he's got to try and reassert control in Washington now, because I think he's lost a bit of control. The feeling of invincibility around Donald Trump is not going to stop him going over, you know, and doing as much as he can with his executive power and expanding and doing more executive orders and smashing things. That's his mode. But that sense of invincibility has been diminished by this. By the way, we just polled our audience. 91% of the Trip U.S. audience voted for Zoran Mamdani. They are not listening to you, Anthony Scaramucci. Just want to apologize to all of you, Mamdani voters, for my Andrew Cuomo tweets. Yes. I apologize for those. We'd like to keep you in the audience. Stay in the audience, and hopefully, if I get a chance to meet with your new leader, I'll report back to you. Maybe what Trump does is he carries on what he's been doing over the last few weeks. He focuses abroad. For those 3% of you that are Cuomo voters, let me just look right into the camera. I'm looking directly at you 3%. I love you. I just want you to know that I love you. Thank you for helping us out. Look, it's over. That chapter of New York is over. There's a new chapter. But Mr. Trump, Mr. President Trump said something, and you referenced it this morning at the Salt London Conference, and so it begins is what he put on his social media platform. What did he mean by that, Gad? He meant the fight against Mamdani begins because he has said that he's going to cut as much as he can in the way of federal funding to New York City. He's going to make New York City hurt. Mamdani referenced that, by the way, in a very combative acceptance speech in which he says, if you want to get to any of us, you have to come through all of us. And he referencing the hit that New York might take. But Donald Trump sees the fight with Mamdani is a good thing for Donald Trump and for MAGA. He thinks this is going to be a good thing for Republicans because he's assuming that Mamdani can't deliver either because he doesn't have the experience or because everything that he's offering, free child care, free buses, is too expensive. And if he raises taxes by 2%, which he's threatening to do on people over a million dollars, they're just going to leave the city. So he's Trump's banking on the idea that Mamdani fails big time, and that then becomes good for Republicans. Well, you can flip the city upside down because, again, as I referenced yesterday, 1% of the people pay, 48% of the taxes. We had a question that's a good question. But D. Joy is basically asking the following question. If Trump cuts federal funding, can New York stop paying federal taxes? So I'm going to give the answer to that. The answer is no. But just so you know, more money is leaving New York in terms of taxes to the federal government than it's coming back into New York. Same is true for California, and the Great Ironies, most of the blue states-- Subsidize the poor red states. They subsidize the poor red states. That's the Great Irony. Of America. They subsidized Iran. And that's the Great Irony of Mitch McConnell. When they said that to him in Kentucky, he continues to ignore that and other red states. But I want to ask this question, though. What do you say, as Zora Madami, if-- and I think this is a very unfair thing, by the way, and this is for Cuomo supporters, Madami supporters, or my fellow New Yorkers, that Trump is now going to go after this young man by cutting federal expenditures into New York? And remember, he's already cut the infrastructure expenditures. Remember, he went to Schumer and said, "That $20 billion tonneau that you want, I have terminated it." And so this is hurting jobs, it's upset the municipal bond market, it's hurting the infrastructure rebuild of the city that the city's owed based on its tax expenditures back into the federal government. So go ahead. What do you say? You're Zora Madami. Madami, again, no disrespect. I want to make sure I'm always pronouncing his name right. What do you say back to Donald Trump, and how do you respond? We're going to take a quick break, and I'll come back with my answer. So if I'm the mayor-elect of New York, I take the feisty position, I think that he did last night, that you're not afraid to fight against Donald Trump, and you try to use your platform now to expose the things that Donald Trump is doing that are unfair to American cities like your own. I know people who run big institutions in New York, and they are worried about this. They're worried about how they will be hit if New York City is hit, because Donald Trump launches on a campaign of retribution. The only thing I would say is that one of the factors behind last night's wins, and you look at those, I'm looking particularly at the Virginia and New Jersey wins, because we knew Zora Madami was going to win in New York, but every single county in Virginia shifted to the left, shifted towards Democrats, and is part of that shift, again, the country saying as they did in 2020, we are exhausted by Donald Trump. We're exhausted by the retribution. We're exhausted by the constant drama. We're exhausted by the expansion of executive power that we've seen over the last nine months. We're exhausted by the ICE raids and how to feel about that. If that's the case, then carrying on these campaigns of retribution, I'm not sure that it helps Republicans in the midterm elections. Let me go rogue. Okay, go rogue. I want to go a little rogue. Oh, my God. Okay, here we go. All right, here we go. We're going to go rogue. Trump is going to go crazy. He's going to say that this is a 100 percent communist takeover. He's called the mayor-elect a 100 percent communist lunatic. He's going to cut the funding. He's going to cut the money. He's going to threaten to end the HUD projects. And then he's going to go after the mayor culturally and from a religious foundation perspective. That could hurt. I think that could hurt Republicans. Okay, tell me why. Because I think actually a lot of what Americans have seen over the last nine months of you called it white supremacy at the beginning, a rise of attacks against minorities. Actually, people, they don't really like it. They don't like it. They don't like seeing kids zip-tied by ICE. What about a save our cities plan where he goes to places like Houston, Miami, and says these are the cities that love America and Scranton, PA is the forgotten America and Staten Island is the real New York, which of course voted the only borough that voted for Angel Cuomo. Along with the Upper East Side voted for. Yeah, Upper East Side. Yeah, but the borough was only Staten Island. Okay, but go ahead. So go ahead. Save our cities plan. I'm going to tour our cities and I'm going to praise the cities that are red. Yeah, by the way, there are not very many of those because a lot of cities in America now are blue. Even the ones in red states, the cities tend to be blue. But if you look at the turnout last night from these elections, which is why Democrats are feeling good, across the board you had turnout amongst groups who had swung to Republicans to Donald Trump in 24, either staying home or voting Democrat. And some of that has to be the nature of the government that we've seen over the last nine months. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I think some of this is a pushback against that. Why have you got young men turning out such big numbers? Why do you have Hispanic voters? You look at some of the counties, heavily Hispanic counties in New Jersey, 18 point swing from the Republicans in 2024 to Democrats this time around. Okay. This is a question that's come in from at tuning Kate. What do last night's results mean for the culture wars, given that many of the fear campaigns fell short with the results change the tone in any way? It's a great question. It's what we're just talking about. I'm not sure that the tone will change because I don't think, I mean, I spoke to a very senior Republican recently in the Senate who said to me, you know, when it comes to moments of crisis, you can have a leader who reaches for reconciliation and you can have a leader who goes for the division and Donald Trump's going to take the bait every single time. And I don't see Donald Trump toning down his device at rhetoric at all, but I do see voters in these results pushing back against some of that. Listen, I'm not a Trump advisor, but if I were a Trump advisor, I'd say cool out, ignore the kid, help them, frankly, because it's your city. You grew up there. And by the way, your own self-interest, you've got a lot of real estate holdings there. He's not going to do that, of course. He's going to go full ballistic on him. He's going to be saying things up on X that, you know, this was the city that never sleeps. Now it's the city that never works. He's going to be pressing. I think when he goes for the religion. Oh, he's going to go for the religion. He's going to press every button imaginable and to tune in, Kate, the culture war is going to escalate because Donald Trump is no dummy. And he knows that his political relevancy is on a shot clock right now. It's on a timer, and it is decaying. And by this time next year, all of the sand in the hourglass is going to have run out on him. And so I predict he's going to go out. Guns blazing. On fire. Guns blazing. Guns blazing. Actually, there's Yosemite sand. You know, another problem that he has that we need to do a podcast on, and maybe we get to it next week. There are already divisions emerging in MAGA on culture wars issues. So you're seeing splits between people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes on the one side. Ben Shapiro. Very anti-Zionist, very talking about basically anti-Semitic. On the other side, you've got people who are saying, hold on a second, guys, this is not the way we need to be talking. I think one thing that we should talk about is, and this is a, we've pulled this, should the Democrats as a whole adopt mandani-like policies, yes, 75%, no 25%. Those are our followers. Those are our followers. We've pulled this. Should the Democrats as a whole adopt mandani-like policies, I'm actually going to say, I'm going to put myself in the no camp, except for New York City. I think that the message that the Democrats have to take away from this, and it applies in particular to the midterms, and we can talk about 28 just as we close, is that different candidates work in different places. This is so great because I'm actually going to surprise people and differ from you on this. Okay. You think mandani everywhere? If I'm them, I am taking a slice of his program, and I'm going to try to promote that. And let me give you the slice that I would like to see him actually promote, is the equal opportunity slice of his platform. The country is rich enough to provide people rich or poor with a starting block, a good seat to open the race with, education, health care, child care. And so I like that aspect of his campaign and his messaging. And how do you pay for it? Okay. Well, let me get to that. I want equal opportunity, but I don't want equal outcomes, and that's one of the problems with socialism. You want to give people the opportunity to get to the gate, get them to run the race, get them to run the race fairly, not be so far behind a rich kid or not be so far behind a noble person, but to get to the gate. But then once they're at the gate, let them thrive. And I would go to him and say go to Ireland and look at the tax policies in Ireland that favor big companies and favor multinationals, a left-leaning country Ireland by and large, but they've taken the debate about tax policy and incentivizing corporations to be domiciled in Ireland. It's no longer a political discussion, it's no longer a partisan discussion about taxes. Neither side debates that anymore. And so I would go to, I would use his platform and say, here's the signal, but don't make the mistake of pushing too much taxation and don't make them say, no, no, because by the way, how do you pay for it, how do you pay for it, get the people, convince the people that you're going to educate the workforce in your city and you're going to incentivize those people to show up in the city to hire those people. You may surprise everybody, you may flip the, you may flip the table on everybody and you may have somebody like Mondani running the table if you're willing to bring in some of these other elements. I didn't hear that in his acceptance speech. No, I heard some arrogance in that speech. I heard in his acceptance speech, a lot of class warfare that we've been shut out of power. This is now for the, it was definitely populist. I think if you want to run on a position of giving everybody a free, an equal shot at the beginning, and I do think some of the stuff there is free childcare, which is exorbitantly expensive for young Americans. That is a platform that you could run on in rural Virginia, but you can't run on it by saying, we're going to smash the wealthy to get it. And that's why I don't think, not in America and certainly not in red leaning counties in Virginia and in New Jersey, which is why actually I think what the Democrats should learn from this is that they have to be a big tent. They can run Mamdani's in New York city. They can run Spanburgers, Centrist, XCIA in Virginia and she can win in rural counties in Virginia and you can run Michael Sherrill's first two women governors by the way in both of those states and you can run and win. But you have to choose your candidates for the area and you have to be a big enough tent that does not have purity tests in order to do that. So before, I know we have to go, but... Damn, this is so much fun. Mikey... I love election day. I love election wrap ups. I'm going to just do 30 seconds on Salt London. So Mikey Sherrill was at Salt. He came to Salt three times. So I know her well. She's a veteran as you've pointed out. We've got our goalhanger friends coming to Salt this afternoon. Guys like Gary and her and Tom and Dom, et cetera, Alistair and Rory. And so we're excited to be here in London and Catty is hosting Salt. How about that, Catty? Do you enjoy that? We had fun. We had a little mini trip U.S. this morning at Salt on these election results. Very enjoyable. Anyway, thank you, everybody. This week, our members episode for our founding members is going to be the JD Vance series. It's a great series that our colleagues, Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart have done. Of course, if you want to become a founding member and listen to all of our extra content, do sign up at therestispolitics.com. You know what I love about this promotion? Okay. You're looking at the camera? Therestispolitics.com. Okay. She's great at selling, but you know what I love about this? She never listens back to the podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, I just want you to know that. I know it's good from when we're talking, I know enough. She did listen to the JD Vance episodes, so I don't know. Pretty good. But I thought I loved that. I thought it was great. It was great. Very insightful. Thanks so much for joining us. A lot to talk about with these elections. And the Democrats now at least feeling they have come back to life. Signs of life in the Democratic Party. See you soon, guys. See you next week. Hello, I'm David Oolishogum and I'm Sarah Churchwell. This week on Journey Through Time, we are exploring the story of the gunpowder plot of 1605, the story of how a small group of Catholics engaged in what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in all of British history. The plan was ruthless, blow up parliament, King James I and most of his family all in a single blow. The series will tell the story of treason and traitors of a group of men led by the charismatic Robert Cadesby, who believed that the only option left to them to win their rights as Catholics was the violent destruction of the Stuart state. We look at the story of Guy Fox, the nation's most famous trader, from his recruitment to becoming the plot's fall guy and ultimately being tortured and killed. Finally, we find out why this plot is still remembered now, 400 years later. Listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]