U.S. Democrats Fight Back

by Michael Carberry

I read with interest Stoker’s piece in last month's Only Connect - Mr Trump Leaves Town. As always, Stoker’s article was well informed, thought-provoking and amusing.  But I fear that his attempt to airbrush the extent of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Mayoral elections in New York as “not quite so overwhelming for Mamdani as the BBC might have you believe” will fool no one.  With the Democrats’ vote split between Mamdani and former Democrat Governor, Andrew Cuomo, backed by the outgoing Democrat Mayor, Eric Adams, the result ought to have been a shoe-in for the Republicans even in a Democrat stronghold like New York.   That Donald Trump’s party only managed to poll a pathetic 7% of the vote was not entirely the fault of the hapless Republican candidate, Mr Silwa.  Because, Mamdani was not just up against the other candidates in the election.   Ignoring the long-established convention that Presidents do not interfere in State elections, Donald Trump threw everything he could against Mamdani, repeatedly and (naturally for Trump) quite untruthfully, labelling him a “communist” which for many Americans is rather worse than a “paedophile”. Even threatening, quite unconstitutionally, to withhold federal funds from New York if he got elected.  Stoker is quite correct in his - not so “cynical” - assumption that many Republicans chose to vote for Cuomo; not least because Donald Trump, with typical lack of integrity or any sense of loyalty to his own party’s candidate, urged them to do so in an attempt to keep Mamdani out. In the face of all that, and especially given his youth, inexperience and fairly radical politics, that Mamdani managed to win an outright majority over both the other candidates was, by any standards, a stunning victory.

So, the idea that the President was “quietly amused” by the result is laughable.  Donald Trump does not do “quietly amused”.  He does nasty abuse of anyone he dislikes, threats to anyone who dares stand up to him, public bullying and humiliation of anyone he perceives as vulnerable, like Ukraine’s President Zelensky or South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and fawning sycophancy to perceived strongmen such as Valdimir Putin.  All of which makes his reaction to the Mamdani victory rather interesting.  In one of those dizzyingly frequent volte-faces which we have come to expect from someone with no discernible principles other than self-adulation, Trump invited the erstwhile communist pariah to the White House, called him a “nice man” and declared that that they had much in common.  But why this sudden about-turn?

Although not on the ballot sheet, Trump had intervened hard in the election and got a bloody nose.  The President famously does not like a “loser” and cannot be perceived as one. Hence his sudden cozying up to the victor.  That childish desire to be on the winning side might be endearing in a five-year-old but in an aging real-estate developer it is merely sad and contemptible.  But there is more to this extraordinary U-turn than mere vanity. Even Trump’s super-inflated ego could not fail to perceive the message of the electorate.  This was not just a vote for Mamdani; it was a decisive rejection of Donald Trump and his style of Republicanism.  And New Yorkers had a particular reason to dislike Donald Trump.

The outgoing Mayor, Eric Adams, was a controversial figure.  Nominally a Democrat, who had switched opportunistically between the Republican and Democratic parties, Adams’ harsh policies on homelessness, law enforcement and immigration had brought him into conflict with the Biden administration.   Since his election in 2022 numerous criminal investigations into abuses by his administration led to a swathe of enforced departures - of the Buildings Commissioner, the Police Commissioner, the Schools Chancellor and the Deputy Mayor. It culminated in September 2024 in the indictment of Adams himself on charges of conspiracy, fraud, bribery, and soliciting campaign funds from foreign nationals.  Unsurprisingly, Adams’ poll ratings dropped to a record low of 26% and dozens of New York’s elected officials, political groups and notable individuals were calling for his resignation.

On February 10, 2025, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) instructed federal prosecutors to drop all the charges against Adams. Shocked Justice Department officials refused to carry out the instructions and resigned in protest.  In April 2025 Judge Dale Ho rejected appeals from the Justice Department to dismiss the case “without prejudice.” Ho pointed out that the case against Adams was "entirely consistent with prior public corruption prosecutions" and commented that the request from the DOJ “smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions." Nevertheless, as the judge explained, the court "cannot force the Department of Justice to prosecute a defendant" and the case was duly dismissed. Adams tried to run again but dismal poll ratings forced him to withdraw. Instead, he backed Cuomo who had himself been forced to resign as Governor in 2021 following numerous sexual misconduct allegations.

Like many Americans, New Yorkers have become tired of Trump’s lies, bombast, personal abuse, petty vindictiveness, crazy and disruptive tariff policies, and flagrant disregard of both domestic and international law and constitutional proprieties. The wave of massive “No Kings” demonstrations across many American cities protesting at the President’s authoritarian and fascist behaviour shows that this is a national issue by no means confined to the ‘Big Apple’.   For New Yorkers, Trump’s attempt to interfere in their city to pervert the course of justice against a disgraced former Mayor and to influence the election in favour of a disgraced former Governor was the last straw. They had had enough and by electing Mamdani they sent an unmistakable message to the President to that effect.

Lest there be any doubt, that message was confirmed by the results of the two gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia which Stoker again tries to dismiss as “Perhaps, not a pronounced swing away from Mr Trump and the Republicans, but a movement back towards moderation and courtesy, to a more traditional form of politics.”  It is to be sincerely hoped that Stoker is right about the second half of that statement, but the first part is wildly wrong. True, New Jersey is, as Stoker says. fairly safe Democratic territory.  But when voters are fairly confident that their candidate will win, they often fail to turn out.  So, for a new female candidate to not only win handsomely, but to increase the size of the vote share held by her predecessor by almost 10% is hugely significant.   And Abigail Spanberger’s thumping victory in Virginia, overturning a comfortable Republican majority to a whopping 14% majority for the Democrats speaks for itself.  So, despite Stoker‘s attempt to disparage the BBC’s reporting of the elections, they got it absolutely right.

Far from being “quietly amused” Donald Trump was seriously rattled by these results.  Apart from cozying up to Mamdani in an attempt to curry favour with New Yorkers (still - contrary to Stoker’s assertion - a hugely important constituency) he has reacted in the way he knows best: playing to his base by falling back on what got him elected - whipping up fear and paranoia about immigrants.  His opportunity came with the shooting of two national guard members in Washington DC on Thanksgiving Day (November 27^th). The perpetrator was Ramanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan who, from the age of 15, had served in Afghanistan in one of the CIA’s “zero groups” or death squads, carrying out secret raids against suspected terrorists or Taliban fighters, and who were notorious for multiple human rights abuses, including the summary execution of women and children.  Admitted to the United States as one of almost 200,000 Afghans who had assisted the US forces and whose lives would be in danger if they remained in the country, he was extensively vetted at the time. But in recent years he had exhibited severe post-traumatic stress disorder and his mental health had spiralled downwards with increasing signs of manic-depressive disorder.

Despite all this being well known, the Trump administration seized on the incident to immediately pause asylum decisions nationwide and ordered a new review of green card cases from nineteen “countries of concern” (essentially Black or Muslim-majority countries) which could impact thousands of people, despite the fact that immigrants are statistically much less likely to commit violent gun crime than native-born white Americans. Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen called it, “…outrageous and unfair” to punish “an entire class of people for the evil acts of one person.”  He stressed that many Afghan evacuees “worked side by side with America in the fight against the Taliban,” and could be killed if forced to return.   Trump, as usual, tried to blame the Biden administration for the incident. When a female journalist politely pointed out to the President that Ramanullah Lakanwal had been granted asylum by his own administration, Trump’s response was a typically unedifying and misogynistic outburst, snarling at the woman “Are you stupid or something?” 

The administration has now cut the cap on refugee admissions from the previous 125,000 set by President Biden to a record low of 7,500 for the coming year. Many people, like those Afghans who fled in fear of their lives for having helped the US forces, will now be excluded, not least because the majority of those places will be reserved for white South Africans.  The President’s Executive Order 14204 “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa” actually promotes the resettlement of relatively wealthy white Afrikaner “refugees” on the alleged grounds that they are “escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,” an assertion which has been widely discredited.

So, what are we to make of all this? The election results have energised Democrats, who seemed sunk in a lethargy of defeatism and despair since the defeat of Kamala Harris in the Presidential election.   Will this translate into a comeback for the Party?  It is very difficult to say.   Trump’s poll ratings have plummeted and, alongside Elon Musk, he is now one of the most unpopular public figures in the United States. But in the current extremely toxic and divisive state of US politics, with no truly independent news sources and most of the MAGA faithful getting their information from media controlled by moguls like Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch or Trump himself, Republicans who are disillusioned with the President are tending to look to his Vice President JD Vance rather than the Democrats.  Much, will depend on the outcome of the mid-term elections next year.  If, as seems possible, the Republicans lose control of one or both houses Trump will be a largely lame-duck President and that could presage a swing back towards the Democrats. At least by then, Stoker may have had time to take off his rose-tinted spectacles and see the Trump presidency for what it really is - a grotesque aberration in the political life of the United States which will take Americans decades to live down.