On Friday, October 31, at his Arabian residence in Florida, President Trump hosted a Great Gatsby-style party for millionaires—before the Great Crash of 1929. While 42 million people did not know what they were going to eat due to the government shutdown (socialism always fixing what capitalism could never solve), Daddy Trump served up the spectacle of a young woman in a bikini inside a huge champagne glass.
On Tuesday of the following week, there were gubernatorial elections in two states and a momentous election in California, which will have an impact on the House of Representatives in Washington for the 2026 elections. All three elections were Democratic victories. In New Jersey and Virginia, two women won, much to the fury of the White House. As the pathological narcissist that he is, Trump declared after the defeat:
“The government shutdown and the fact that I wasn’t on the ballot were the two reasons Republicans lost the election.”
However, the most important victory was that of the New York City mayoralty. A Democratic candidate winning the New York election by more than 50 percent of the vote would not be significant if the winner were not Zohran Mamdani.
These elections had the highest turnout in a mayoral election since 2001.
Mamdani won despite corporations flooding the coffers of his Democratic rival, Andrew Cuomo, who had been defeated months earlier by Mamdani himself in the primary election. The former governor was supported by Trump and Elon Musk. Musk had mocked the Muslim’s socialism, who had proposed that city buses should not charge fares.
Mamdani not only reminded him that Cuomo had given Musk hundreds of millions in tax cuts, more than it would cost to provide free public transportation for workers, who are drowning in low wages and $3,000 rents.
More than significant, the symbolic (psychological and ideological) importance of Mamdani’s victory outweighs any concrete fact. From the perspective of identity politics, which has dominated the political circus in the United States since at least the late 1990s, many have pointed out with both appreciation and contempt his status as a 34-year-old immigrant from Uganda, a Muslim, and the son of a professor and a film producer from India.
In the ideological arena, Mamdani openly identified with socialism and unhesitatingly with human rights in Palestine and against the genocide in Gaza. Despite being in the midst of an election campaign, he said that if Netanyahu set foot in New York and he was mayor, he would order his arrest. The powerful Zionist lobby opened its coffers, but a large proportion of New York Jews (39 percent) who believe that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza supported Mamdani’s candidacy.
The “danger of bad examples” (that is, any example other than orthodox capitalism) has been central to the obsession of US foreign policy makers for many generations, based on demonizing and blocking any possible alternative in the Global South, from Lumumba in the Congo and Allende in Chile to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
If there is one thing Mamdani is not, it is politically timid, ideologically ashamed, or morally cowardly. He has confronted the man most feared by friends and foes alike, President Trump, with a self-assurance that will set the much-feared example of how the left must confront the kleptocratic advance of neoliberal privatizers: without currying favor, without asking permission, head-on and without makeup.
“If anyone can show Donald Trump defeated,” Mamdani said on TV, “it is the city that saw him born… So, Donald, since I know you’re watching this, I say to you: turn up the volume and listen.”
Mamdani broke the mold. Bernie Sanders supported him when he no longer needed moral support. Days before the election, Obama—who for years dodged all of Trump’s attacks with jokes and silence—called him to offer his advice if he won the NYC government.
Mamdani’s proposals are concrete and clash head-on with dogma: a return to taxes for millionaires (now multi-billionaires) to finance basic works and services that New York urgently needs; rent control; construction of public housing; creation of public supermarkets in every neighborhood; creation of public daycare centers; raising the minimum wage for workers; protection of labor and union rights; among other measures, for which he will need allies in the City Council and the State Congress.
Not only Trump, but the system itself feels compelled to block the heart of capitalist financial power. Trump promised it, but it will be more difficult than doing so with a colony or a banana republic.
The difference has always been that all these threats against the “bad example” were crushed without any ethical, moral, or legal restrictions. Now that this example comes from within the very heart of capitalism, the home of Wall Street, it becomes a bigger and more difficult problem to deal with.
Washington cannot bomb New York. Trump is left with the classic options: before the elections (as in Argentina), he threatened to block federal resources—even though New York, like California, subsidizes the conservative states of the South—the old policy toward countries like Cuba and Venezuela.
The second option is a military invasion, in the style of the banana republics before World War II or the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), or Panama (1990). Although this option seems unthinkable, there are always shortcuts. We must not forget that the militarization of Chicago and Los Angeles was only a trial run and, above all, an attempt to proceed with the old strategy of accustoming a population through gradual doses of something that, if done abruptly, would not be tolerated—creeping normality.
The third option that should not be off the table for strategists is the classic Cold War option: destabilization of a democratic government and removal of the leader by a coup d’état.
Mamdani cannot run for president because of his birth. But it is becoming clear that the two most important young figures in the dominant parties, J.D. Vance and Mamdani, represent two extremes not seen in more than a century. Mamdani’s election is likely to be the turning point that many of us have been waiting for over the last two years.
The story could unfold as follows: in November 2026, the Democrats regain both houses of Congress. Calculations indicate that it is unlikely that the Democrats will achieve a majority in the Senate in 2026. If this miracle were to occur (an event that would alienate some Republicans, as we saw in the case of Palestine), in 2027 they could impeach a president who is no longer in full physical and intellectual possession of his faculties. Unlikely because, to remove the president from office, two-thirds of the Senate would be required. Unlikely, but not impossible.
If the improbable were to happen (something common in history), that same year we would witness two possible opposite outcomes: impeachment and a more direct militaristic or dictatorial reaction from the White House, followed by a major conflict.
jorge Majfud, november 7, 2025
Washington no puede bombardear Nueva York 6 noviembre, 2025
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