At the end of her interview with President Donald J. Trump, recorded on October 31 at Mar-a-Lago and aired last night, heavily edited, on 60 Minutes, Norah O’Donnell of CBS News asked if she could ask two more questions. Trump suggested previous questions had been precleared when he mused aloud that if he said yes, “That means they’ll treat me more fairly if I do—I want to get—It’s very nice, yeah. Now is good. Okay. Uh, oh. These might be the ones I didn’t want. I don’t know. Okay, go ahead.”
O’Donnell noted that the Trump family has thrown itself into cryptocurrency ventures, forming World Liberty Financial with the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. In that context, she asked about billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Binance. Zhao is cryptocurrency’s richest man. He pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering, resigned from Binance, paid a $50 million fine, and was sentenced to four months in prison.
Trump pardoned him on October 23.
O’Donnell noted that the U.S. government said Zhao “had caused ‘significant harm to U.S. national security,’ essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around.” She asked the president, “Why did you pardon him?”
“Okay, are you ready?” Trump answered. “I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. And what I wanna do is see crypto, ‘cause if we don’t do it it’s gonna go to China, it’s gonna go to—this is no different to me than AI.
“My sons are involved in crypto much more than I—me. I—I know very little about it, other than one thing. It’s a huge industry. And if we’re not gonna be the head of it, China, Japan, or someplace else is. So I am behind it 100%. This man was, in my opinion, from what I was told, this is, you know, a four-month sentence.”
After he went on with complaints about the Biden administration—he would mention Biden 42 times in the released transcript—O’Donnell noted, “Binance helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin. And then you pardoned [Zhao].” She asked him: “How do you address the appearance of pay for play?”
Trump answered: “Well, here’s the thing. I know nothing about it because I’m too busy doing the other….” O’Donnell interrupted: “But he got a pardon….” Trump responded: “I can only tell you this. My sons are into it. I’m glad they are, because it’s probably a great industry, crypto. I think it’s good. You know, they’re running a business, they’re not in government. And they’re good—my one son is a number one bestseller now.
“My wife just had a number one bestseller. I’m proud of them for doing that. I’m focused on this. I know nothing about the guy, other than I hear he was a victim of weaponization by government. When you say the government, you’re talking about the Biden government.” And then he was off again, complaining about the former president and boasting that he would “make crypto great for America.”
“So not concerned about the appearance of corruption with this?” O’Donnell asked.
Trump answered: “I can’t say, because—I can’t say—I’m not concerned. I don’t—I’d rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it. You just came to me and you said, ‘Can I ask another question?’ And I said, yeah. This is the question….”
“And you answered…” O’Donnell put in.
“I don’t mind,” Trump said. “Did I let you do it? I coulda walked away. I didn’t have to answer this question. I’m proud to answer the question. You know why? We’ve taken crypto….” After another string of complaints about Biden, he said: “We are number one in crypto and that’s the only thing I care about.”
If, among all the disinformation and repetition Trump spouted in that interview, he did not know who he was pardoning, who’s running the Oval Office?
It appears House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) doesn’t want to know. At a news conference today, journalist Manu Raju noted: “Last week…you were very critical of Joe Biden’s use of the autopen…[you said] he didn’t even know who he was pardoning. Last night, on 60 Minutes…Trump admitted not knowing he pardoned a crypto billionaire who pleaded guilty to money laundering. Is that also concerning?”
Johnson answered: “I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t see the interview. You have to ask the president about that. I’m not sure.”
Pleading ignorance of an outrage or that a question is “out of his lane” has become so frequent for Johnson that journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who is very well informed about the news indeed, suggested today that journalists should consider asking Johnson: “Do you ever read the news, and do you agree it’s problematic for the Speaker to be so woefully uninformed?”
Johnson continues to keep the House from conducting business as the government shutdown hit its 34th day today. Tomorrow the shutdown will tie the 35-day shutdown record set during Trump’s first term. Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), whom voters elected on September 23, is still not sworn in. She has said she will be the 218th—and final—vote on a discharge petition to force a vote requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files.
Trump and Johnson continue to try to jam Democratic senators into signing on to the Republicans’ continuing resolution without addressing the end of premium tax credits that is sending healthcare premiums on the Affordable Healthcare Act marketplace soaring. They continue to refuse to negotiate with Democrats, although negotiations have always been the key to ending shutdowns.
To increase pressure, they are hurting the American people.
The shutdown meant that funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on which 42 million Americans depend to put food on the table ran out on October 31. Although previous administrations—including Trump’s—have always turned to contingency funds Congress set aside to make sure people can eat, and although the Trump administration initially said it would do so this time as usual, it abruptly announced in October that it did not believe tapping into that reserve was legal. SNAP benefits would not go out.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island ordered the administration to fund payments for SNAP benefits using the reserve Congress set up for emergencies. Since that money—$4.65 billion—will not be enough to fund the entire $8 billion required for November payments, McConnell suggested the administration could make the full payments by tapping into money from the Child Nutrition Program and other funds, but he left discretion up to the administration.
Today the administration announced it would tap only the first reserve, funding just 50% of SNAP benefits. It added that those payments will be delayed for “a few weeks to up to several months.” The disbursement of the reserve, it continued, “means that no funds will remain for new SNAP applicants certified in November, disaster assistance, or as a cushion against the potential catastrophic consequences of shutting down SNAP entirely.”
“Big ‘you can’t make me’ energy,” Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted. It’s also an astonishing act of cruelty, especially as grocery prices are going up—Trump lied that they are stable in the 60 Minutes interview—hiring has slowed, and the nation is about to celebrate Thanksgiving.
The shutdown also threatens the $4.1 billion Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) that helps families cover the cost of utilities or heating oil. Susan Haigh and Marc Levy of the Associated Press note that this program started in 1981 and has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress ever since. Trump’s budget proposal for next year calls for cutting the program altogether, but states expected to have funding for this winter. Almost 6 million households use the program, and as cold weather sets in, the government has not funded it.
When the Republicans shredded the nation’s social safety net in their budget reconciliation bill of July, the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” they timed most of the cuts to take effect after the 2026 midterm elections. But the shutdown is making clear now, rather than after the midterms, what the nation will look like without that safety net.
In the 60 Minutes interview, O’Donnell noted an aspect of Trump’s America that is getting funded during the shutdown. She said, “Americans have been watching videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?”
“No,” Trump answered. “I think they haven’t gone far enough because we’ve been held back by the—by the judges, the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama.” (In fact, a review by Kyle Cheney of Politico on Friday showed that more than 100 federal judges have ruled at least 200 times against Trump administration immigration policies. Those judges were appointed by every president since Ronald Reagan, and 12 were appointed by Trump himself.)
It appears that the administration did indeed ignore today’s deadline for congressional approval of the ongoing strikes against Venezuela, required under the 1973 War Powers Act. It is taking the position that no approval is necessary since, in its formulation, U.S. military personnel are not at risk in the strikes that have, so far, killed 65 people.
Today has just not been a good day for humanity.
So much for obeying a court order, even if begrudgingly and with manufactured delay. At 8:00 this morning, President Donald Trump announced that “SNAP BENEFITS…will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”
U.S. District Judge John McConnell of the Rhode Island District ordered the administration to fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for 43 million Americans at least partially by using a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. The judge also suggested using a different reserve to fund SNAP fully. But the administration is using the hunger of Americans to pressure Democrats to agree to send healthcare premiums skyrocketing, so it dragged its heels as deeply as possible to delay the payments. It said it would fund SNAP only at 50% and that the money could take “weeks or months” to go out.
Trump’s social media account announced that the White House intends to ignore the court’s order, but hours later White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the administration is fully complying with the court order.”
Myah Ward, Alex Gangitano, and Dasha Burns of Politico reported last Friday that Trump expected the Democrats to fold and accept Republican terms to reopen the government no more than ten days into a shutdown. His frustration that they are not doing as he expected is showing, especially as more Americans blame Trump and MAGA Republicans for the shutdown than blame Democrats. Last week, Trump demanded that Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota end the Senate filibuster, enabling the Republicans to pass the House Republicans’ continuing resolution with a simple majority vote. This was a nonstarter, since the filibuster has become central since 2009 to the ability of Republicans to block most Democratic legislation.
So Trump is railing at the Democrats—“It’s their fault. Everything is their fault,” he told reporters last week—and ratcheting up pain on the American people.
Adding to the administration’s pressure is Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has been hitting the media to insist that the shutdown is the Democrats’ fault. Today he warned that another week of the shutdown could lead to “mass chaos” that would force him to close some of the nation’s airspace. Air traffic controllers are federal employees and thus have been working without paychecks. Many are calling in sick or not showing up for work, forcing significant flight delays and cancellations.
Today the administration sent notices to federal employees suggesting that furloughed staff won’t be paid when the shutdown ends. Hannah Natanson, Jacob Bogage, and Riley Beggin of the Washington Post note that a 2019 law guarantees they will.
Just a reminder: What the Senate Democrats are insisting on before agreeing to a continuing resolution is the extension of the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act healthcare insurance marketplace. The Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their July budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—although they extended tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Without the credits, millions of people will be unable to afford healthcare insurance and will go uncovered, and coverage costs will skyrocket for millions more.
Seventy-eight percent of Americans want those tax credits extended. That includes 59% of Republicans. Only 22% don’t want them extended.
So Trump is refusing even to negotiate with Democrats to end the shutdown when almost 80% of Americans want what the Democrats are demanding.
Trump says the Democrats should back down. “It’s so easily solved,” he told reporters. “All they have to do is say, ‘Let’s go. Let’s open up our country.’” While this course would entrench Trump further as an autocrat who can dictate to the country, the true easy solution seems to be for the Republicans simply to agree to a policy that a solid majority of their own constituents—as well as more than three quarters of the country—want.
This fight is bonkers, but it reflects Trump’s determination to assert his power over the country. That determination showed today in an Axios story by Marc Caputo, Stef W. Kight, and Stephen Neukam. They quoted a Trump advisor as saying that if Senate Republicans don’t pass the continuing resolution without the Democrats by nuking the filibuster, Trump “will make their lives a living hell.” “He will call them at three o’clock in the morning. He will blow them up in their districts. He will call them un-American. He will call them old creatures of a dying institution. Believe you me, he’s going to make their lives just hell.”
Today was Election Day, with crucial elections on the ballots across the country.
In New Jersey, someone emailed bomb threats to precincts this morning. Election officials directed voters to other polling places.
With an approval rating under 40%, Trump spent the day panic-tweeting to suggest the elections are “rigged,” just as he did in 2020. He posted that should New York City voters choose Democrat Zohran Mamdani as mayor, “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home.”
California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.”
Mail-in voting does not shut out Republicans. It makes voting accessible. Asked about Trump’s statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today: “It’s absolutely true that…there’s fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact.” The fact is, there is no evidence of any such thing.
It seems likely that the administration was preparing to declare a vote in favor of Proposition 50 fraudulent.
Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).
Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.
Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.
California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.
And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.
Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held [Republican] dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three [Republican] Uber drivers. Just everything.”
Trump posted on social media: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”
But in fact, today voters resoundingly rejected Trump and Trumpism, and tomorrow, politics will be a whole different game.
A Few Day After the Election Thoughts
The clearest read of what happened last night is that, as far as I can tell, Democrats won every race that was in meaningful contention anywhere in the country. That’s not just high-profile races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia or the redistricting proposition in California. It goes way down into races only obsessives or local observers were watching in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Mississippi and a bunch of other places. Democrats won everywhere, and just about everywhere they won by larger margins than even optimists were expecting.
As I noted last night, some of these were surprises against low expectations which were not realistic. But Democrats did well against realistic expectations too.
Last night gives us one possible explanation to the question I raised Monday, which is how President Trump can be as extremely unpopular as he is (not an exaggeration, look at the numbers) and yet Democrats have only a modest advantage on the generic ballot. Maybe it’s the simple answer: the polls are wrong. Or “wrong” isn’t the right word. Maybe we’re over-interpreting them. The generic ballot is a good benchmark. But there is literally no “generic” ballot. There’s always a name on it and a specific political context. What’s more, as I suggested Monday, it’s hard to figure that an electorate that is so down on the president wouldn’t turn to some degree on the congressional party that makes his untrammeled rule possible.
In any case, results are results. There’s a very small caveat worth applying here. An off-year election without congressional races isn’t the same turnout or intensity as a midterm. Democrats were reminded in 2023 and 2024 that special elections, which are always very low-turnout and privilege the views of the most committed, every-time-voters, are not predictive of a general election. But these weren’t special elections. These were full elections in several states, and in the hothouse political environment of 2025 they got a lot of attention. At this moment, they point to wave election territory in 2026. A year is a long time, but there are pretty few scenarios where I think Trump will get more popular in the next 12 months.
The big immediate question is what impact this will have on the Capitol standoff. I think it changes the equation. But it’s not obvious to me what the new equation produces. One thing that caught my eye is that as the results were coming in last night, Trump hopped on Truth Social and declared that none of it was his fault. Republicans were getting hammered, he insisted, because 1) he wasn’t on the ballot and 2) the shutdown. Not my fault is typical Trump. But those other claims are … well, noteworthy.
Donald Trump won’t ever be on the ballot again. (Stop dooming.) So that’s a problem for Republicans. And he seems to be conceding that the shutdown is a disaster for Republicans. If he thinks that, you’d imagine he tries to end it as quickly as possible. There’s clearly a deal available, for better or worse, to pass a continuing resolution in exchange for restoring Obamacare subsidies — not a promised vote, but actually restoring the subsidies. Most Republicans are ideologically dead set against that. But Trump doesn’t give a crap about the policy or budgetary implications. What’s more, restoring those subsidies is at least something of a plus for Republicans in the midterms. And he cares about holding the House a lot. Who knows? I suspect at a minimum, last night’s result kills whatever reality there was behind those reports of a deal to pass a continuing resolution in exchange for a promise of a vote.
The biggest impact of last night’s result may be to collapse D.C.’s collective denial about the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s unpopularity. A mix of spectacle, aggression and speed have created this on-going pageant of Trump’s power. And he does have a lot of power. He can break things. A lot of things. Here and abroad. Like God imputed Abraham’s faith to him as righteousness, the political class has read Trump’s power, perversely, as popularity or at least political power. But that’s not how it works. These results tell a clear story: an electorate eager to send a message to Donald Trump and clip the wings of his untrammeled power.
A couple additional points.
A few days ago, Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin ran a piece speculating on whether Republicans would hold or build on their gains with Hispanic and Black voters in New Jersey and make New Jersey into a swing state. The short answer is that Republicans gave up all the gains with Hispanic voters and a bit more. That is again at least partly a win against poorly thought out expectations. 2024 was a weird year, with an incumbent party still under the overhang of post-pandemic trauma, and lower- and middle-income voters struggling under high prices and economic dislocations, notwithstanding a good jobs environment. It’s certainly good news for Democrats that those voters appear to be shifting back. But it’s always dangerous to assume a sustained realignment on the basis of an election like 2024. It involves a lot of wishful thinking, of which there was plenty in the winter of 2024/25. The pattern has been: Republican wishful thinking/press work which is readily consumed by commentators and the political press and then becomes the conventional wisdom in which everyone operates.
I’m certainly not saying that every trend is good for Democrats right now or that every apparent bad one is fake. I’m restating the obvious, which is that the Democrats lost a very close election in 2024. The country remains broadly deadlocked in partisan terms with events (inflation, military withdrawals), overreach (Trump wilding sprees) or exogenous shocks (pandemics) creating the momentary advantage for one coalition or another.
Final point.
A number of morning-after reviews I’ve seen say that the Democrats had had a great night but still hadn’t addressed their “civil war” — the battle over whether to run “moderates” or “progressives.” Is it a future of Spanbergers or Mamdanis?
That doesn’t seem quite right to me. They have a pretty good model: find candidates suited to their constituencies and focus on cost of living issues and opposition to Donald Trump’s autocracy. Full stop. It’s not more complicated than that. That’s your opposition message. To the extent there are big operative questions, they turn on how to use political power to battle encroaching autocracy. At least in the near term that’s separate from the hot-button policy questions that ordinarily divide centrists, liberals and progressive Democrats. Are you ready to reform the Supreme Court, add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states to the union, pass a raft of post-Trump laws to put new armor plating on the weak seams of the republic? Since those are mostly 2029 questions, that simple program outlined above is more than adequate now and for the next year.
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a member of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, began his victory speech last night with a nod to Eugene V. Debs, labor organizer and Socialist candidate for president at the turn of the last century.
“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”
The 34-year-old mayor-elect’s speech went on to deliver something that was more than a victory speech. It marked a new era much like the one that had given rise to Debs himself. After more than forty years in which ordinary Americans had seen the political system being stacked against them and, over time, forgotten they had agency to change it, they had woken up.
Mamdani began by lifting up New York City’s working people, noting that “[f]or as long as we can remember,” they “have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands…. And yet,” he said, “over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.”
“Tonight,” he said, “against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.” New York, he said, had delivered “[a] mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.”
Mamdani thanked “the next generation of New Yorkers who refuse to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past.” And that was the heart of his message: that democracy belongs to ordinary people. “We will fight for you,” he said, “because we are you.”
He thanked “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.” He assured “every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point” that “this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.”
Mamdani celebrated the hard work of democracy in his win. It was a victory not just for all those who make up New York City, he said, but also for “the more than 100,000 volunteers who built this campaign into an unstoppable force…. With every door knocked, every petition signature earned, and every hard-earned conversation, you eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics.”
With that base of Americans engaged in the work of democracy, Mamdani welcomed a new era. “There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared that we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us simply to more of the same,” he said. “And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn.”
But in New York City last night, he said, “we have answered those fears…. Hope is alive. Hope is a decision that tens of thousands of New Yorkers made day after day, volunteer shift after volunteer shift, despite attack ad after attack ad. More than a million of us stood in our churches, in gymnasiums, in community centers, as we filled in the ledger of democracy.”
“And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.”
Mamdani promised a government that would answer to the demands of the people. It would address the city’s cost-of-living crisis, invest in education, improve infrastructure, and cut bureaucratic waste. It would, he said, work with police officers to reduce crime while also defending community safety and demanding excellence in government.
Mamdani pushed back not just against the smears thrown his way during the campaign, but also against the deliberate division of the country that has been a staple of Republican rhetoric since 1972, when President Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew embraced his role as the key purveyor of “positive polarization.” In its place, he called for community and solidarity.
“In this new age we make for ourselves,” Mamdani said, “we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another…. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.”
Mamdani, who is Muslim, promised to “build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism. Where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong—not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.”
He called for a government of both competence and compassion. “For years,” he said, “those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January first, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.”
Mamdani took on the problem of disinformation in modern politics, noting that “many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them.” He laid that disinformation at the feet of the very wealthy in their quest to divide working Americans to make sure they retain power. “[A]s so often occurred,” he said, “the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system.”
Mamdani urged New Yorkers to embrace a “brave new course, rather than fleeing from it.” If they do, he said, “we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves.”
Mamdani identified the popular momentum to defeat President Donald J. Trump, but made the point that the goal is not simply to stop Trump, but also to stop the next Trump who comes along. While Mamdani’s prescription focused on the avenues of resistance open to New York City government, he emphasized that for the president “to get to any of us,” he will have to “get through all of us.”
Mamdani called for New Yorkers to “leave mediocrity in our past,” and for Democrats to “dare to be great.” When Mamdani said, “New York, this power, it’s yours,” and told New Yorkers, “[t]his city belongs to you,” millions of Americans heard a reminder that they, too, are powerful and that the government of the United States of America belongs to them.
Mamdani won election yesterday backed by just over half the city’s voters, in an election characterized by extraordinarily high turnout. Andy Newman of the New York Times noted yesterday that in the last four New York City mayoral elections, fewer than a third of registered voters turned out. Yesterday, more than 2 million voters voted, the highest turnout for a mayoral election since 1969.
And that turnout is a key part of the story of yesterday’s Democratic wave. As Mamdani said, American voters appear, once again, to be aware of their agency in our democracy.
In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.” She found the Old World lacking in civic maturity and commitment compared with her new home, the then-booming United States, noting that “the peoples of Western Europe have developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach.” She believed that her adopted country, by comparison, enjoyed a kind of clarity of public vision: “With the possible exception of the Scandinavians,” she wrote, “no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans, for whom a certain amount of responsibility, i.e., of moderation in the pursuit of self-interest, is almost a matter of course.” Arendt wasn’t celebrating a perfect America; rather, she was lauding a people who approached political life with an adult sensibility and a reserve of self-control.
Arendt, and any judicious observer, could not make the same assessment of America today.
The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity. The White House press secretary answers a question from a member of the free press—a serious question about who planned a meeting between the American and Russian presidents—by saying, “Your mom did.” The secretary of defense cancels DEI and other policies by saying, “We are done with that ****.” The vice president calls an interlocutor on social media a “dipshit.” The president of the United States, during mass protests against his policies, responds by posting an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet fighter over his fellow citizens and dumping feces on their heads.
These are not the actions of mature adults. They are examples of crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified.
The republic will not fall because Vice President J. D. Vance has decided that swearing is edgy, and the juvenility of American public life did not begin with the Trump administration. But the larger danger under all of this nastiness is that President Donald Trump and his courtiers are using crass deflection and gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence. When the U.S. military kills people at sea and Vance, responding to a charge that such actions might be war crimes, responds, “I don’t give a **** what you call it,” the goal is not just to boost Vance’s hairy-chest cred; it’s also to grind others down into accepting the idea of extrajudicial executions.
The collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys explains much about why American democracy is on the ropes, reeling from the attacks of people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States.
For years, Trump has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics. Some hold opinions too extreme for any but a Trump administration. Stephen Miller’s odious views, including his echoing of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric and his accusation that the president’s critics are terrorists, would make him a liability not just in any other administration but even at a family dinner, as remarks from some of his own relatives have suggested.
Other Trump appointees, however, have used personal loyalty as the bridge across the chasm that separates their lack of ability from the jobs they occupy. The experiences of prior Trump appointees suggest that many of the current crew know they are in over their head, which could explain much about their churlish and unprofessional behavior.
Consider the candid admissions of Stephanie Grisham, a press secretary in Trump’s first term who later walked away from Trump. In 2021, she explained to New York magazine why she took the job in the first place.
For people like me—and I’m not proud of this—you have a sick sense of pride. All the people who told you how terrible he was? You’re like, Oh? He’s the nominee, buddy! I’m not proud of that. And then he wins, and you get into the White House, and you’re in the White House.
To be fair, many reasonable people have the same kind of awestruck moment when they arrive in Washington. (I certainly felt overwhelmed many years ago when I showed up for my first day of work in the Senate.) But Grisham admits to a deeper insecurity: “I thought that they”—the Trump team—“were the only ones who would ever get me there. My lack of confidence in myself as a single mother and someone who has made mistakes in my past, I thought, Well, this is my only shot. Nobody’s gonna ever want me, really, but these people did. So I’ll stick around.”
This kind of private insecurity can manifest in public life as childishness and trollishness. Or maybe such behavior is simply a reflection of the man at the top. Like all schoolyard bullies, Trump is crude and surrounds himself with people who will not challenge him. Thus his appointees, instead of rising to their responsibilities as public servants, emulate their boss’s shallow swagger. Instead of advising the president, they seek to placate him. Instead of showing leadership, they replace their own dignity with loyalty to Trump and do whatever it takes to stay out of the Eye of Sauron.
Whatever the reason for their immaturity, the effect is miserable policy and a corroded democracy. The public is poorly served and does not get answers to important questions. Tariffs? Inflation? Immigration? Peace or war? Who’s responsible for these choices?
Your mother, apparently.
The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence of those in charge are perhaps less astonishing than the willingness of Trump’s most loyal supporters to tolerate them all. By now, any other president would have been restrained by Congress or, as happened in 2020, by voters. In Trump’s second term, however, his base seems almost eager to forgive him for anything, with the possible exception of his involvement with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But Trump’s popular support (which is probably firmest in the range of some 35 to 40 percent of the U.S. population but much higher within the GOP) is not as much a mystery as it might appear. Americans of all political leanings have been poisoned for years by memes and disinformation. They have marinated in the nihilism of a culture that regards everything with a kind of post-ironic glib dismissal. (As usual, The Simpsons was ahead of its time: A 1996 episode shows two teens at a music festival, where one asks the other, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” The other, crestfallen, says: “I don’t even know anymore.”)
Perhaps Trump’s voters have become like the members of the administration, delighting in the crassness and obscenity that pours out of the president and his circle whenever they are challenged. The White House’s approach to social media in particular, as my colleague Ali Breland wrote recently, “now resembles the polemical, trolling, vicious manner of posting” pioneered by white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes and his fans, who have become more visible participants in the MAGA movement during Trump’s second term.
Friedrich Nietzsche created a concept that can help us understand this political moment. He imported a word from French to describe a kind of deep-seated anger that goes beyond transitory gripes: ressentiment, a feeling that comes from a combination of insecurity, an amorphous envy, and a generalized sense of resentment. Citizens engulfed by this emotion want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined. They are driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury. Accordingly, they see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle. A Trump voter put out of work during the 2019 government shutdown captured this mentality when she exclaimed: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy.
People who are willing to accept “your mom” as an answer to important questions are people who have already decided that democracy is a rigged game. The political process, for many of them, doesn’t seem to be a means for solving common problems and developing solid policies. Instead, they treat it as just another opportunity to excoriate their fellow citizens. They may support candidates such as Trump (and the late Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and the now-imprisoned former leaders Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil) not because they expect responsible government, but because such candidates promise to hurt the right people—to humiliate them, impoverish them, and perhaps even shoot them.
What can other American citizens do when faced with a government that offers trolling and obscenity as replacements for governing? How do people who care about democracy and the rule of law deal with fellow voters who keep electing a class of public officials who seem to be all id and no superego?
Perhaps most important, other Americans should model the behavior they hope to foster in their friends and neighbors. Populist ressentiment is not necessarily produced by inequality. It’s driven by a perception of inequality, a sense of being looked down on by others. It is a demand for attention and emotional engagement. But trying to answer that demand is a fool’s errand: On social media, for example, some of Trump’s voters seem especially enraged not by arguments but by indifference. The whole point of their trolling is to gain attention and then intimidate others.
Both online and in daily life, Americans who are part of the pro-democracy coalition should resist such invitations. Responsible citizens must hold themselves to a higher standard than officials who are acting like grade-schoolers. The national figures, from Trump on down, who put out rancid bait may do so because they want others to argue and lower themselves, and thus prove that no one holds the moral high ground. (Perhaps this is why Trump and so many of his supporters resort to whataboutism when confronted with their behavior.) When these leaders and their followers swear or behave rudely, they may hope and expect that others will do likewise.
As tempting as it is to trade punches to the groin, the better approach is to model mature behavior and demand it in return from people being paid to serve the public. When the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answered the journalist S. V. Dáte’s text-message question about who chose the location of a possible U.S.-Russia summit with “Your mom did,” Dáte texted back: “Is this funny to you?” Leavitt then went full Regina George, calling him a “far left hack” and refusing to answer his “bullshit questions.” Leavitt later posted the exchange on X, where Dáte responded: “Feel better now? Now can you answer the question? Please and thank you.” That’s the only way to go: Ask the question, and then ask it again, and keep asking.
This is not Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” argument. (Even she seems to have abandoned that strategy.) Rather, it is a recognition—and a plea—that the voters and candidates who wish to replace this current government must present themselves as stable, responsible, and adult alternatives to a claque of trolls and incompetents. (Even California Governor Gavin Newsom’s troll-back of the president, as clever as it was, has run its course.) The right answer now to the faux-macho silliness of someone such as Pete Hegseth is not to produce clever memes and nicknames for the secretary of defense; it is to remind people that Hegseth is acting like a teenager and trying to distract Americans with idiotic slurs about fat soldiers because Pete Hegseth is terrible at his job.
Like most things that require some adulting, this approach is emotionally unsatisfying. And it may not gain much ground if enough Americans have decided that they are satisfied with poop jokes as public policy. The “No Kings” protests, however, are an example of how people can mobilize to mock ridiculous behavior (and do so festively, even) without the mayhem that Trump and his lieutenants seemed to hope would arise.
In addition to marching, Americans who care about democracy must organize and vote in every election, no matter how small or local. And in their personal lives, people who want to restore maturity to national government must be clear with those around them, even if it means risking their personal relationships, that some things, such as glib schoolyard taunts and scatological nonsense from the commander in chief, are not acceptable.
Americans have learned that guardrails are easily destroyed. Restoring them will take time—because they have to be repaired by each of us, one person at a time, making small but important decisions about how we want to live.
“None of this is complicated,” political data specialist Tom Bonier wrote yesterday about Tuesday’s dramatic Democratic victories around the country. “The [Republicans] ran on affordability in 2024. They gave sanctimonious lectures on cable news on election night about how the ‘silent working class majority’ had spoken. Then they governed as reckless authoritarians, punishing the working class.”
For nine months now, officials in the Trump administration have pushed their extremist policies with the insistence that his election gave him a mandate, although more people voted for someone other than Trump in 2024 than voted for him. Tuesday’s elections stripped away that veneer to reveal just how unpopular their policies really are.
Aside from the health of the country, this poses a dramatic political problem for the Republicans. The midterm elections are in slightly less than a year, and Tuesday’s vote, which suggests the 2024 MAGA coalition has crumbled, may spell bad news for the mid-decade gerrymandering Republicans have pushed in states they control, like Texas. Republican lawmakers created the new Republican-leaning districts by moving Republican voters into Democratic-leaning districts, thus weakening formerly safe Republican districts. That could backfire in a blue-wave election.
First thing Wednesday morning, on the day the government shutdown became the longest shutdown in history, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote to President Donald J. Trump to “demand a bipartisan meeting of legislative leaders to end the [Republican] shutdown of the federal government and decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis.” They assured him that “Democrats stand ready to meet with you face to face, anytime and anyplace,” and concluded: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Trump had a different approach to Tuesday’s news. He met with Republican senators before the cameras and admitted that the shutdown had badly hurt the Republicans. But rather than moving to compromise—as all previous presidents have done to end shutdowns—he reiterated his crusade to make sure Democrats can never again hold power. He demanded that Republican senators end the filibuster and, as soon as they do, promptly end mail-in voting and require prohibitive voter ID. “If we do what I’m saying,” he told the senators, Democrats will “most likely never obtain power because we will have passed every single thing that you can imagine.”
Former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stopped Bloomberg News Senate reporter Steven Dennis in the hallway to say: “We’re not going to do that.”
Throughout the day, Trump continued to flood social media with more than 30 social media posts and choppy videos in which, standing in a dark room behind a podium and slurring his speech, he appeared to read from his social media posts, touting his accomplishments, railing against former president Barack Obama, threatening Nigeria with war, and pleading with Republican senators to end the filibuster.
Jenna Amatulli of The Guardian noted that “[t]he bizarre series of posts could raise further questions on Trump’s mental acuity.” More questions arose yesterday after Trump spoke before the America Business Forum saying: “For generations Miami has been a haven for those fleeing communist tyranny in South Africa. I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in parts of South Africa. Look at South Africa, what’s going on. Look at South America, what’s going on. You know, I’m not going there. We have a G20 meeting in South Africa.”
Trump seems to be flailing in other ways, too. One takeaway from Tuesday’s vote was that Americans are frustrated at the rising costs of living and slowing job market, and Republicans are suddenly pivoting to claim they are good stewards of the economy. But it’s a hard sell.
One of Trump’s posts yesterday tried to make the point that the economy has improved under his guidance. He posted that “Walmart just announced that Prices for a Thanksgiving Dinner is [sic] now down 25% since under Sleepy/Crooked Joe Biden, in 2024. AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!”
But readers noted that Walmart’s 2024 Thanksgiving meal contained 21 items while the 2025 list includes only 15, and that most of the brand name items listed in the 2024 meal were replaced with Walmart brand items in 2025.
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments concerning the legality of Trump’s tariff war, the centerpiece of his economic plan. Trump seemed to try to pressure the Supreme Court to save his tariffs, posting that the case before the court “is, literally, LIFE OR DEATH for our Country.”
But the Constitution gives power over tariffs to Congress alone. Three lower courts have found that Trump’s assumption of power to set tariffs through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives the president power to regulate international commerce after declaring an emergency in response to an external threat against the United States, is unconstitutional.
As Chris Geidner of Law Dork explained, the Supreme Court justices seemed inclined to agree with the lower courts that Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional. Undermining Trump’s insistence that the tariffs are paid by foreign countries, in yesterday’s arguments the administration’s lawyer admitted that American consumers pay from 30% to 80% of the tariffs.
Today Trump disagreed and changed the justification for the tariffs to national security, ground on which he likely expects the Supreme Court to support him. “No, I don’t agree,” he told a reporter. “I think that they might be paying something, but when you take the overall impact, the Americans are gaining tremendously. They’re gaining through national security. Look, I’m ending war because of these tariffs. Americans would have to fight in some of these wars.”
Today brought more bad news for Americans living in Trump’s economy. A report today showed that in October, layoff announcements hit their highest level in more than 20 years. According to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a private firm that collects data on workplace reductions, Abha Bhattarai of the Washington Post reported, U.S. employers have announced 1.1 million layoffs so far in 2025. That number rivals job cuts during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced today that a shortage of air traffic controllers will force flight reductions at forty of the nation’s busiest airports starting tomorrow. This will affect both commercial and cargo traffic. Today airlines began to cancel hundreds of flights. The Federal Aviation Administration said that reductions will begin at 4% on Friday and go up until they hit 10% on November 14.
The administration is tripping in court over its immigration policies, as well.
On Monday, jury selection began in the trial of Sean Dunn, a former paralegal for the Department of Justice, charged with a misdemeanor for throwing a salami submarine sandwich “at point blank range” at a federal agent after a grand jury refused to authorize felony charges. As former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance noted, prosecuting this case while dismissing others—like the issue of border czar Tom Homan allegedly accepting $50,000 to steer contracts toward a certain firm—diminishes the public’s confidence in the Justice Department.
The case also made the administration seem like a joke as a federal agent wearing a bulletproof vest tried to claim a sandwich that remained intact in its wrapper “exploded” against his chest. Punsters had a field day all week. This afternoon, the jury acquitted Dunn.
“He beat the wrap,” one poster wrote.
Trump’s immigration policies were in court in Chicago today, too, where U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis issued a broad injunction to stop federal agents’ undisciplined use of tear gas, pepper balls, and other “less-lethal” crowd control measures. As Heather Cherone of WTTW reported, Ellis found that federal agents had violated protesters’ First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly while preventing the free exercise of religion by using force against clergy members. Ellis repeatedly called out federal agents for lying.
And, in the District of Rhode Island, U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell found the administration had ignored his order to pay Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits this week. He accused the administration of withholding SNAP benefits “for political reasons” and called out Trump’s social media post saying SNAP would be funded only after the shutdown ends as “an intent to defy the court order.” McConnell ordered the administration to make full SNAP payments to the states by tomorrow for distribution to beneficiaries.
The Trump administration immediately appealed.
Republican lawmakers created the new Republican-leaning districts by moving Republican voters into Democratic-leaning districts, thus weakening formerly safe Republican districts. That could backfire in a blue-wave election.
The repercussions from Tuesday’s vote, in which Democratic candidates were victorious across the country, continue to echo.
Since Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump has tried to reinforce the idea that he is, in fact, in control of the country, no matter what voters say. He has doubled down on his demand that the Republican senators end the government shutdown by killing the Senate filibuster, enabling them to pass legislation without any Democrats. Then they could pass the continuing resolution the House passed on September 19, the last day the House was in session to work.
But Republican senators don’t want to get rid of the filibuster. It serves their ideology of slashing the government. Democrats want to pass legislation that changes society, while Republicans want to stop such legislation. The current exceptions to the filibuster enable Republicans to fund the government and even to get tax cuts, but the wide swath of legislation that can be stopped by the filibuster generally neuters Democratic policies.
The filibuster also protects Republican senators from having to take painful votes on the hot-button cultural issues important to the Republican base but hated by the general public: things like abortion bans, for example. The filibuster means they can trust the Democrats to stop such measures before Republican senators have to go on record as either for them or against them.
Today, speaking during a meeting at the White House with Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Trump demanded again that Republicans end the filibuster. He tried to assuage Republican concerns that if they nuke the filibuster, Democrats in power in the future would use a simple majority to pass whatever legislation they wish. Trump said there was no need to worry about future Democratic control because by getting rid of the filibuster, Republicans could pass legislation that would guarantee they would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” again.
As House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced he is keeping the House out of session again next week, for the eighth consecutive week, and as Trump pressured Republicans to rubber-stamp his wishes, the Democrats today offered a compromise to end the shutdown.
Senate Democrats have stood firm on the principle that they would not vote for the continuing resolution the House passed on September 19—the last day it held a vote—without the Republicans agreeing to extend permanently the premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act markets. Without those credits, millions of Americans will lose healthcare coverage, and healthcare premiums for millions more will skyrocket. About three quarters of Americans want those premium tax credits extended.
Today, on the floor of the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the Democrats would vote to end the government shutdown in exchange for a one-year extension of the expiring premium tax credits and the establishment of a bipartisan committee to figure out how to revise the tax credits so they could continue past next year’s open enrollment period. This would have answered the short-term problems of the increasingly painful government shutdown and skyrocketing premiums and left the question of extending the premium tax credits to voters next year.
If Republicans took the deal, the Democrats could claim they had negotiated an end to the shutdown that put into place the popular extensions of the premium tax credits and that called for next year’s midterm voters to decide if they wanted them extended further.
But if Republicans rejected it, Democrats would be in the position of having offered a reasonable—even a popular—deal that Republicans refused because Trump insisted they must not negotiate. Such an outcome would make the Republicans own the ongoing shutdown.
Republicans rejected the offer outright. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) called it a “nonstarter” that “doesn’t even get close, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called it “political terrorism.” The rejection put the Republicans in the awkward position of rejecting the reopening of the government because they are determined to kill a measure that is popular with three-quarters of the American people.
After a closed-door Republican conference meeting, Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) told reporters: “What we have here is an intergalactic freak show.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said it was “insane” that President Trump and Republican congressional leaders have refused to talk to Democrats to negotiate a deal. “They refuse to engage,” he told Jordain Carney, Katherine Tully-McManus, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico. “It’s killing the country.”
Tonight Trump appeared to be trying to keep pressure on the Republicans to kill the filibuster or the Democrats to cave by tightening the screws on the American people. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to stay the order of U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by the end of today. This puts the administration in the position of going to the Supreme Court for permission to stop the distribution of food benefits for 42 million Americans.
While senators say they will stay in Washington and work to end the shutdown, Trump is following House speaker Johnson’s lead and getting out of town, heading to Florida for the weekend.
