The Week | November 14, 2025: The Shutdown Ends at Last

• Just wait for the 50-year reverse mortgage.

• Anyone who closely followed Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor saw that his and his followers’ passion was reserved primarily for their denunciations of Israel and the Zionist project. Those who didn’t defaulted to the messages in the candidate’s campaign script, which was focused on the unaffordability of life in the Big Apple. Mamdani’s proposed remedies—free child care, free buses, government-run grocery stores, etc., all paid for by expropriating the wealth of the rapacious capitalist class—appeal to those who have failed to familiarize themselves with socialism’s shortcomings. But what are Republicans doing to correct that misimpression? Surely, not enough. “I don’t want to hear about the affordability,” President Donald Trump recently told reporters. He later added in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that Americans’ discomfort with the cost of living is the result of “a con job by Democrats.” That’s not going to cut it. But neither can the administration counter socialism’s charms with its version of socialism-lite. Introducing import taxes to reorder the economy along lines preferred by Washington bureaucrats, muscling private companies into giving the government stakes in their enterprises, and inflating consumer demand with “tariff rebates” (that cost more than the tariffs have raised): None of this is making life more affordable. Trump has forgotten why the voters elected him in the first place.

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• Just wait for the 50-year reverse mortgage.

• Anyone who closely followed Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor saw that his and his followers’ passion was reserved primarily for their denunciations of Israel and the Zionist project. Those who didn’t defaulted to the messages in the candidate’s campaign script, which was focused on the unaffordability of life in the Big Apple. Mamdani’s proposed remedies—free child care, free buses, government-run grocery stores, etc., all paid for by expropriating the wealth of the rapacious capitalist class—appeal to those who have failed to familiarize themselves with socialism’s shortcomings. But what are Republicans doing to correct that misimpression? Surely, not enough. “I don’t want to hear about the affordability,” President Donald Trump recently told reporters. He later added in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that Americans’ discomfort with the cost of living is the result of “a con job by Democrats.” That’s not going to cut it. But neither can the administration counter socialism’s charms with its version of socialism-lite. Introducing import taxes to reorder the economy along lines preferred by Washington bureaucrats, muscling private companies into giving the government stakes in their enterprises, and inflating consumer demand with “tariff rebates” (that cost more than the tariffs have raised): None of this is making life more affordable. Trump has forgotten why the voters elected him in the first place.