Greetings and welcome to this 60th performance of the Carnival of Fools! We’re a week away from elections in Virginia, New Jersey, California, and most of all New York City, and I expect an azure tide: All four states are Democratic strongholds liable to return Democratic results. (I hold out the most hope for Attorney General Jason Miyares in Virginia, but I suspect my heart will once again be broken by a surprisingly narrow Republican loss in New Jersey.)
But I’m not going to feel too terribly heartbroken over what’s about to happen to New York City. NYC voters, I just want you to remember, before this all goes down next week: You wanted this.
Zohran Mamdani Is Getting Sloppier as He Senses Victory
In June of this year, back when Zohran Mamdani was still regarded as a bushy-browed, upstart underdog running in the Democratic primary against the persistently odious Andrew Cuomo rather than the all-but-assured next mayor of New York City, I wrote a piece titled “I Love Everything About the NYC Mayoral Race”:
Why would I, a person who lives nowhere near the Empire State, be so riveted by a local election? Because it is a saga of urban political despair that sings to my own corroded soul like few others this year. I love the chaos, the insanity, the sheer hopelessness of the choices on offer for New Yorkers, as only a longtime Chicago resident truly can.
I went on to warble my little oracle of doom — we’ve tried this experiment in flamingly progressive big-city governance recently, it didn’t end well, and I would know — and then ended by double-dog daring New York voters to “pledge their souls to Zohranastrianism.” Now that they seem likely to take me up on the offer, some have asked me if I regret my earlier glibness.
Why should I? I didn’t order New Yorkers to vote for Mamdani. They’re doing this to themselves. (Also, we’re still doomed here in Chicago anyway, and misery loves company. Join us.)
I might be an outsider to the Big Apple, but I think I understand well enough the dynamics that have made next week possible. New York City is currently glutted by young professionals whose shared sense of grievance transcends other racial or cultural differences: They face shrinking career horizons, ballooning debt, and an astronomical cost of living. Andrew Cuomo is not a candidate who speaks to these anxieties, to put it mildly.
Cuomo is the grim, joylessly corrupt embodiment of everything that people feel isn’t working about the New York Democratic establishment — and he’s allegedly a tush-groping creep on top of it all. Electing an inexperienced progressive outsider who promises free gifts and redistributive revenge against the wealthy — and moonlights as an intifada enjoyer — might not normally seem like a smart move, but when faced with Andrew Cuomo as your other serious choice? Well, in that case, second look at the communist. I’m not surprised city Democrats are rejecting the former governor, though I myself wouldn’t feel enthusiastic about driving headlong down a blind alleyway either.
Seen from that perspective, the newcomer is going to win this race because the rest of the field disqualified itself. But make no mistake: Zohran Mamdani is no generational talent, regardless of what the progressive left would have America believe. As Democratic elections analyst Lakshya Jain points out in a fine piece of analysis over at The Argument, Mamdani isn’t even terribly popular for a Democrat in New York. He plays specifically to a youth demographic’s moment of cultural and professional frustration — good enough to win access to Gracie Mansion but hardly a coalition with much hope of taking the next step up the ladder, either statewide or nationally.
Which is why it was so hilarious to see the misbegotten moments emanating from his rally with Governor Kathy Hochul and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday. Dan McLaughlin already wrote incisively about AOC’s semi-spontaneous exercise in slam poetry. But really, it was about the crowd, made up of Zohran’s truest and most vocal believers, sensing its political moment was nigh.
They were feelin’ it on Sunday night, and you could tell not only in AOC’s spastic theatrics but in the way the crowd lustily booed Hochul — their nominal ally but not-so-secret enemy — and screamed “TAX THE RICH!” at her. For those unaware, Hochul has specifically stated her opposition (as governor) to a New York City “wealth tax,” which puts her crosswise of one of Mamdani’s most self-destructively impractical campaign positions. There Hochul stood, forced into silence by the jeers of a heckling crowd, until Mamdani strode onstage to take her by the arm and lead her away.
It was a delightfully grim moment. The only thing missing was Mamdani’s escorting her to a tumbril for transport to the Place de la Révolution. But it also spoke to the limitations of Mamdani’s moment. The sort of hard socialism that his political program represents — certainly the aspirations of his most activist voters — is not a prescription for national revolution, and it remains to be seen whether it will even be a local one.
Mamdani and his supporters can probably afford to feel their oats a bit at this point: All the cards have fallen fortuitously for him in a race he has barely had to sweat to win. Sure, he has natural talent for retail politics, but he hasn’t made any of his positions more popular. Perhaps NR alum Kyle Smith said it best, in a column for the New York Post: “We’re living through a multicultural real-life reenactment of Being There, in which a total moron is mistaken for a Solon because people want to believe things that can’t be.” He is instead loved for what his voters hope he will represent: a kick against the pricks.
Donald Trump Is Not Running for President in 2028
Donald Trump’s serial provocations have come at such a pell-mell rate that it has been difficult for me, as a writer, to sort through them all with any thoroughness or speed. Keep in mind, this is a president who idly proposed seeking a personal $230 million settlement from his own federal government last week (for the sins of the Biden administration), and I barely even blinked. I probably should have done more — even proposing such an act is grotesque — but at this point I’m as shellshocked and inured as the next observer of this presidency. When the real carnage comes, then I’ll write; until then, it’s just more ordnance exploding off in the distance.
Commentary in the age of Trump has devolved into something akin to battlefield triage, trying to decide what merits discussion and what deserves to pass meaninglessly by without comment. And because this is the Carnival of Fools, we choose to fixate on the meaningless stuff. (It’s more fun.) So let me explain to you that, no, Donald Trump will not be running for president in 2028.
Trump keeps dropping insouciant little hints that he might, of course. Our two-term president was quoted in Politico the other day saying, “I would love to do it — I have the best numbers ever! . . . Am I not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me. All I can tell you is that we have a great group of people, which they [the Democrats] don’t.”
Needless to say, this is such a transparent bit of trolling that I find it disgraceful that people are taking it seriously. I am not going to now list the seven different overdetermined reasons why Donald Trump will not seek a third term in office, just as I feel no need to explain to anyone save small children that water is wet and fire burns. But I also find the entire nonsense question to be beneath our political dignity, such an obvious distraction and diversion that I don’t know if I feel more contempt for Trump (who is the provocateur here) or for the media (who are either stupid or cynical enough to encourage it and play along). Worry about the president using his own Justice Department as an ATM (or worry about JD Vance), not a clickbait fantasy.
Kamala Harris Is Not Running for President in 2028 Either
Meanwhile, maybe Kamala Harris needs an intervention. Because while Trump is acting like the same sort of shameless carny he has always been, Harris comes off as sadly delusional when she tries to convince anyone at all that she has an electoral career remaining before her.
Yes, the 107 Days book tour has finally made its way to the United Kingdom, where the former vice president took the opportunity to sit down for an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. It’s not terribly interesting, primarily because Harris is not a terribly interesting person. But there was one sadly delightful moment, when Kuenssberg asked her the entirely predictable “Are you running again?” question.
KUENSSBERG: Have you made a decision yet?
HARRIS: No, I have not.
KUENSSBERG: But you say in your book, “I’m not done.”
HARRIS: That is correct, I am not done. I have lived my entire career, a life of service. And it’s in my bones, and there are many ways to serve, I have not decided yet what I will do in the future beyond what I am doing right now.
All well and good, right up until the moment Harris gets hit point-blank with a question more hilariously brutal than any single one she fielded during the 2024 campaign season:
But you’ve been very clear that it’s a possibility that you might run again to become president, and in my experience interviewing politicians when someone says “I’m not done,” they are thinking seriously about running. But when you look at the bookies’ odds, they put you . . . [polite pause] as an outsider, behind Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I mean, is that underestimating you?
Ah, bless the Brits and their way of getting to a point. I want to pause here and congratulate Harris on not physically wincing after being verbally fish-slapped like that, because even I felt it, and you people already know how little I sympathize with her. But such humiliations are the price of her vanity, as she goes through a “will she or won’t she” ritual absolutely nobody — not just in the Democratic Party or America but anywhere in the English-speaking world — has any appetite for. It’s over, lady; just admit it and please let us all move on.
Kuenssberg’s comparison of Harris’s odds at the Democratic nomination with The Rock’s was a laugh-out-loud moment, as if her questions had been scripted for her by Armando Iannucci. But it was Harris’s goggle-eyed, head-shaking response that made me feel like I was staring into the eyes of a ghost slowly awakening to the reality that it’s dead. “I think there are all kinds of polls that will tell you a variety of things,” Harris sputtered, though she knows all of those polls say the same thing.
A lot of people will be running for president in 2028, but I can 99 percent guarantee you that neither major-party candidate on the ballot in 2024 will be among them. I’m certain that Donald Trump is aware of this. But sometimes I wonder about Kamala.
Eric Swalwell, Magnificent Idiot
A final note on one of the least likable men in Democratic politics, a California Democrat known solely for his partisan cloddishness and his suspiciously close ties to Chinese spies. Representative Eric Swalwell, last seen coyly hinting that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a MAGA drone, is in the news again, and this time for being so stupid that I, Jeffrey Blehar, humble National Review scribe, could have written his lines as a gift-wrapped present to myself. How do I know? Because I accidentally did.
Recall that last week the world was discussing Donald Trump’s soon-to-be-constructed White House ballroom, with Democratic commentators (mostly online types) hyperventilating in a huffy rage. I offered my own two cents and concluded by saying that, “in the meantime, we shall see which Democrat is willing to escalate first, by publicly demanding a wrecking ball on Day One of the next Democratic administration. The voters are guaranteed to respond well to that.”
Readers, the very next day, out went Swalwell onto Twitter/X to make the following statement: “Don’t even think of seeking the Democratic nomination for president unless you pledge to take a wrecking ball to the Trump Ballroom on DAY ONE.”
Amazing. The exact wording, no less. I would like to thank Representative (and apparent reader) Swalwell for sharing my work with a far larger audience than I myself could ever hope to reach. But what he evidently fails to realize is that I did not intend that part as a recommendation.
Until next week.