A Wake-Up Call for the Dem Establishment
What Zohran Mamdani’s shock win in last night’s NYC mayoral primary means.
The world’s attention may have wandered elsewhere, but Russia continues its brutal bombardment on civilians in Ukraine. Its strikes on the city of Dnipro yesterday, which included an attack on a passenger train from Odesa, were some of its deadliest yet, as journalist Caolan Robertson discussed with Tim in a Bulwark video yesterday. Happy Wednesday.
The Democrats’ Crisis—and Opportunity
by William Kristol
Silly me. I was kind of looking forward to November 4, 2025.
There’ll be two elections for governor that day, in Virginia and New Jersey, and in both cases the Democratic nominees—Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill—are impressive individuals whom I admire, centrist liberals with whom I agree, and skilled candidates who are likely to win.
Their victories would signify a Democratic party on the road back, a party at once embracing and updating the humane and tough-minded legacies of Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey—and yes, for us ex-Republicans, of John McCain.
And they do seem likely to win. But as my Yiddish-speaking forebears would have told me: Mann tracht, un Gott lacht. Man plans, and God laughs.
And so, we get another type of Democratic nominee who now seems poised to become a face of the party: New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a vocal proponent of government-run grocery stores, and a person unwilling to repudiate the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
Now to be fair, the good Lord didn’t nominate Mamdani last night. New York’s Democratic primary voters did. They did so partly because Mamdani really ran a heck of a race. He is a 33-year old state assemblyman who was at 1 percent in the polls in February and ended up scoring a comfortable victory over a three-term New York governor. His imaginative campaign, his skills as a communicator, and his abilities as a candidate are things everyone from every faction of the party in every part of the country should study.
It’s also the case that Mamdani was hugely helped by the fact that his main opponent was Andrew Cuomo, the aforementioned 67-year old former governor who’d resigned in disgrace after sex scandals, as well as after having mismanaged the pandemic and lied about it. The Emily Litella–like Democratic establishment looked at Cuomo’s baggage and decided: Never Mind. But the voters did mind.
As high as Mamdani is riding this morning, both he and his backers should recognize that New Yorkers are perfectly capable of rejecting the Democratic nominee in the general election. The Democratic nominee, after all, has lost seven of the last fifteen New York City mayoral races. But the alternatives this time don’t seem as formidable as John Lindsay or Rudy Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg.
Mamdani’s challengers in the general include Cuomo, who does have another ballot line—but after the drubbing he just took, it seems unlikely now that he’ll ask voters for another look in November. But who knows? Otherwise, the November ballot will feature the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, running as an independent, who’s a bit . . . problematic. There’s the wacky Republican, Curtis Sliwa, who lost to Adams in 2021. And there’s another independent who’s qualified for the ballot, a former assistant U.S. attorney named Jim Walden. He seems like a perfectly normal and reasonable alternative, so, given the world we live in, he presumably has little chance of gaining momentum.
In any case, beginning today and for the next five and a half months, Democrats in office and running for office all around the country are going to be asked whether or not they support Mamdani. If they say, ‘Yes,’ then the natural followup will be: Well, do you endorse this or that statement or position of his? If they say ‘No,’ it will be: Aren’t you disrespecting the Democratic voters of New York?
Some will welcome the chance to speak up and get some attention. Others will desperately try to duck and weave. Either way, fun times for the media and for the Republicans. Democrats in disarray!
And I doubt that the natural dodge—“Hey, it’s just a mayoral race”—is going to work. The population of New York City is almost as large as that of Virginia or New Jersey. New York City has a larger budget and a larger GDP. It’ll be kind of hard to pretend what happens there doesn’t really matter.
Still, all may be well. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy ran for president, there were plenty of Democratic officeholders at all levels who were segregationists and in some cases racists. He wasn’t. He managed to coexist with them, held the party more or less together, and won the presidency. In 1948, by contrast, the segregationists led by Sen. Strom Thurmond and the leftist fellow travelers led by former vice president Henry Wallace defected from the party, and the Democratic nominee Harry Truman won a four-way race.
So Mamdani’s victory needn’t be some kind of death knell for a winning Democratic party coalition in 2026 or 2028. It needn’t be a death knell for a centrist party in the tradition—now that you mention it!—of Truman and Kennedy. It should be a death knell for an ossified Democratic establishment that needs to be put out of its misery. And it should be a wakeup call for non-socialist Democrats to show some of the audacity and the ability of Mamdani.
The Great Truth Social Tongue Bath
by Andrew Egger
Some might argue there are saner ways for a world leader to manage a conflict between two hostile states than by screeching at them on his bespoke microblogging platform. But over the past few days, Truth Social has become a dramatic stage of geopolitical intrigue and a remarkable window into our president’s id.
Just take a gander at the offerings from the wild last few days. There was Donald Trump’s unexpected swerve into full military support for Israel as he bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, then his hard redirection into time-for-peace rhetoric culminating in his hardball insistence that Netanyahu be the first to lay down arms. (For more on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of the impact of the strikes, see the Quick Hits below.) And then came yesterday. Not even haters as hardened as we can deny the immediate-term effectiveness of Trump’s furious barrage of ‘everybody just be cool for two seconds’ posts, which came as Israel and Iran were limbering up to immediately violate their fragile ceasefire deal.
Also notable has been the acute, almost overwhelming desire that Trump has simultaneously exhibited for praise.
The president has spent so much time sharing the rapturous buttering-up he’s received. There are the usual suspects, of course—Trump reposted several calls from the likes of Charlie Kirk and Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) insisting he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. But some of the other flatterers were significantly more interesting.
There was NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who congratulated Trump in a private text on his “decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do.” Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, went on to tell Trump he was “flying into another big success in The Hague” (where the NATO summit is currently being held) and that “you will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done”: extracting larger military-spending commitments from other NATO member countries. “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should,” Rutte wrote, “and it will be your win.” Trump promptly tweeted out the entire text chain.
It didn’t end there. Trump reposted an entire article from the Washington Post’s conservative columnist Marc Thiessen, in which he praised the “deep-seated MAGA unity behind Trump and Israel” while deriding “the whining of a loud but tiny cabal of right-wing isolationists” like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) who are “completely out of step with Trump and the larger MAGA movement.” It took four screenshots.
Trump was even feeling magnanimous enough to accept olive branches from some old foes. Jeb Bush’s organization United Against Nuclear Iran released a statement praising the president’s “watershed” decision to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons program as an “unmistakable message to rogue regimes” that “the era of impunity is over”—“where others delayed and wavered, Trump acted.” Trump was apparently so touched that he included a note as he reshared it: “Thank you to Jeb Bush—Very much appreciated!”
It turns the stomach to see how thoroughly Trump has forced the entire world to fit itself to the contours of his own diseased mind. The secretary general of NATO doesn’t parrot Trump’s own opinion of himself back to him, using his own kindergarten-style capitalization, because that’s his communication method of choice. It’s because he knows Trump is a manchild whose goodwill can be won in no easier way. That Trump doesn’t recognize this is sort of embarrassing. Or maybe he does and doesn’t care, which is humiliating.
The bigger problem, of course, is that it’s not only allies who have caught on to this trick. Guys like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have been schmoozing him in just this way for years—buttering up his ego and aggravating his grievances against his domestic enemies. America’s president wields awesome power—so awesome that every other power on Earth is busy trying to play him now. It’d be nice if he were a little more difficult to play.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Next Level Live with Sarah, Tim and JVL starts tonight at 8 p.m. eastern!
Closed Primaries Like NYC Screw Voters in Broad Daylight… On How to Fix It, JOHN AVLON chats with JOHN OPDYCKE, founder and president of Open Primaries, to make the case for changing how we vote, starting with the primaries.
SCOTUS to Trump: Deport, Deport, Ignore the Courts… Right-wing justices give the president a green light for the deportation programs lower courts have found unlawful, writes PHILIP ROTNER.
Eric and Eliot’s Strike Assessment… Come join the professors on Shield of the Republic as they cover Trump’s motives, bomb damage assessment, the fate of the uranium, potential hidden sites, Israeli intel, MAGA fractures, Trump’s regime-change pivot, and the hypocrisy of critics demanding a vote despite backing Libya, Bosnia, and Kosovo strikes without one.
A “One Bomb Country…” On Just Between Us, WILL SALETAN joins MONA CHAREN as they discuss their theories about why Trump took the shot. Also, was it legal?
A Huddled Masses interview… JORGE RAMOS joins ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO to recap ICE in LA, and where mass deportation goes next.
Quick Hits
TELLING THE COURTS ‘FUCK YOU’: Donald Trump has many legal fixers, but only one that he has nominated for a federal judgeship. That would be Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, whose path to Senate confirmation got thornier yesterday after an explosive whistleblower complaint against him was leaked to the New York Times.
The complaint came from former Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni, who found himself at the center of controversy earlier this year after he correctly acknowledged in court—to the enormous irritation of the White House—that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador in error. Reuveni was subsequently placed on leave and ultimately fired this month.
In Reuveni’s telling, however, there was much more to the story. The New York Times reports:
Top officials at the Justice Department and the White House sought to defy federal court orders “through lack of candor, deliberate delay and disinformation,” his account states. . . .
A pivotal meeting occurred on March 14, when Mr. Bove, a senior official in the deputy attorney general’s office, spoke bluntly about the administration’s plans. He informed his subordinates that Mr. Trump would soon invoke the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly fly a group of immigrants out of the country that weekend . . . .
Mr. Bove “stressed to all in attendance that the planes needed to take off no matter what,” according to Mr. Reuveni’s account. Mr. Bove then broached “the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated.”
“Bove stated that D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order,” according to the account.
The Justice Department denies that anything of the sort ever occurred, but it bears remembering that this is more or less what ended up taking place.
Bove has a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today. This should make for some fireworks.
SQUABBLING OVER INTEL: Donald Trump’s war of words with his own intelligence community is getting more heated. Yesterday, CNN reported that a preliminary intelligence assessment found that America’s strikes in Iran had not destroyed the core components of its nuclear weapons program, and had in fact likely set Iran back only by months.
In its response, the White House went berserk even as they confirmed the existence of the report. In a statement, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the assessment “flat-out wrong” and said it had been leaked “by an anonymous, low-level loser” to “demean President Trump” and “discredit the brave fighter pilots”1 who flew the mission.
“Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration,” Leavitt added.
Speaking to reporters this morning, Trump himself was a bit more restrained. “The intelligence was very inconclusive,” he said. “The intelligence says, ‘we don’t know.’ It could have been very severe—that’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take the ‘we don’t know.’ It was very severe. It was obliteration.”
Trump is actually correct about one thing here: The preliminary intel report was just that, preliminary, and certainly no slam-dunk proof that the attack had failed to achieve its aims. But it’s notable that—rather than make that case initially—the White House’s first response to the Pentagon’s own internal intelligence assessment was to go on the attack.
Old habits die hard, we guess. Trump’s war of words with his own intelligence community was a hallmark of his first term, as he repeatedly disparaged and belittled their assessment that Russia’s Vladimir Putin had worked to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Many assumed he’d be more simpatico with the apparatus the second time around, in the hands of loyalists like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Now, however, Trump has belittled intelligence from both their departments just in the last week.
Cheap Shots
And bomber pilots?
The complaint that the closed primary in NYC disenfranchises voters is such nonsense. The ONLY qualification New Yorkers need to vote in the primary is to register with a party. Nothing else. I’m sorry, a private organization like a political party, is under no obligation to open up ITS own nominating contest to voters who don’t belong to the organization!
As far as last night goes, Mamdani has REPEATEDLY stated that he wants Jewish New Yorkers to feel safe in the city. That he would do all he could to stop the rise in anti-Semitism. Despite his answer on the flagship podcast, the idea that the mayoralty of NY hinges on an answer about a conflict half a world away is patently ridiculous.
Lastly, why does no one mention Mamdani’s full answer about the city administered grocery stores that he gave on the podcast? Bill, the city currently subsidizes PRIVATE grocery stores to tune of MILLIONS of dollars every year. The proposal is for a pilot program, not for a wholesale socialist plot for a government directed grocery economy in NYC.
I live upstate (Glens Falls area) so I don’t have a say in NYC mayor. Mamdani may be too far left for me and may end up repelling people if he’s elected.
I do however remember thinking that Adams would be great because he was this centrist, conservative Dem who would appeal to a wide swath. How did he work out?
My criteria have been reduced to “Is the candidate not a corrupt sociopath?”