127. MAMDANI WINS: Trump’s Worst Nightmare Comes True

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1:26Welcome to The Rest is Politics US, live from London, actually in person. You exist as a real person, Anthony. Who knew? I exist as a real person. Wow, we hardly ever actually spend time together. This is a treat. Our social media team here, you're not wearing a I'm with stupid shirt, so I think I'm going to be okay. So you're feeling good today? I'm feeling pretty good. I'm feeling robust. Are you feeling as good as the Democrats are feeling today? I'm getting my intellectual security back. Okay, good. After feeling insecure for the last two weeks. But I like what happened for the Democrats. Do you like what happened for the Democrats?

1:58I would be very happy if I was a Democrat. I think it's not just, so we're doing this emergency episode on this Wednesday morning after the results of the elections from New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and I think you could throw in California, where Democrats had a very big night. And it's not just that the Democrats won in those elections, because you and I predicted that they would win in New York and in those governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia. It's the size of the wins that Democrats are excited about. I'm getting texts from Democrats from the states. We're in London, but I'm getting texts this morning from Democrats who are saying these are huge numbers.

2:32And I think it's that they overperformed expectations in all of those races, particularly that one in New Jersey where we said she might be tight. These are Northeast mid-Atlantic elections. So these are generally coastal populations, generally. right? They've got some rural population. Coast, right? Yeah. I guess what I'm saying is these are liberalish, bluish states, or am I wrong? No, I think you're right. They're liberalish, bluish states, but Democrats have been concerned about New Jersey because Donald Trump had overperformed in New Jersey in the 2024 election, so they thought that one might be closer.

3:09I would say Virginia is a purplish state. It did swing for Kamala Harris, but she didn't have huge numbers. But if you look at all of these races, and if you look at the turnout and the groups who turned out for Democrats in all three of those races, young people who had swung to Donald Trump in 2024, swung back to Democrats. Black and brown voters who had swung towards Donald Trump in 2024, swung back to Democrats and gave them big margins. Let me play the orange-minded individual and say this is great for me, okay, because I'm going to use Zoran Mondami as a socialist punching bag. Communist, he calls him.

3:55Communist for the next three years. I'm going to put his face out there. He's a brownish face, okay, and I'm a white supremacist. supremacist and so this is going to be good for me because I'm going to scare the living daylights out of my very white Wonderbred base and I'm going to drive my wonder bed base out to the polls and crush everybody in the midterms and then go on to Have a Republican electoral success For the presidency in 2008 so did is that gonna happen? So I think the other thing that he's saying that is actually he hasn't really sent out very many posts You know what I love about you lately?

4:33I said white supremacist. You didn't even push back. So white supremacist is okay with you, but fascist is not okay with you, right? Push back. I think authoritarian white supremacist, that's okay. That's okay. That's okay. All right, we got that. Fascist. Caddy Kay, the official political score here, for those of you that are playing at home. On linguistics, yeah. White supremacists, white nationalist supremacists, we're okay with. Okay, go ahead. Okay, look, the other thing that he's saying, and he hasn't spent a lot of time tweeting about this, but we know he's watching. And by the way, Mamdani knows he's watching because he told him to turn up the volume on the television set.

5:07He's saying when I, Donald Trump is saying, look what happens when I'm not on the ballot. When I'm on the ballot, like in 2024, the Republicans have big wins. When Donald Trump is not on the ballot, he's saying because he - Is he right though? I don't know that this is because Donald Trump was not on the ballot. But I think this is a repudiation of some of the stuff that has happened since Donald Trump was inaugurated. Two things in particular, particularly with Hispanic voters, but also with working class voters and young voters. They don't like the fact that things cost too much still. There's a huge affordability crisis.

5:47I mean, listen, he's getting Mamdani got 40 points more. He won by 40 points in New York amongst young men. there'd been a whole load of stories about how young men were drifting right in america were drifting towards the republicans and were becoming trumpy to win by for as a democratic strategist texted me this morning for a brown muslim candidate to win in new york by 40 points amongst young men is a huge deal and i think that's a repudiation of prices being too high and he ran on that And I think amongst Hispanic voters, there's some pushback against all of the ICE rates, what they've seen in other cities that you and I have spoken about.

6:31Yeah, well, listen, I think you're seeing the start of the decline of MAGA. That is my opinion. We both share this opinion on our podcast. But I think what's interesting about this race in New York, let's focus on New York for a second. if you took Sliwa the Republican candidate and you took the independent candidate Cuomo and you added those two together you didn't get to Zoran Mondami's total now I don't know who voted what do you read into that well I don't know who voted for Adams or not because Adams was still on the ballot maybe there was a few people but I would imagine that Zoran beat all of them combined and I think this is a fascinating thing and what I read into it is probably three or four things but let me just name a few of them.

7:13Number one, this is a phenomenal grassroots movement by this young man, and he worked tirelessly. And this is something that AOC did. Okay, AOC, when she beat Joe Crowley several years ago, she was taking pictures, Caddy, of the soles of her shoes. And she was putting them on Twitter and Facebook. And she's saying, I'm burning through my shoes to knock on doors to get these votes. Yeah. Okay, and he did that. It's a good message. You have to give him the grant. Secondary message is we don't care. This is the opposite of the right. We want to smash into the institutions in New York that are not working for us.

7:54Financial services, accounting, advertising, whatever's living in New York right now that's doing well, we're not doing well. We don't like that, and we want our new mayor to smash into you. So orange wrecking ball of Donald Trump on the national level, somebody like Mondami on a local level or an urban level. And then the last thing, which I think is the most important thing, which has me troubled because I think that de Blasio was incompetent, particularly compared to Bloomberg. I think Adams had a better message, but he was also managerially incompetent. And he's surrounding himself with de Blasio people.

8:35so and he's never run anything before and he's never had a job and he's never managed a process or organized and delegated to people so I think we're a job as an assemblyman yeah but it's a representative job it's not an executive I agree and one of the concerns actually you even see that amongst his supporters in the last few days you had stories there was a story in the New York Times about how even some of his supporters have concerns about his management capacity given that he's never run anything this big I mean He's now going to be in charge of how many employees are there in the New York?

9:07300 ,000. 300 ,000 employees. I think at the moment he's in charge of six people. That's pretty much what an assemblyman is in charge of. But his campaign had several hundred and they were very, very effective and they were well organized. And they were very disciplined to bring our message because you and I tried to interview him a few times and we couldn't even get hold of him. Yeah. He had no use for us, Caddy Kay. Mayor-elect, if you would like to join the rest is politics, U.S. will make you an honorary founding member. It had a lot to do with me bashing him every single day on Twitter. It may have been to do with the fact that you and Andrew Cuomo support.

9:39But I hope that he is big enough now to put those past and, you know, relationships behind him and have good relationships and reach out. I want to say something to you, and please react to this. I feel like this is another seasonal generational change. Andrew's message was an old school Democratic message from the 80s. It was an old school Bill Clinton-esque message from the 90s, and it was off key. It wasn't playing from a sheet of music that new, younger, generational Democrats wanted to bring into the prey. Am I right about that? I think you're right. I think we are seeing a shift in what people are calling the K economy, where people who are doing well and are older are maximizing their assets at the moment and looking at the stock market and feeling they're doing really well.

10:38A K-shaped economy. And the people who are not doing well, who are often younger, particularly in New York City, are losing money and losing assets. I'm smiling because you're actually using the… You're like a Wall Streeter now a little bit, right? I mean, the K is such a Wall Street verbiage. Very, very impressed with this. And I had it on point, right? I came in early with it. You did. But I think you're seeing that split between older people who are basically doing reasonably well in the middle class and younger people who aren't doing reasonably well. I'm doing interviews at the moment on the BBC for an interview series that I'm doing on The New Normal.

11:16And a ton of them are about how young people can't find jobs. young people can't afford to pay rent young people can't have children because they can't afford to buy a house and i think this reflect this election last night reflected how pissed off people under the age of 30 are about the state of their economy and they are and they are turning out in elections and that's we we agree on all of this but let's go to these other two races okay Because these people to a Republican are hard left. Okay. Yeah. Okay. They may not be relative to Zoran Mandani. You mean Spanberger or Mikey Sherrill? To a Republican.

11:55They are. They're very liberal. I would say they are not to old school Republicans, to MAGA. MAGA. MAGA. They are hard left. Okay. Okay. MAGA are. To a George W. Bush Republican. Centrist. A John McCain Republican. A Mitt Romney Republican. They're centrist. They are centrist. Yeah, but hear me out for a second. The reason I'm saying this is now I am the media guru. It's interesting because I had breakfast with Mark Thompson. Hopefully, he wouldn't mind me saying this, but he said something brilliant about Trump. And if he does mind, he's saying it anyway, so they go sort him out. But he said something brilliant about Trump that I want to share with everybody because it was a very big insight, and I want to footnote him.

12:34he said that when he did the preparation the CNN debate Trump came to the stage he said where's my camera and if I want to get the attention of the moderator or what do I do and how do I know when I'm done speaking is there a timer he was looking around the stage he wanted to test the lighting he knows television okay he's he he stood behind the podium he said uh can I see the monitor and he went back he said no no i want the light at this aperture and i want this great when joe biden came on he looked over at mark and said hey can i you want a picture with me he didn't look at anything didn't focus on anything and the reason i'm bringing this up is not only that he's you know television he actually knows messaging do not underestimate this man as a messenger and so go ahead katie k what is the donald trump message back to his base what is the message to rebut what happened last night?

13:30The election was rigged. I mean, so far, that's been pretty much the sum total of his message. The election was rigged and I'm not on the ballot. And the problem for the Republicans, now... Are you like those, like, tachycardia things in here, like where you can shock somebody's heart back to life and you're like, if I drop dead? A defibrillator. Yeah, defibrillator. I mean, it's just rigged. The election is rigged. That seems to be his only answer at the moment. The election was rigged and I wasn't on the ballot. Okay. And he also actually said the government was shut down, which makes me think this is day 36 of the shutdown.

14:05I think the government's going to reopen, is my prediction, pretty soon because the wind is behind Democrats. Well, they're going to close the air traffic and the Secretary Duffy, the transportation secretary, said we're going to have to close large portions of the airspace over the United States as a result of the government shutdown. Yeah. You're going to let that happen? They can't. So here comes the Epstein files. Here comes the government reopening. Here comes the Epstein files. And so, go ahead, give me Trump's narrative. So Trump's narrative now that he is on the back foot, and it's interesting that he is meeting with Republican senators the morning after these results come in, which is going to be a pretty awkward meeting, because I think you now start to see Republicans push back against Donald Trump on all of the things they have been supine about for the last nine months, particularly things like tariffs, they're going to start saying, actually, you know what, we don't like this because his hold over the party as of today weakens.

15:08Whether or not that he, whether or not Republicans lost because he was not on the ballot. And it's possible, you know, him being on the ballot, would it have turned out more Republicans? Possibly a bit. But this was such a decisive win for Democrats. You have to think this is a referendum on all the things that are going on in government at the moment and all the things that are going on in the country at the moment. And people don't like, clearly people don't like them because they turned out in huge numbers in New York, right? Record turnout in some of these places for an off-year election. I think his message has to, he's got to try and reassert control in Washington now because I think he's lost a bit of control.

15:44The feeling of invincibility around Donald Trump, it's not going to stop him going over you know and doing as much as he can with his executive power and expanding and doing more executive orders and and smashing things that's his mode but that sense of invincibility has been diminished by this by the way we just polled our audience 91 of the trip us audience voted for zoran mandani they are not listening to you anthony scaramucci just want to apologize to all of you Mondani voters for my Andrew Cuomo tweets. Yes. I apologize for those. We'd like to keep you in the audience. Stay with us. Stay in the audience.

16:22And hopefully if I get a chance to meet with your new leader, I'll report back to you. Maybe what Trump does is he carries on what he's been doing over the last few weeks. He focuses abroad. For those 3 % of you that are Cuomo voters, let me just look right into the camera. I'm looking directly at you, 3%. I love you. I just want you to know that I love you. Thank you for helping me. Look, it's over. That chapter of New York is over. There's a new chapter. But Mr. Trump, Mr. President Trump said something, and you referenced it this morning at the Salt London Conference. And so it begins is what he put on his social media platform.

16:59What did he mean by that, Kat? He meant the fight against Mamdani begins because he has said that he's going to cut as much as he can in the way of federal funding to New York City. He's going to make New York City hurt. But Mamdani referenced that, by the way, in a very combative acceptance speech in which he says, if you want to get to any of us, you have to come through all of us. And he referencing the hit that New York might take. But Donald Trump sees the fight with Mamdani is a good thing for Donald Trump and for MAGA. He thinks this is going to be a good thing for Republicans because he's assuming that Mamdani can't deliver either because he doesn't have the experience or because everything that he's offering free health, child care, free buses is too expensive.

17:41And if he raises taxes by two percent, which he's threatening to do on people over a million dollars, they're just going to leave the city. So he's Trump's banking on the idea that Mamdani fails big time. And that then becomes good for you. You can flip the city upside down, because, again, as I referenced yesterday, one percent of the people pay 48 percent of the taxes. We had a question. That's a good question. But at DJI is basically asking the following question. If Trump cuts federal funding, can New York stop paying federal taxes? So I'm going to give the answer to that. The answer is no.

18:10But just so you know, more money is leaving New York in terms of taxes to the federal government than it's coming back into New York. Same is true for California. And the great irony is most of the blue states— Subsidize the poor red states. They subsidize the poor red states. That's the great irony. Of America. They subsidized Iran. You know, Mitch McConnell, you know, when they said that to him in Kentucky, he continues to ignore that and other red states. But but I want to ask this question, though. What do you say as Zora Mandami if and I think this is a very unfair thing, by the way, and this is for Cuomo supporters, Mandami supporters or my fellow New Yorkers, that Trump is now going to go after this young man by cutting federal expenditures into New York.

18:57And remember, he's already cut the infrastructure expenditures. Remember, he went to Schumer and said that$20 billion tunnel that you want, I have terminated it. And so this is hurting jobs. It's upset the municipal bond market. It's hurting the infrastructure rebuild of the city that the city's owed based on its tax expenditures back into the federal government. So go ahead. What do you say? You're Zora Mandani. Again, no disrespect. I want to make sure I'm always pronouncing his name right. What do you say back to Donald Trump? and how do you respond? We're going to take a quick break and I'll come back with my answer.

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21:21So if I'm the mayor-elect of New York, I take the feisty position I think that he did last night, that you're not afraid to fight against Donald Trump. And you try to use your platform now to expose the things that Donald Trump is doing that are unfair to American cities like your own. I know people who run big institutions in New York, and they are worried about this. They're worried about how they will be hit if New York City is hit because Donald Trump launches on a campaign of retribution. The only thing I would say is that one of the factors behind last night's wins, and you look at those, I'm looking particularly actually at the Virginia and New Jersey wins, because we knew Zoran Mamdani was going to win in New York.

22:09But every single county in Virginia shifted to the left, shifted towards Democrats. And is part of that shift, again, the country saying as they did in 2020, we are exhausted by Donald Trump. We're exhausted by the retribution. We're exhausted by the constant drama. We're exhausted by the expansion of executive power that we've seen over the last nine months. We are exhausted by the ice raids and how to feel about that if that's the case then carrying on these campaigns of retribution i'm not sure that it helps republicans in the midterm elections let me let me go rogue okay i want to go a little rogue oh my god okay here we go all right here we go we're gonna go rogue trump is going to go everybody crazy okay he's gonna say that this is a 100 communist takeover he's called the mayor elect a 100 % communist lunatic.

23:05He's going to cut the funding. He's going to cut the money. He's going to threaten to end the HUD projects. And then he's going to go after the mayor culturally and from a religious foundation perspective. That could hurt. I think that could hurt Republicans. Okay, tell me why. Because I think actually a lot of what Americans have seen over the last nine months of, you called it white supremacy at the beginning, a rise of attacks against minorities. Actually, people, they don't really like it. They don't like it. They don't like seeing kids zip-tied by ICE. What about a Save Our Cities plan where he goes to places like Houston and Miami and says these are the cities that love America and Scranton, PA is the forgotten America.

23:51So that's the question. And Staten Island is the real New York, which of course voted, the only borough that voted for Andrew Cuomo. Along with the Upper East Side voted for Cuomo too. That was a neighborhood, but the borough was only Staten Island. Okay, but go ahead. So go ahead. Save our cities plan. I'm going to tour our cities, and I'm going to praise the cities that are red. Yeah, there aren't very – by the way, there are not very many of those because a lot of cities in America now are blue. Even the ones in red states, the cities tend to be blue. But if you look at the turnout last night from these elections, which is why Democrats are feeling good, across the board you had turnout amongst groups who had swung to republicans to donald trump in 24 either staying home or voting democrat and some of that has to be the nature of the government that we've seen over the last nine months i mean maybe i'm wrong but i think some of this is a pushback against that why have you got young men turning out such big numbers why do you have Hispanic voters.

24:50You look at some of the counties, heavily Hispanic counties in New Jersey, 18 point swing from the Republicans in 2024 to Democrats this time around. Okay, this is a question that's come in from at tuning Kate. What do last night's results mean for the culture wars given that many of the fear campaigns fell short? Will the results change the tone in any way? It's a great question. It's what we're just talking about. I'm not sure that the tone will change because I don't think, I mean, I spoke to a very senior Republican recently in the Senate. who said to me, you know, when it comes to moments of crisis, you can have a leader who reaches for reconciliation and you can have a leader who goes for the division.

25:26And Donald Trump's going to take the bait every single time. And I don't see Donald Trump toning down his divisive rhetoric at all. But I do see voters in these results pushing back against some of that.

25:40Listen, I'm not a Trump advisor, but if I were a Trump advisor, I say, cool out, ignore the kid, help them, frankly, because it's your city. You grew up there. And by the way, your own self-interest, you've got a lot of real estate holdings there. He's not going to do that, of course. He's going to go full ballistic on him. He's going to be saying things up on X that, you know, this was the city that never sleeps. Now it's a city that never works. I think he goes for the religion. Oh, he's going to go for the religion. He's going to press every button imaginable. and to tune in Kate, the culture war is going to escalate because Donald Trump is no dummy and he knows that his political relevancy is on a shot clock right now.

26:26It's on a timer and it is decaying. And by this time next year, all of the sand in the hourglass is going to have run out on him. And so I predict he's going to go out. Guns blazing. fire and guns blazing guns blazing and actually there's yosemite sam you know another problem that he has that we need to do a podcast on and maybe we get to it next week there are already divisions emerging in maga on culture wars issues yes so you're seeing splits between people like tucker carson and nick fuentes on the one side ben shapiro very anti-zionist very talking about basically anti-semitic on the other side you've got people who are saying hold on a second guys This is not the way we need to be talking.