Trump’s Rage at Zohran Just Backfired in a Surprisingly Revealing Way

Indeed, Mamdani sometimes explicitly connects these things. “I will be a mayor who doesn’t bow down to corporate interests, doesn’t take his orders from billionaires, and sure as hell doesn’t let ICE steal our neighbors from their homes,” Mamdani said recently, emphasizing that last clause in a huge applause line. “There are no kings in America, whether that’s Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, or the Republican billionaires who fund both of their campaigns.”

All of this is about challenging power, whether economic or authoritarian. Those are of course frequently in tight alliance with one another, as we see with corporate oligarchs cravenly acquiescing to Trump’s autocratic takeover to protect their own perceived narrow interests. As Adam Serwer notes, Trump correctly diagnosed a deep rot afflicting some segments of elite society that left them vulnerable to divide-and-conquer authoritarian bullying.

To this I would add that the Democrats breaking through right now are those who recognize that patriotic resistance to Trump’s authoritarian abuses of power is the path to Democratic—and national—renewal. Governors J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, among others, treat it as an unavoidable reality that Trump is consolidating autocratic power at an alarming clip and that he is deliberately using it to subjugate or even terrorize Blue America, which he and Stephen Miller quite consciously depict as an enemy nation within. Those Democrats are being heard across the country by getting creative in protecting their own people from exactly this—and by unflinchingly depicting it as the fundamental, existential challenge of our moment.