Mamdani Is Trump Is America

Barring what would be one of the biggest upsets in recent American political history, come November 4, New York City, the largest Jewish city in the world and a long-time crucial support-base for Zionism, will elect a new mayor who cannot bring himself to say that Israel has a right to exist as the national home of the Jewish people or that Hamas should not remain in power in Gaza.

No, please – not a “Muslim mayor,” as Israeli media tend to describe Zohran Mamdani in the pejorative. You cannot seriously counter antisemitism while judging others by their ethnicity or religion rather than by their views and actions.

Mamdani’s expected victory will owe in part to strong support from Jews. Four in ten Jewish voters favor him. Commentators who express astonishment fail to realize that there is no longer a “Jewish vote” in America. Secular liberal Jews vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats because they are secular and liberal, and religious conservative Jews vote for the Republicans because they are religious and conservative.

The rise of a candidate who was almost obscure only a year ago is explained as an aggressive emotional reaction to Trump 2.0.

Indeed, the 34-year-old socialist Mamdani is as ideologically apart from the 79-year-old president as any two Americans can be. Also, they don’t fight in the same weight class or the same ring. Trump has already reduced the United States to the status of a fragile democracy by leading a violent insurrection against an elected president, bullying his way to another term by threatening to lead another insurrection, and then using his office for openly declared personal vendettas. Mamdani is yet to wreck anything, and would only be able to do so on a local scale.

Yet in essence, the two New York privileged media-savvy individuals who found their way to the masses reflect the same zeitgeist: the despair of Americans about traditional politics and conventional wisdoms, and the consequent mainstreaming of radical solutions.

Two decades into Obamism, a decade into Trumpism, and a year into Mamdanism, some pundits still don’t get the root cause of these phenomena: the inability of traditional, establishment politicians to offer a sense of identity and mission to Americans in the post-Cold War world and to meaningfully positively transform lives through their policies.

Most Americans experience their country for what it has really become, not through tired self-congratulatory slogans: the broken infrastructures; politicized, brutal, and inefficient judiciaries; invasive megalomaniac tech-tycoons; corrupted and distorted elections; declining life-expectancies; ailing academia; and ever-expanding national debt that risks bringing the whole façade down sooner rather than later. They recognize the diminishing chance that they could provide their children a better quality of life than the one their parents provided them. They realize that their constitution – once hailed as the most brilliant document ever written – makes essential structural reforms practically impossible to achieve.

In this climate, accusing a candidate of radicalism amounts to endorsement.

The more Mamdani’s ideas about how to make the actual lives of his electorate better were attacked through old, belittling slogans rather than through inspiring alternatives, the more voters were convinced that there was something in them. Just as the more Trump was attacked through the labels of fascist or populist, the more voters were convinced that he could actually deliver.

Unlike Barack Obama, whose radical message was his identity – which is why his presidency did not live up to its promise – Mamdani appears to be a real radical. He is not afraid to call socialism by its name and to explain why it is a good thing.

When he does so, veteran politicians like Andrew Cuomo, appealing to young voters as a week-old bread roll, rush to castigate him, only to discover that they are not on the same page with voters. What seems to establishment politicians and elder analysts as cheeky assaults on common sense and the American Way of Life (whatever that means) turns out to be, for a majority of voters, a blessed alternative for a system that does not work for them.

The genius of Trumpism is that it masks its recognition of how flawed the American system is through rhetoric that speaks of its inherent greatness. This gives it a crucial advantage over leftist radicalism, but also makes it less capable of addressing the fundamental reforms the Union needs.

According to a Fox News poll from mid-September, 48% of New Yorkers have a positive view of capitalism. Yet socialism was only slightly less favorable, with 41%.

In essence, Mamdani has been asking old-schoolers to explain why things that work well in other countries are impossible to implement in New York.

If the Big Apple is indeed so rich and the American dream is so glorious, why can’t New York have free public transportation as Luxembourg does?

If a capitalist healthcare system works so well, why do Americans die younger than Albanians, Chileans, Maltese, Taiwanese, Panamanians, and Israelis, while paying more? (The state of New York fares better than 90% of the Union, but still would not top the world list).

Israel and Hamas are just another case in point of the growing irrelevance of political conventional wisdoms in American politics.

At the beginning of his second term, Trump advanced the idea of emptying Gaza of its inhabitants while turning it into a Riviera, or something.

This was a radical plan that ran the risk of becoming a criminal one. The reason why it was taken so lightly by Americans was not just that Trump was not taken seriously, or that his words were interpreted as a tactical effort to get Arab states to rally behind realistic solutions for ending the war (they were not). The reason is that after many other conventional roads to resolution presented by experts failed, crazy ideas no longer seemed irrational.

It is clear that Mamdani’s sympathies lie with the Palestinians, not with Israel. Listen not just to his eloquent, nuanced words, but also to the music that accompanies them.

Yet what seemed just recently to be unthinkable – that New Yorkers will elect a person who is so averse to Israel – does not ring so when considering the late September New York Times/Siena Poll survey and the early October Washington Post poll.

For the first time since the NYT began surveying this question in 1998, more Americans – Americans, not liberal New Yorkers – said they supported the Palestinians than Israel. By a whisker, and yet. Fifty-one percent opposed American economic and military support to Israel. Among 18-29 year olds, 61% backed the Palestinians over Israel. Among Democrats, 54% sided with the Palestinians and only 13% with Israel.

According to the Washington Post, six in ten American Jews believe Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Four in ten believe it committed genocide. Seven in ten have an unfavorable view of Netanyahu.

Thus, Mamdani, who hints at a one-state solution, talks nonchalantly about Israeli apartheid and genocide and threatens to have Netanyahu arrested, sounds extremist only to those who don’t keep updated about the shifts in American public opinion.

Yesterday’s radical speech is today’s mainstream also with regard to Israel. Not just because of what happened in Gaza, but also because the entire political discourse has become more embracing of the fringe.

Israelis who bask in Trump’s radicalism because it works well for them at the moment are ignoring the broader process America is going through and its potential implications. In three years, if the Union survives, Trump may well be replaced by another radical – and it will possibly be a Mamdani-type, one who is unapologetically, uncompromisingly anti-Israel.

In the meantime, the ceasefire does the Republicans little good internally. The majority of American voters care most for radical change in their lives, not in the lives of Gazans. Less than four in ten currently approve of Trump; only one-third approve of his handling of the economy, the issue that matters most.

“It’s kind of cool he’s bringing peace, but I’m like, ‘You kind of need to worry about your American people instead of bringing peace to the world first,’” told the Associated Press Justin Sanders, a 31-year-old driver and Republican from Birmingham, Alabama, who voted twice for Trump. He added: “We need the inflation to go down. I’m tired of sitting here struggling, going day by day, trying to figure out if I’m going to eat or not.”

What credit does Trump deserve for his single policy achievement thus far?

From October 8, it was obvious that Israel would not be able to eliminate Hamas as a governing power in Gaza while keeping dozens of murderers in prison and bringing back its hostages. The deal ultimately mediated by Trump and his team prioritized the third objective, but without hermetically closing the door on the first, without absolute capitulation on the second, and with a narrow, cautious path for more ambitious diplomacy charted.

Given how the war was developing and the state of public opinion in Israel and the world, the deal was the lesser of evils, the best that could be achieved, and thus a real triumph for the Trump administration.

Those who mock Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize obsession are encouraged to inquire about the efforts Shimon Peres invested in the matter after the Declaration of Principles was signed.

Contrary to common analyses, though, it was not non-conventional, erratic, madman Trump diplomacy that facilitated the achievement. To the contrary, the deal is textbook realist school: pragmatic, advanced by a broad international alliance assembled around the United States and its interests, and grounded in the existing international system.

If there was a defeat Israel suffered from the deal, it was its own doing: the submissive way in which Trump was embraced in Jerusalem, more befitting early 19th-century island colonies.

I can understand the flattery. I cannot understand the overdoing.

I cannot understand MKs who claim to speak for national dignity and pride who give up so easily – is it theirs to give? – on foundations of sovereignty and cheer as adoring teenagers a foreign leader who acts as an imperial boss (the entire slumber-party smug act took place at the time that coffins of dead hostages were prepared to be laid to rest).

I cannot understand the Greater Israel ideologist who so easily forgives the person who promised them just recently that all their dreams would come true, and then brushed off the prospect of annexation for good.

Could it be that national dignity and Greater Israel are not the real passion of these people, and that their actual kick is the kind of politics that Trump represents?

I equally cannot understand politicians whose flagship agenda is the protection of democracy and liberalism who cheer for Trump and giggle at Trump without hesitation, reservation, nuance, or reflection. Something that would show that they understand that Kaplanism and Trumpism are inherently in conflict.

Could it be that their real passion is not liberal democracy? 

The most shameful aspect of the Trump Show was the trashing and bashing of President Biden. Never mind the government. What about the public, the media, Jewish organizations?

Sinwar’s strategy on October 7, 2023, was simple. It counted on Israel’s sensitivity about hostages and on the West’s sensitivity about civilian casualties to lead Hamas to a resounding victory. One in which Israel, possibly under intense fire also from other fronts, would be forced to provide the Islamist dictatorship in Gaza with immunity while embroiled in an excruciating war of attrition, humiliatingly emptying its prisons from each and every Palestinian terrorist, and as a result, landing Sinwar recognition as the unchallenged all-Palestinian leader, revered across the Muslim world (and Ireland).

This scenario failed for four reasons: the thirst of Gazans for Jewish blood, which stopped them from settling for the kidnapping and killing of soldiers and cost them heavily in international legitimacy; the courage displayed by IDF soldiers; several brilliant tactical moves by the Israeli leadership – and Joe Biden.

His famous “don’t” at the start of the war and deployment of aircraft carriers deterred Iran and Hizballah and possibly other actors from full intervention, and the practically free hand, as well as military supplies, he gave Israel, made the massive ground offensive in Gaza possible.

By the fall of 2024, with Biden as President, the masterminds of the massacre were killed, the military infrastructures of Hamas were greatly diminished, and large parts of Gaza were occupied. In the north, Nasrallah was killed along with the majority of Hizballah’s top brass. Its weakening facilitated the end of Alawi Iran-backed rule in Syria and practically eliminated the most dangerous border fronts Israel faced.

Israel prevailed and, in some respects, grew stronger. That was far from an assured result on October 8, 2023.

Biden made that possible while knowing that he is harming his chances for reelection. He ended up not running, and it wasn’t the war in Gaza that cost the Democrats the elections, but your guess on how Trump would act in the same circumstances is as good as mine.

To deny Biden any of the credit he deserves as the great friend that he was of Israel in its darkest hour is an immoral act, an outrageous breach of Hakarat Hatov. It is also political folly.

If Israel’s politicians are determined to turn the country into a shtetl, let them be reminded that tomorrow’s paritz may not be today’s.