By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

For the first six months of his second term, President Donald Trump sucked up all the political oxygen of planet earth. He has started the second six months claiming success and victories on all fronts. He declared obliterating victory after America’s sprawling metallic mammals flew non-stop from Missouri and dropped bunker-buster bombs at three nuclear sites in Iran. Within two days, he ordered ceasefire on both Israel and Iran and swore down Netanyahu into submission when the Israeli Prime Minister tried his usual end run on Washington. On the fourth day, Trump arrived in Amsterdam to right royal Dutch welcome and genuflexion by the new NATO of abject supplicants.

By the time he flew back home quite triumphantly, the US Supreme Court was ready yet again to give him judicial cover for his executive orders. Trump is now relatively free of lower court  injunctions to deport undocumented migrants to third country jails, and set up new jails in America to hold them indefinitely without cause; deny newborns of immigrants the constitutionally mandated birthright citizenship unless their parents or others acting on their behalf challenge the executive order individually or through class action law suits; harass universities into expelling international students and force university presidents to resign for affirmatively helping socioeconomically challenged American students; to close down American aid agencies overseas and cancel aid programs without any notice or warning and without any regard for millions of the world’s vulnerable people who depend on USAID programs for their healthcare and clean infrastructure; and to go about imposing tariffs without immediate reviews regardless of the cost to consumers and industries in America and the disruption of economies everywhere.

And a week later the Congress, the third branch of government, gave Trump his “big, beautiful bill,” the budget for his second term that will turn the current surplus into a $3.3tn deficit in ten years by providing additional $4.5tn in tax cuts, $150bn for defence and $129bn for border control, while cutting back $930bn in Medicaid healthcare benefits to low income Americans, $488bn from incentives given to the Green Energy Sector and $287bn of funds allocated for food benefits to seniors and the vulnerable. For a country with a $30tn economy, its president has to siphon off $1.2tn from Medicaid and food benefits to the poor, to help himself and his billionaire buddies to a hefty tax cut.   

The pseudo economic argument is that the ‘big, beautiful’ tax cuts will propel the economy into unprecedented growth and prosperity will trickle down to one and all. Most analysts, on the right and on the left, disagree, forecasting a sustained “drag on the economy” after “a small, temporary, short-lived boost.” As a result of the cuts to Medicare funding, 16 million Americans, mostly Blacks and Latinos, will lose their health insurance. About 338 rural hospitals that treat patients receiving Medicaid will be forced to close down for want of patients and their insurance.

The Republican social policy argument includes the heartless illogic that there is no point in the public funding of healthcare when people are going to die anyway. Democrat firebrand, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) pilloried the Republicans during the House debate: “This bill is a deal with the devil. It explodes our national debt. It militarizes our entire economy, and it strips away healthcare and basic dignity of the American people — for what? To give Elon Musk a tax break and billionaires the greedy taking of our nation?  We cannot stand for it, and we will not support it. You should be ashamed.”

The whole passage of the bill numbering 1,116 pages in its final version, stretched over long days and nights, and bandied back and forth between the two chambers, was lowbrow political soap at its worst. The 1,000 pages of the bill are needed to include every minor concession given to a Senator or Congressman to get her or his support for the budget. In good old times, the pork barrel politics of granting local concessions for national support spanned both parties. Now, it is all about the Republicans.

Even so, there was haggling over who gets the prize to be the meanest and the cruellest when it came to cutting services, and who gets to be the loudest and the showiest when it came to cutting taxes. Trump would overlord the squabbling Republican factions and corral them into line in support of the bill. Even Elon Musk, who was on a reconciliation path after his very public spat with Trump, rejoined the fray berating the bill as too expensive and a betrayal of Trump’s promise to bring down federal spending. Musk threatened to destroy the re-election prospects of hardline legislators who were softening to support the bill.

Trump fired back threatening to turn DOGE back on Musk. DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is the downsizing agency that Trump tasked Musk to operate and eviscerate federal government departments and American aid agencies abroad, to save money to make up for the tax cuts. Trump is now threatening to use DOGE to do to Musk’s businesses what Musk did to the government of the USA through DOGE. In other words, Trump would terminate US government subsidies and contracts that Musk had been enjoying from the time of President Obama, through Biden and finally under Trump. Without government subsidies and contracts, “Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa,” said Trump. When someone asked if he would banish Musk from the US, Trump deadpanned “I don’t know, we’ll have to take a look.”

Trump’s second term has got off to a whirlwind start, but it is unlike any other American presidency. Not only the presidency but also the congress and the judiciary are in unchartered territories. Trump has bullied the federal institutions into submission. The conservative Supreme Court has used the Trump presidency to expand the unitary executive power ostensibly for any and all future presidents, but deliberately oblivious to the deranged possibilities under the current president.

Bestirring in New York

Democrats stood united in Congress and voted against the budget, but they are rudderless and leaderless as there is no room for a leader of the opposition in the American presidential system. The elders of the party would rather do nothing on any issue that Trump has turned into a controversy because they are not sure which way the electoral wind will blow in those parts of the country where voters swing from one party to other between elections.

But the grassroots are stirring up. For months now, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) have been holding political rallies from state to state and city to city, as part of their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour”. The response has been overwhelming but the mainstream media and the establishment of the Democratic Party have been severely ignoring them. Not Trump, who has taken to giving special treatment to AOC in social media, and AOC responds in her own kind without holding back. The fight came home to New York, so to speak, for Trump and AOC are both New Yorkers.         

And the fight is about electing the next Mayor of New York City, supposedly one of three or five most watched elected offices in the country! New York is New York, and as Tennessee Williams famously said, “there are only three cities in America, New York, San Fransico and New Orleans, everything else is Cleaveland.” The mayoral election is due in November, but Democrats held the primary to elect their candidate on June 24. In a stunning upset, a nationally unknown State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani handily defeated the nationally too well known Andrew Cuomo, a Clinton era cabinet secretary and a former Governor of New York who was forced resign over allegations of sexual harassment.

With an electrifying face-to-face and social media campaign based on a thoroughly egalitarian platform, Mamdani surged from zero to 56.0% of the vote. Mamdani’s victory has been called a political earthquake and what is most remarkable about it is that the entire establishment of the Democratic Party, flanked by former presidents Bill Clinton and Barrak Obama, was galvanized in opposition to Mamdani. Yet he won and they lost, just as they lost to Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. But Mamdani had the endorsement that mattered, that of New York’s most popular current politician – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.   

Trump of course has reacted viciously to Mamdani’s primary victory, posting on social media, “As President of the United States, I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York. Rest assured, I hold all the levers, and have all the cards. I’ll save New York City, and make it ‘Hot’ and ‘Great’ again, just like I did with the Good Ol’ USA!” He has also questioned the legality of Mamdani’s citizenship as ground for deporting Mamdani, and promised “to look at everything.” The threat to Mamdani came on the same day after Trump had said that he would look into the possibility of deporting Elon Musk.

Zohran Mamdani is the 34 year old immigrant son of Ugandan-Indian Muslim father Mahmood Mamdani, a postcolonial academic; and American-Indian Hindu mother Mira Nair, the celebrated filmmaker. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, his parents’ only child, and moved to New York as a seven year old. New York City is the world’s melting spot where the dialectic of constant racism and the equally constant fight against it produces some fascinating syntheses. Mamdani is emerging as new synthesis.

The Mayoral election in November and time thereafter will tell how far he can go. He will not be the first or the only immigrant Muslim mayor in the western world. Sadiq Khan has been Mayor of London for ten years winning successive elections. In Alberta, Canda, the City of Calgary elected Naheed Nenshi as Mayor in 2010 and served multiple terms till 2021. Mr. Nenshi now leads Canada’s New Democratic Party and is Leader of the Opposition in the Province of Alberta. 

Unlike Trump and his Administration in America, the governments and leaders of Britain and Canada never raised racist objections to Muslims becoming Mayors, or immigrants becoming political leaders and ministers in their countries. Yet Trump and his politics should not be described as fake or aberrations as it was done during his first term. He has established a loyal political base unlike any other American president. His political genius has been in locating the dark demons in the human collective, as opposed to its better angels, and cynically mobilizing them to feed his ego and win elections. Constant messaging, or marketing, is his proven weapon. He has played the American system almost perfectly to undermine its main purpose of striving towards “a more perfect union,” by counterposing the exclusively atavistic ‘make America great again,” slogan. He may not have created quite the old Animal Farm, but there is no need for allegorical symbolism to see what he is really doing.