With such electoral success, another president may try to negotiate an agreement to end the shutdown, which as of this week is the longest in history and breaks the thirty-five-day record set during Trump's first term. Not Trump. Escalation rather than compromise is his preferred move. On Wednesday, his administration announced that due to a shortage of air traffic controllers exacerbated by the shutdown, ten percent of all flights at forty major airports across the country would be canceled, leading to travel chaos in an attempt to force Democrats to break the impasse. I'm not entirely sure about Trump's theory: if Americans weren't already blaming the president for the crisis, wouldn't they be more likely to do so now? (And data suggests that the electorate is already does hold Republicans accountable.) But no matter. The goal is to change the subject, to show that he's not giving up just because voters no longer like his party as much in Passaic County, New Jersey, or Lynchburg, Virginia.
More fighting will undoubtedly follow soon. How long will it be before Trump successfully chooses one option with the new mayor of New York? Zogran Mamdania thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist whose unlikely rise this year has been greeted with almost as much enthusiasm by national Republican strategists as young progressives in Brooklyn? Mamdani's election night victory speech showed he was more than willing to play against Trump, even trolling the TV-obsessed president by telling him to “turn up the volume” so he could hear Mamdani's words urging him to “come and get us if you can.” Mamdani knew his man—the White House later confirmed that Trump was indeed watching.
While Washington was still digesting Thursday's election results, a fundraising email landed on the transom from Jasmine Crockett, the Democratic congresswoman from Texas who has become one of the party's most vocal television warriors. Subject line: “His presidency is over for you.”
Crockett may have been exaggerating Trump's post-election obsolescence a bit, but she knew something. The smell of generational change now hovers over American politics. It was felt in Victory for Mamdanisure, but also Mika Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, neither of whom are like my colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells markedwere in politics when Trump first became president. Mamdani is over Andrew Cuomo's comeback attemptsending the former governor, whose father also held the post, into forced retirement again. For now, Cuomo's name is associated with the past, not the future, of New York politics.
Election Day itself began with the morning news that Dick Cheney, one of the dominant Republicans of his generation, had died at the age of eighty-four. When Cheney first made his mark in Washington as the wunderkind of Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he was the same age as Mamdani is now. In a career that has included many acts, including as George W. Bush's powerful vice president and chief propagandist for the Iraq War, Cheney's latest performance – as a fierce opponent of Donald Trump – was perhaps his most surprising. While other leading Republicans, including his former boss, remained largely silent as Trump took control of their party and challenged the constitutional norms and principles they once loudly defended, Cheney proudly supported his daughter Liz's efforts to stand up to him. One of the most striking images of how much our politics has changed in recent years was the sight of Cheney on the floor of the House of Representatives at a ceremony held by Democrats to mark the president's one-year anniversary. storming the Capitol by a crowd of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021; he and Liz were the only Republicans present. Democrats, many of whom once shunned Cheney as a war criminal, lined up to shake his hand. The visualization, like this week's election, underscored something important: Politics is moving forward. It's not static. Cheney's resistance to Trump in his final years was a rearguard action, not a harbinger of things to come. His version of the Republican Party no longer exists.
On Thursday morning, Nancy Pelosi, another giant of our recent politics, announced her decision to resign from Congress at the end of her current term. A two-time Speaker of the House of Representatives, in which capacity she oversaw major legislative victories, including passage of the Affordable Care Act, during the Obama administration, she is arguably the most powerful woman in American history. During Trump's first term, she became the president's greatest scourge, rallying Democrats to recover from the shock of his 2016 victory and regain control of the House two years later. But this time, since Pelosi is eighty-five years old and no longer in a leadership role, others will have to regroup.
Trump responded to Pelosi's statement in a text message to Fox News' Peter Doocy. “Nancy Pelosi's retirement is a great event for America,” he wrote, calling her “evil,” “corrupt” and “grossly overrated.” He added: “I’m honored that she brought me to justice twice and failed me twice.” She tried to get rid of mehe could also say: but I'm still here.
But the clock is ticking for Trump, too. The president himself knows this. He blamed Tuesday's defeat on the fact that he was not on the Republican rallying ballot, but he failed to mention a larger constitutional truth about his lame-duck status that neither he nor his party seemed to have begun to reckon with: He would never again be at the top of the ballot. ♦
