SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
maga
'How Small They Are': Mamdani Takes Apart MAGA's Vision of America in July 4 Address
"At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power for themselves by turning us against one another."
Jul 03, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday delivered a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America that drew a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump's vision for the country.
Speaking from New York City Hall, Mamdani recounted how his city had long served as a refuge for people from across the globe who came seeking a new life an opportunity.
It was these immigrants who ultimately shaped New York and made it into what it is today, said Mamdani—who is an immigrant and among the rising number of democratic socialists who have recently won at the ballot box.
The mayor then moved to the present day, where he took aim at the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies emanating from Trump and his MAGA movement.
"The story of America has been written by those who have so often been told by those with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional," Mamdani said. "For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best."
Mamdani took aim at the ideology espoused by many rich and powerful people who see America as "an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal."
"America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes," the mayor continued. "America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit."
"How small they are," Mamdani remarked. "How weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power for themselves by turning us against one another."
The mayor then pivoted to a more hopeful tone by arguing that "time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress."
Mamdani insisted that the greed shown by American oligarchs and the division sown by its current political leadership are "not all we see when we look for America."
"We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on her ailing neighbor," he said. "Yes, we see in America corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed in a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work, and who still believes this country can do better by his family."
In his conclusion, Mamdani paid tribute to "those ideals upon which our nation was built," which he described as "strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them."
"Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived," he said. "A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America: The striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection. What a privilege each of us has to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump, Bill Cassidy, and the MAGA Purge to Fear
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
May 18, 2026
On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”
Former generations of Republican politicians had principles, beliefs, ideals. They thought the federal government too large. Or believed it spent too much money. Or was too lenient on criminals. Or was too eager to support the civil rights of Black people. Or any number of issues with which Democrats disagreed.
Today’s Republican Party no longer has any purpose other than achieving whatever Trump wants, which is making Trump richer and more powerful. The GOP is now Trump’s; it is no longer America’s.
Today’s Republican voters, by contrast, are showing increasing frustration with Trump. Those who think of themselves as traditional Republicans don’t like Trump’s expansive use of federal power. Those who are fiscally conservative, like Thomas Massie, are upset by Trump’s wanton spending, tax cuts, and soaring debt. “America-first” Republican voters are concerned about Trump’s intrusions into Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere. And they want the rest of the Epstein files released.
Yet for elected Republicans, survival now depends on personal loyalty to Trump.
All of which raises a fundamental question: Has the official Republican Party — now nearly purged of anyone willing to reflect the concerns of Republican voters rather than Trump’s will — become complicit in Trump’s criminality? Is it aiding and abetting Trump’s lawlessness?
A case can be made that the official Republican Party is indeed complicit.
For Trump, the first and most basic sign of loyalty to him — and therefore survival as a politician in Trump’s Republican Party — is a willingness to publicly proclaim as truth what we know to be two big lies: that Trump won the 2020 election, and that he did not seek to overturn its results by illegal means. As a result, almost all congressional Republicans are now election deniers.
Trump has also made it clear that loyalty to him bars any criticism of his unlawful immigration dragnet, which has so far resulted in the murders of three U.S. citizens by ICE agents and the detention and deportation, without a hearing, of people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.
To Trump, loyalty requires full support of his foreign policy — including the abduction of a foreign leader, an undeclared war with Iran, and the killing on the high seas of people only suspected of smuggling drugs, in violation of international law.
Loyalty also demands unquestioned support for other of his lawless acts — using the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents, building a mammoth White House ballroom, issuing no-bid contracts to his friends, promoting his family’s businesses and implementing policies favorable to them, accepting gifts from foreign powers, and defying court orders.
Is it fair to conclude from all of this that today’s official Republican Party — the people who are in office because Trump has put them there, or who maintain their office because they back whatever Trump wants — has in effect become a criminal organization, analogous to the mafia or a drug cartel, whose members are blindly loyal to their criminal bosses?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Working People Are Leaving MAGA, But Where Will They Go?
Working class voters need a home, but the Democratic Party refuses to build them one.
Mar 18, 2026
A new study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams, of nearly 2 million 2024 Trump voters, shows that more than one in five are not planning to vote for the Republicans in 2028. That group, which they call the “waverers,” is disproportionately poor, non-white, and working class.
But neither are these waverers planning to return to the Democrats. According to the study:
Of the 20.1 percent who are wavering, only 3.4 percent plan to vote Democrat. The remaining 16.7 percent say they will vote for neither party or are unsure.
That poses a severe problem for anyone who believes that our political system should better represent the needs and interests of working people. And it should scare the hell out anyone who fears the rise of more authoritarians in the future.
These workers clearly are telling us that they don’t have a home. We’d better figure out how to help build one.
Run more working-class candidates in the Democratic Party?
That’s what most progressives argue for. They believe that such candidates can attract these disgruntled workers back into the Party. As one progressive campaign operative said to me, “Our goal is to once again make the Democratic Party the party of the working-class.” That’s also what the League of Labor Voters and the Working Families Party are trying to do.
But it’s an uphill struggle. According to the Guardian:
“Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.
For every former bartender like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there are thousands of ambitious candidates who are well-off members of the bar.
The Democratic Party brand is in big trouble. In the study the Labor Institute conducted with the Center for Working-Class Politics (again with Jared Abbot, that boy gets around), 70 percent of the 3,000 voters surveyed in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had negative things to say about the Democrats. And a hypothetical Democratic candidate ran 8 percent behind an independent candidate even when they said exactly the same things.
That makes it next to impossible to launch Democratic working-class candidates in the 130 congressional districts in which the Democrats already lose by more than 25 percent. In those areas, the Democratic Party is not just dying, it is dead.
What are the odds, really, of the Democrats changing their stripes? Do the reformers really believe that a trickle of working-class candidates can turn into a torrent of new working-class candidates, if only we pushed harder?
Never say never, but that would be more likely if Democrats faced a real threat from the outside—from new working-class candidates running as independents. Should those independents gain traction, we can be sure the Democrats will take notice.
Independent working-class candidates in red areas
If you are tired of seeing nearly all of rural America flash bright red on your screen a few seconds after the polls close, there has to be a new approach outside of the Democratic Party. Dan Osborn, a mechanic and former local union president, is doing just that in his Senate run in Nebraska. In 2024 he ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris though still lost by six points. He’s running again in 2026, and so far the race is a toss-up.
Osborn knows that his only chance is to run against both parties as an independent. He calls it the “two-party doom loop.” He is directly taking on the wealthy in both parties, including the scion of a billionaire against whom he is running for Senate in 2026.
At a recent United Steelworkers conference I ran into a young miner who is running for the state legislature in Wyoming, also as an independent in this deep read state, and he thinks he will win in a landslide.
The point is that these working-class candidates with union credentials understand that voters in these red areas, including their fellow union members, have little use for the Democrats, and the only way to run is by running against both parties. Their slogan seems to be: “Not Blue, Not Red: I’m a working-class independent!”
If more and more working-class independents run against the two parties, and succeed, then maybe the Democrats will realize that they too should run working-class candidates in red areas.
But I’m not holding my breath. I truly believe that it will be much harder to wean the Democratic Party from its wealthy donors and consultants than it will be to run independent working-class candidates in red areas. But that prediction won’t matter until more working people, and their allies, jump into the fray as independents.
Then and only then will those disaffected MAGA voters have a place to go, and candidates they are willing to vote for. If we keep playing pattycake with the Democrats we may be delivering these disaffected working-class voters to Cruella de Vance, or worse, next time around.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular