Mamdani Won. Now What?

Written By Leeja Miller

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Transcript:

Hi, welcome to Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City, winning decisively over establishment favorite accused sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo. What does his win, along with other decisive Democratic victories across the country, mean for us all moving forward into 2026 and 2028? Meanwhile, the government shutdown is now officially the longest in United States history, entering its 36th day, and today the Supreme Court heard arguments over Trump’s tariffs. Something has shifted recently and it feels as though for the last 10 months Trump has been fucking around and we have now entered the find out era. Some of the damage, however, is already done. All that and more after a brief moment to thank today’s sponsor!

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First, to the Supreme Court which today heard oral arguments in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump–a case brought by businesses to contest Trump’s ability to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs. The court’s decision in this case could really be a nail in the coffin of the functioning of the American government so it’s worth taking a minute to discuss this. The Supreme Court through its conservative MAGA majority has made it clear that it is willing to step over precedent and established norms to hand Trump unprecedented levels of power. This has expanded to things like Trump’s handling of foreign affairs and his handling of the executive branch and dismantling the so-called administrative state. But this case gets at the separation of powers between Trump and Congress. Can Trump unilaterally declare new tariffs without any input or approval from Congress? Trump says yes, these businesses are arguing that’s unconstitutional given the fact that the Constitution is pretty explicit about this. Article 1 section 8 clause 1 explicitly gives to Congress the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.” A duty is a tax on any imported goods, such as, for example, a tariff. And clause 3 explicitly gives Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations.

But of course the words of the Constitution haven’t stopped Trump before, and the thing with any law or document is that there’s someone out there willing to argue over what it ACTUALLY means. And when it comes to the constitution, we’ve been arguing over what it ACTUALLY means since the day it was written. That’s the literal job of the Supreme Court and it is a sport that Trump’s goons have turned into an olympic competition, unbound by things like “dictionaries” or “precedent.” So the question here is will the Supreme Court step in and, like it has historically done, protect the separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative branches and reassert that it is actually Congress that has this power and therefore any tariff must be approved by them and, since these weren’t, the tariffs have to go.

Every conceivable legal argument here favors the idea that Trump cannot unilaterally set Tariffs. He is arguing that under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act or IEEPA Congress gave him the authority to set these tariffs. Now Presidents have since the passage of the act relied on the IEEPA for all sorts of things. The law is meant to be used for “unusual and extraordinary” emergencies, though what that means has been stretched by many presidents. For example, Jimmy Carter declared a state of economic emergency during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and that emergency state has been renewed every year since, up to the present day, yes that’s right the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 is still an active ongoing emergency. However, the IEEPA has never been used to enact sweeping tariffs, or tariffs of any kind, because it's so obviously pretextual as to be LAUGHABLE. A trade deficit is not an emergency, in any meaning of the word. A trade deficit happens when one country buys more from another country than that country buys from it. And we’ve had trade deficits for decades. There is no world in which this is an emergency, even under the lenient terms of “emergency” used in invoking the IEEPA in the past.

One major idea to understand is the “major questions” doctrine, which is something this Supreme Court is very quick to apply to Democratic presidents. The idea is that if the executive branch is claiming it has authority to undertake vast economic and political actions, Congress had better have been extremely clear on granting clear authorization for the executive branch to act in this way. Enacting sweeping unprecedented tariffs on nearly every country on the planet under the guise that decades old trade deficits constitute an emergency is like the definition of an action that wouldn’t pass the major questions doctrine. The Supreme Court was quick to apply the doctrine to Biden, it was this doctrine that shot down Biden’s attempt to grant student loan forgiveness as a result of the COVID emergency. The Supreme Court also used the doctrine to strike down the proposed eviction moratorium in 2021. And that was during a literal actual global pandemic. Trump has nowhere near the type of emergency a global pandemic offers to claim sweeping powers. Which is why this case is so consequential. Not only have the tariffs done serious potentially long-term and irreversible damage to our economy and our relations with other countries especially our allies while also costing everyday Americans and no one else, but if the Supreme Court chooses not to side with every other lower court that has decided against Trump in this case, if the Supreme Court rules that Trump does, in fact, have the power to pass sweeping tariffs, that would be a shocking, almost unimaginable grant of sweeping power to Trump that they were, just a couple years ago, unwilling to give to a Democratic administration. And what have I said before about this administration, this supreme court? Whatever the absolute worst option available is, assume they will take it. If you’re saying oh they couldn’t they wouldn’t that would be so beyond the pale–yeah that’s probably the one they’ll pick. I’m open to being pleasantly surprised but I’m done with the wishful thinking or with believing that things are proceeding as usual in any way from here on out. And potentially the stupidest part of this whole case is that if the court does surprise us all and actually rules against Trump, it could potentially order repayment of $90 billion dollars from the government to, I assume, the businesses who were forced to pay those tariffs. You know, the same businesses that passed on the increased expenses to us on the goods we’ve already bought? So even if the Supreme Court comes out in a way that’s not deeply concerning for the functioning of our country, we the people could have given a $90 billion dollar WINDFALL to private companies who get repaid for the tariffs they were charged and then charged us for. So the money Trump says he’s raising for the government off these tariffs will just go straight into the pockets of big businesses, not to mention the administrative headache of actually issuing those refunds. It’s so monumentally fucking stupid it almost seems like it was his intention from the get go. Though there is a world where the Supreme Court could rule against him but stop short of ordering a refund of the tariffs. AND even IF the Supreme Court rules against Trump, it’s not like there’s enough people with a spine in Congress to stand up to his demands. Trump loves these tariffs it’s his like go-to bargaining chip. If the Supreme Court takes it away, he’ll get it a different way by bending a few arms in Congress. We are on the stupidest timeline!!

Okay but on a happier note, congrats New York City for being the envy of progressives everywhere! You’ve really done it. Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City. He will be the first Muslim mayor of New York City, the first South Asian mayor of New York City, and the youngest mayor the city has seen in over a century. And the establishment is Big Mad. Israel is also Big Mad. The Israeli minister of diaspora affairs said “New York will never be the same again. The city is walking, eyes open, into the abyss into which London has already plunged.” London recently elected Sadiq Khan, a progressive and the first Muslim mayor of that city. And for the record I had the privilege of visiting London a month ago and did not notice the alleged abyss, the way the minister was talking you’d think it’d be full on 28 days later no one but Cillian Murphy wandering the streets naked and emaciated. That is, from my experience, not the case. Trump said that jews who voted for Mamdani are “stupid.” Which, according to exit polling, means Trump called a third of Jewish voters in New York City “stupid.” Right but Mamdani’s the anti-semitic one. Interesting.

Billionaires are also Big Mad. 28 different billionaires donated at least $100,000 towards defeating Mamdani, according to Forbes. Michael Bloomberg alone donated $8.3 MILLION to preventing Mamdani’s win. Mamdani himself quipped that they were spending more on this election than he would ever tax them. As The American Prospect pointed out, it’s actually kind of remarkable how horribly these billionaires did at preventing Mamdani’s win. Andrew Cuomo was an awful candidate to throw their weight behind, he had so much very recent baggage and functioned perfectly as the Nixon to Mamdani’s JFK–his tired, out of touch deeply conservative rhetoric and insistence on siding with an increasingly unpopular Israel only made Mamdani’s star shine that much brighter. For all their billions, the 28 billionaires who spent more money on the election than they would be taxed, did a pretty shit job at the whole undermining democracy with their money thing. And listen that usually isn’t the case, usually throwing some money at an election does the trick, which is a testament to Zohran Mamdani’s skills as a truly inspiring politician and his ability to surround himself with a team that knows what they’re doing. More progressive politicians need to learn from him and I hope that his campaign produces some progressive political organizers with serious skills and now the experience to back that up and export it to other races. Like every progressive politician should have the contact info for whoever managed Zohran’s social media and PR, because that man was everywhere for everyone, spreading an incredibly clear, easy to understand message about affordability and dignity. He was in nightclubs on Saturday night and churches on Sunday. His campaign should be studied and exported across the country. And in this case these billionaires severely underestimated Mamdani and the power that a campaign on affordability can hold–which makes sense these people don’t know what a banana costs and the growing chasm between the rich and the poor means these people have truly and utterly zero concept of what it’s like to live in this country even as a middle class person let alone someone living in New York City under the poverty line, which is a huge chunk of New York City residents.

I think this is also why Democrats at the federal level like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, who never endorsed Mamdani, by the way, I think this is why they seem utterly unconvinced and incapable of even beginning to turn towards discussing how to make life more affordable and ensure everyone has dignity. They literally don’t know the first thing about what it’s like today for Americans. And listen neither Jeffries nor Schumer are billionaires, according to Forbes they’re both worth a few million dollars, and while that’s far higher than your average American, having a net worth of $2 million dollars these days still puts you in the middle class, you know. Maybe you’re flying first class on commercial flights but you’re not cruising around on a private jet. But your reality is shaped significantly by the people and society you are surrounded by, and billionaires and the millionaire lobbyists they hire to do their dirty work are flooding the halls of Congress. Half the members of Congress themselves are millionaires. I am pretty comfortably middle class but I don’t have millionaire friends. I don’t hang around with millionaires. I probably rubbed elbows with a few when I worked at a private law firm for partners making private law firm partner income, but that lasted about a year and honestly it creeped me out I felt like a class traitor and made zero friends at that job because rich people and wannabe rich people are fucking creeps, sorry. Get a grip. And the reality is Democratic leadership has been bought and sold for decades and now they are all mostly out of touch rich creeps or wannabe rich creeps. So of course they wouldn’t get it. They believe they have more in common with the billionaires that own them than a single immigrant mother barely making ends meet in New York City. They’re wrong. The difference between one million dollars and one billion dollars is about one billion dollars. Even the difference between seven million dollars, which Forbes estimates is Chuck Schumer’s net worth, and one billion dollars is about one billion dollars. And Elon Musk has 400 BILLION DOLLARS. And those billionaires are wining and dining our politicians to the point that Hakeem Jeffires and Chuck Schumer think they’re closer to those billionaires than they are to the rest of us swine out here just rolling around in the mud. They’re not, but they’re convinced that they are, and they are so entrenched in the billionaire bullshit they are literally not fit to run national campaigns at this point.

Though I think it is important to talk about a few of the other races from yesterday because it does illustrate a larger point that I think is important to think about moving forward, and that is that even though Mamdani’s team should be exporting their strategies to progressive candidates across the country, and it is imperative to find progressive candidates that are talented and elicit the same trust and excitement that Mamdani does, New York City is a very different race than Virginia, for example. And the same exact progressive platform or candidate there will not do as well as it did in New York City, a very progressive city. And so the strategy moving forward–and I don’t necessarily mean for the DNC because they seem like an entrenched lost cause and until we overturn Citizens United and get money out of our political system I don’t think the party establishment will ever willingly push a progressive agenda, it will need to be pushed at the grassroots level by the people and in primary votes–but the strategy moving forward needs to be learning from Mamdani and applying it to the specific location. But they have landed on a winning strategy that does export well to pretty much every part of the country and that is affordability. Which I feel like progressives have been screaming about for a very long time, like just fucking begging the Democratic establishment to actually put forth achievable policy initiatives that make peoples’ lives even remotely better yes even if, gasp, taxes have to be raised on the wealthy. But of course they won’t touch that with a 10 foot pole because, once again, they are in their creepy rich people bubbles and all they hear is all their billionaire friends getting vewy vewy mad at them. But I think Mamdani has put the idea into action and proven that a progressive strategy based around affordability can win bigly. And I think we’re seeing that too in the incredibly successful anti-oligarchy tour that Bernie Sanders and AOC have been doing across the country. That’s not the same as winning elections, of course, but it’s an incredibly appealing message and it’s one that gets around the wedge issues that divide us and unites many disparate groups around something that would genuinely benefit all of us. Like picture a situation where, nationwide, life was affordable enough that you could work one full time job and afford food and housing and healthcare and childcare. That would only work to improve the functioning of democracy, because it is impossible to pay attention to or participate in local and national government through voting through lobbying whatever, when you’re drowning in medical bills or when you had to skip dinner so your kids could eat. Trump’s goons know this, they’re literally starving people out and attacking “democrat” programs because they don’t want us to have the energy to engage. This is why I’m also so morally opposed to diet culture, sorry you are starving your brain cells when you undereat on purpose please get a passion or a hobby to focus on instead. The more of us distracted by the logistics of surviving day to day, the fewer of us capable of showing up to protest outside ICE facilities or making content to spread information or coordinating direct actions with our neighbors. An empowered electorate is very scary and dangerous to them. Even though, of course, what a lot of people are pining for like affordable healthcare, education, and childcare is, like, run of the mill shit in such anarchist countries as Sweden and The Netherlands. You know where the people have run amok and it’s nothing but a bolshevik hell hole. And so I can only attempt to understand the way billionaires think, I think their brains are pretty fucking twisted just to be able to ignore humanity enough to become a billionaire to begin with, but I can imagine that the main reason why they’re willing to support strongmen and fascism is pure greed and power lust. Like they literally can’t imagine a world in which they have to cede some of their power in the form of a 2% increase on their income taxes. Which would still leave them billionaires. I think they see it as a slippery slope–first this, then what? Even though the election of Zohran Mamdani is nowhere near a socialist revolution, I think for them it is. And I think that’s a glimmer of perspective for us here in the states how fucking insane most of our politics are, that billionaires are throwing millions of dollars at this and Israel is warning of a cataclysmic abyss and Cuomo was willing to stoop to incredibly horrible racist blows in the last days of the campaign, that Schumer was unwilling to endorse Mamdani, that the entire political establishment of the United States of America is fucking TERRIFIED of a brown man promising the people free buses and a 2% increase on taxes for the top 1%. THAT is what y’all are afraid of? Similar to 1930s Germany, the establishment and the wealthy are willing to shoot themselves in the foot and bend over backwards to appease a violent tyrant in order to avoid ceding one centimeter of their power or allowing the government to do its job of actually providing for its people. Our government is fucking terrified of us. And Mamdani represents, in his multicultural background and in his rhetoric about dignity for all, the heaving masses, the 99% of us not even trying to overthrow anything, just begging for a slice of the pie that our labor built. And even that they are TERRIFIED of. And that realization kinda put a little glimmer back in my eye, honestly. A little pep in my step, how deeply they fear us.

I think Mamdani will be a litmus test and I am eager to see how he leads moving forward and whether he delivers on even some of the promises he has made. The everyday realities of politicking may mean it takes a while to get things done, and it may mean that he doesn’t get everything done that he promised, that is just the reality of the act of doing politics–you don’t always get your way 100% of the time–but the things that he does manage to get through, if he does, and if they are successful, will be a major test case for future progressive politicians, especially at the local level and the local level absolutely matters BECAUSE it gives us further proof that this can work. So I hope New Yorkers will continue to be engaged and hold him accountable, honestly I think it’s what Zohran would want. But the sheer weight of the terror that we, through progressive candidates like Zohran Mamdani, place in the hearts of powerful people terrified of losing their power, should I hope make you feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside. And his victory last night I hope also provides you with the jolt of hope you need to keep going in These Trying Times.

And while I think Zohran Mamdani’s win last night is the biggest sign in favor of truly progressive politics, Democrats had a great night overall last night. Some of the winning candidates provide a much safer-feeling establishment vibe–for example the DNC was chucking money at the Virginia governor race and throwing its full weight behind Democratic candidate Spanberger–in such a way that those Democratic victories don’t feel so much about a rebuke of the status quo but mainly a rebuke of the complete fuckery of the last 10 months, which I will take but like the establishment got us here in the first place so forgive me if I don’t find centrist former CIA agent Abigail Spanberger to be the thrilling change we need to get this country out of the gutter. As we’ve seen time and again, simply pointing at Trump and saying wow look how bad he is, vote for me, only gets the Democrats so far. Again, I think Mamdani’s campaign is so inspiring because it didn’t center around how awful Trump is or simply offer Mamdani as a human with a pulse who isn’t Trump. It centered around actual ideas, well formed and distilled into terms everyone can understand, aimed at making peoples’ lives better. You know, like what did Kamala have beyond her brat girl summer tiktoks? A plan to help people get mortgages and a promise to keep fracking alive and well? So while I think the overwhelming turn out and the positive results for Democrats last night will hopefully inject a little optimism or hope or energy into the opposition in this country when it is badly needed, this feels unfortunately like more of the same, to me. We also had historic turnout for Democrats in 2017. You know, 10 months into the fuckery of the first Trump term. I’m frankly getting really fatigued by the pendulum. What does a “major referendum” on Trump do for us in the long term? We’ve already done this before and it didn’t work, it wasn’t the sea change we were hoping for, Trump came back and if the Republicans manage to find a good successor for him once he finally kicks the damn bucket they’ll be back too. I’m also kind of mad, frankly. Like if Trump was so awful in 2016 that we had to turn out in record numbers in 2017 to make sure Democrats took back some control, where the fuck were those numbers in 2016 to begin with? Or again in 2024? Why must we continue to fuck around and find out while literal children are starving and being deprived of healthcare and access to education? Like what the fuck is wrong with people?

This had me wondering today what it would take to jolt us into the form of Democratic Socialism you see in Europe–which is of course far from perfect but where people at least generally have healthcare, education, and childcare that won’t bankrupt them and food that won’t poison them. And I came to the unfortunate conclusion that it was probably the whole world war 2 thing that made the people willing to go to the opposite “extreme” of, you know, providing the basics for its people. The US of course fought in World War 2 but it was very different for us, it didn’t happen on our soil. We got to fly in, be the unquestionable heroes, and then leave. What would have to happen here, in the US on our soil, to get people to finally be open to the extreme political views espoused by Zohran Mamdani on a national scale–the extreme lengths of taxing billionaires, the extreme socialist depravity of free childcare and free buses and healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt people. This has turned into a rant and I’m sorry but outside of Mamdani’s win yesterday I don’t feel particularly interested in painting the elections yesterday as a major sweeping victory. Too many of us have become too radicalized from watching our institutions collapse in a short 11 months, and realizing that NO one is coming to save us and whatever guardrails there were are completely gone. And they’ve been gone for over a decade for billionaires. So my hope is tempered by the reality that there’s still over 3 YEARS left in this Trump regime. But the reality is that they are fucking terrified of us. If we are able to harness that terror and wield it to our benefit, by electing more progressives, by continuing to organize, to stage direct actions like general strikes, which my next video will probably be about, by becoming the heaving angry masses they are so worried about, maybe some real change can actually come from all this, and I hope the election of Zohran Mamdani provides that spark. Now, we see if he can actually deliver.

And if you’d like to support my work, consider joining here on YouTube by clicking the big join button below, or supporting me over on Patreon, patreon dot com slash Leeja miller, where you get access to all these episodes completely ad free. Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Marc, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Monday about whether it’s time to stop paying taxes.

Leeja Miller
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Is It Time To Stop Paying Taxes?