Wall Street Journal editor-at-large Gerry Baker warned that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani 's push to raise taxes on the wealthy will be "catastrophic" as the Democratic socialist clashes with state leaders over securing approval for his tax plan. "This is socialism in action, this is the Democratic Party in action and the rest of the country's watching," he told Fox News Wednesday
"The ultra wealthy and the most profitable corporations are going to fight any revenue raiser," said Brahvan Ranga, campaign manager of Invest in Our New York, a coalition of organizations pushing for progressive tax reforms. "But the political winds are at our back in a way that hasn't been the case in years." Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election resoundingly by running on reshaping New York to be affordable and manageable for working people. But many of his audacious plans require money-lots of it.
Zohran Mamdani's historic mayoral victory on November 4 created a political earthquake both inside and outside New York City. With bold policies aimed at challenging the status quo in the U.S., a once obscure, long-shot democratic socialist candidate has become a celebrated new star of the Democratic Party - a party whose leaders continue to remain reluctant to endorse him.
President Donald Trump is trying to deploy National Guard members to cities across the United States in what he says is an attempt to combat "the war from within." Some Republican mayors and governors have embraced the deployments. But the effort is facing blowback in the courts, and the pushback from Democratic officials is strong. California has sued over the deployment of troops to Los Angeles.
The ability to retaliate against Donald Trump's power grabs and other outrages is a rare pleasure for Democrats, which is why Gavin Newsom's counter-gerrymandering effort in California is so wildly popular among Democrats. If Democrats can't stop Trump's egregious policies in Congress (and they really can't) and the U.S. Supreme Court is either enabling him or slow-walking efforts to rein him in (which it clearly is), then they need different arenas in which to contest his authoritarian ways.