Mamdani Adds Lina Khan to Team of Women Leaders After Election Win

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is starting off with a big move: bringing former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to co-chair his transition team. 

Mamdani made the announcement during a speech Wednesday morning at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens. Khan will be joined on Mamdani’s transition team by women leaders from previous mayoral administrations: former First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, nonprofit president Grace Bonilla, and budget expert Melanie Hartzog. Elana Leopold, Mamdani’s campaign adviser and a staffer to former Mayor Bill de Blasio, will lead the team of women leaders as executive director.

Khan is famous for her antitrust expertise, beginning with her work at the New America Foundation and continuing through her time at Yale Law School. When President Biden nominated her as FTC commissioner and later as FTC chair in 2021, she was the youngest nominee ever.   

As FTC chair, Khan was willing to take on major corporations such as Amazon and Microsoft to combat monopolies, earning praise from Democrats as well as Republicans, including JD Vance and Steve Bannon. Khan’s action against Ticketmaster drew bipartisan support for a Justice Department lawsuit against the company in May last year.

Mamdani’s inclusion of Khan for his transition suggests that he’s willing to take on powerful corporate interests as mayor as part of his agenda to make the city more affordable. The question is how much he’ll be able to do from New York City Hall.  

Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs were met with overwhelming skepticism from the Supreme Court Wednesday, as conservative justices joined their liberal colleagues in  expressing serious concerns over the legality of the president’s actions.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch appeared entirely unconvinced by the government’s defense of Trump’s tariffs while sharply questioning U.S. Solicitor General John D. Sauer, the president’s former personal lawyer. 

Barrett asked Sauer how Trump could possibly impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which allows the president to regulate commerce in case of a national emergency but doesn’t actually include the word “tariff.” 

Barrett, whom Trump nominated to the high court, also pressed Sauer for a single other example of Congress conferring its tariff authority to the president—but the government’s lawyer couldn’t summon an actual response. 

Gorsuch asserted that Congress would never wrest its tariff power back from the executive, suggesting that the Trump administration’s interpretation of the IEEPA was “a one-way ratchet towards the gradual accretion of power to the executive branch.” He also pressed Sauer on what constituted an emergency under the IEEPA, and even got the president’s lawyer to agree that climate change would be a suitable excuse for invoking the rule. 

Roberts took a turn grilling Sauer too, implying that Trump’s tariffs had overstepped Congress’s authority because the “vehicle is imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been the core power of Congress.”

“So, to have the president’s foreign affairs power trump that basic power for Congress, seems to me to kind of at least neutralize between the two powers, the executive power and the legislative power,” Roberts continued. 

One expert noted to CNN that Sauer repeatedly used the word “tariff” as a verb, in order to avoid using the word “tax.”

Roberts also noted that IEEPA had never been used to impose tariffs. “It does seem like that’s major authority and the basis for the claim, seems to be a misfit,” he said. 

Democrats have argued for months about how to win young men back into their coalition. New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won them over by a massive margin Tuesday night. 

Early exit polls from NBC had Mamdani winning 18- to 29-year-old men in New York City by a staggering 40 points, easily eclipsing opponent Andrew Cuomo. 

Fellow Democratic electees also made inroads with young men, but not by nearly as much. Abigail Spanberger won about six in 10 young men in Virginia, according to the AP voter poll,  and Mikie Sherrill won just over half of young men in New Jersey. 

While Mamdani has the advantage of a much bluer electorate—and of course, being a man—his democratic socialist message is markedly more progressive than that of Sherrill or Spanberger. It should come as no surprise that a group that doesn’t expect to ever own a home or pay off their student loans was attracted to a message centered around affordability in the most expensive city in the country. 

Democratic congressional leadership has been lukewarm on Mamdani, at best, but they would be foolish to ignore that Mamdani and his policies resonated deeply with young men. And while they’re quick to point out that what works in New York City won’t work everywhere in the United States, the very issue Mamdani highlighted is a problem everywhere in the U.S. Young men—and most of the city—didn’t respond positively to Mamdani because he made empty platitudes about going back to “kitchen table issues.” They responded so positively because Mamdani presented real, progressive solutions to the most pervasive issue in their lives. 

Federal immigration officers are finding a lot of joy in causing mass misery.

Department of Homeland Security agents have illustrated a remarkable disregard for public safety while deploying tear gas and pepper spray to advance the Trump administration’s agenda, according to court documents obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

But in some situations, agents tasked with crowd control went far beyond the realm of plausible deniability, apparently finding genuine enjoyment out of injuring and assaulting people.

Last month in Chicago, agents used tear gas in residential areas “multiple times without audible warnings,” court documents said, surprising families with the painful chemical irritant. Footage taken by Customs and Border Patrol illustrates the extent of their own gleeful violence, with one agent at one point telling another that they should throw the tear gas canisters “for fun.”

“The gas did not help agents leave; instead, they weren’t able to leave in their cars after using the gas because it overwhelmed them so much that they had to flee the block on foot,” the court documents read. “There was no threat when gas was deployed.”

The state-sanctioned violence has been nearly nonstop in Chicago over the last few months. Just last week, federal agents allegedly tear-gassed a group of school-age children in a residential Chicago neighborhood on their way to a Halloween parade.

But Chicago isn’t the only city suffering. Needless DHS encroachment has become an issue in just about every city across the country that has dared to oppose Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. In some cases, ICE’s presence has made some cities across the country significantly less safe than they were before the feds showed up.

In Portland, Oregon, mistaken friendly fire between federal agents last month escalated their retaliation against anti-ICE protesters, resulting in officers firing a barrage of rubber bullets into a crowd that also contained local law enforcement, according to the city’s police commander.

Following Tuesday night’s resounding victory for Democrats across the country, Donald Trump came up with a long to-do list Wednesday morning that he thinks is the solution to what ails Republicans. And bizarrely, during his postelection meltdown, he claimed that Americans need ID to buy groceries.

The speech to Senate Republicans began somewhat normally, with the president arguing that Republicans should “do what they have to do and terminate the filibuster,” claiming that no legislation would be passed for “three and a quarter years” if the procedure remains.

“We should start, tonight, with ‘the country’s open,’ congratulations, then we should pass voter ID, we should pass no mail-in voting, we should pass all of the things we want to pass to make our elections secure,” Trump continued, calling for an end to the government shutdown.

“All we want is voter ID, you go to a grocery store, you have to give ID, you go to a gas station, you give ID, but for voting, they want no voter ID. It’s only for one reason, and it’s because they cheat. We would pass that in 15 minutes,” Trump ranted, seeming to slur his words at times. “If you don’t get it, you’ll never pass that. You’ll never talk about mail-in ballots. Mail-in ballots make it automatically corrupt.”

Trump’s claim that grocery stores and gas stations require identification shows just how out of touch he is with the average American (and may be a sign of cognitive decline). The president’s crusade against voter identification also belies the fact that many Democratic victories Tuesday night came in states that already require it, such as Virginia and Georgia. And complaining about mail-in ballots makes no sense considering Trump has voted that way in the past and that Republicans were encouraging people to vote by mail earlier this week.

Meanwhile, his demand to end the filibuster has been resisted by Senate Republicans because they know that Democrats could soon take control of Congress and push through their own legislative priorities. Will Republicans see the president’s demands as extreme, or will they immediately fall in line and attempt to make him happy?

Republican lawmakers in Kansas killed a weeks-long effort to expedite redrawing their state’s congressional map, delaying President Donald Trump’s push to gerrymander red states ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Republicans needed to secure a two-thirds majority approval in both chambers to call a special legislative session—circumventing Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s refusal to do so—but it looks like they couldn’t quite manage it.

House Speaker Dan Hawkins announced Tuesday night that Republicans would not vote to call a special legislative session. “Planning a Special Session is always going to be an uphill battle with multiple agendas, scheduling conflicts and many unseen factors at play,” he said in a statement.

Republicans had planned to target Kansas’s 3rd congressional district, which has been led by Representative Sharice Davids, a Democrat, since 2019. But it seems that the state’s GOP lawmakers just couldn’t get behind the mid-cycle redistricting effort that Trump had demanded, with some concerned redistricting could make red areas more competitive.

State Senate President Ty Masterson quickly promised that redistricting would be “a top priority” when the legislature resumed in January next year.

Davids, who has reportedly been eyeing a Senate run, said in a statement: “We’ve won the first round in this fight against gerrymandering.”

This isn’t the first of Trump’s redistricting schemes to fall apart in a red state. In Indiana, Governor Mike Braun happily called a special legislative session last week, but it still seems that mid-cycle redistricting lacks crucial Republican support. And in California, a Republican fretted that redistricting elsewhere could end up costing him his seat.

While progressives celebrated a historic victory in New York City Tuesday night, their MAGA counterparts were not so jazzed about the mayoral election results. But their anger wasn’t only channeled toward Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who secured more than 50 percent of the citywide vote.

MAGA also fixated on the Republican candidate in the race, Curtis Sliwa, whom they accused of splitting the vote away for a chunk of change.

“You split the fucking vote for $7 fucking million dollars [sic], you are a scumbag. I hope every New Yorker spits in your fucking face every single day,” said David Rem, Donald Trump’s childhood friend. “You fucking sold out like fucking Judas sold out fucking Jesus.… Go fuck yourself.”

Where Rem got that cash figure is not exactly clear, but Sliwa could have made more by dropping out: The Guardian Angels founder told The New Yorker Monday that he had been offered $10 million across seven different bribes to step aside in the race.

By Wednesday morning, it was clear that the results of the mayoral election wouldn’t have changed all too much even if Sliwa had stepped aside. Disgraced ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent in the race after he was squarely beaten by Mamdani during the Democratic primary, acquired 41.6 percent of the vote, while Sliwa pulled 7.1 percent. Added together in a best case scenario for Cuomo, the ousted politico still wouldn’t have had enough citywide support to squash Mamdani’s enormous win of 50.4 percent.

But MAGA Republicans couldn’t squint to see that reality.

“Fuck you @CurtisSliwa I HATE YOU, your dumb wife, that stupid Beret of yours and all your fucking cats!” posted another disgraced ex–New York lawmaker, George Santos, who left prison early last month after Trump commuted his sentence. (Santos once falsely claimed he founded an animal rescue nonprofit that saved 2,400 imaginary dogs but just 280 imaginary cats—so maybe he just hates felines in general.)

But even Santos, who pleaded guilty last year to credit card fraud and illegally receiving unemployment benefits among other crimes, found Cuomo hard to palate.

“Cuomo was by far a flawed candidate. A terrible human being,” Santos said in another post, in which he suggested that he was going to move out of the city while Mamdani is mayor.

Even people outside of the city were irate at Sliwa for daring to shoot his shot in a democratic election. Pro-Trump sports broadcaster Charly Arnolt—who does not seem to maintain a residence in New York City—also lamented the mayoral outcome, tossing vitriol at Sliwa from hundreds of miles away.

“I truly hope Curtis Sliwa is shunned in NYC,” Arnolt wrote on X. “He is a disgrace, a coward and a traitor and should no longer be welcome to walk the streets he claimed to support.”

Rumors of a multicultural Republican coalition have been greatly exaggerated.

Much was made of President Trump’s success with Latino voters after the president won a groundbreaking 42 percent of them last year, flipping blue districts even as he committed to an immigration crackdown on the campaign trail.

Tuesday’s elections showed just how flimsy that support actually was.

In New Jersey, Hudson County is a town with a large Latino population that saw a big swing to Trump from 2020 to 2024, with Vice President Kamala Harris only winning it by 28 percent against Trump, while Biden won it by 46 four years earlier. But on Tuesday, New Jersey Democratic Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli by 49 points, eclipsing even Biden, and beating back any gains that Trump had made with the nonwhite voters there.

“Middlesex County NJ (~61% nonwhite) is a great example of how Republican Jack Ciattarelli failed to replicate Trump’s massive gains with nonwhite voters,” political analyst Ryan Matsumoto wrote in another example. “2020 President: Biden +22, 2024 President: Harris +8, 2025 Governor: Sherrill +25.”

Latino voters didn’t just break from Trump and the GOP in New Jersey.

“The clearest sign I can find of Latinos abandoning the GOP after Trump’s big gains in 2024 is Manassas Park, Va., a city of 17,000 people with a 46% Latino plurality population,” HuffPost’s Kevin Robillard wrote. “Harris won it by 20 in 2024. Spanberger is winning it by 42 tonight.”

There was certainly reason for alarm last year over a potential Latino exodus from the Democratic Party. But whatever momentum or goodwill Trump and the GOP had with those voters has more or less been squandered. It only took nearly 10 months of violent arrests, kidnappings, shootings, pepper balls, and federal agents crashing their cars into innocent people for them to back out.

It seems that many of those voters thought Trump’s deportation crackdown would only target violent gangs, not their friends, family, and neighbors. In May, an Equis poll came out that showed that 15 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump completely disapproved of his presidential actions by that point. An additional66 percent of all Latino voters believed that his “actions are going too far and targeting the types of immigrants who strengthen our nation.”

“A very large share of Latinos believe mass deportations will ‘tear families apart, many of whom have been in the US for a long time’ (73% agree, 53% strongly) and will ‘unfairly impact undocumented immigrants who are law-abiding members of society, work hard and pay taxes’ (71% agree, 52% strongly),” the poll continued.

“We don’t really want people who have committed any type of crime, even more if they are illegals,” Cuban American and Republican Florida Representative María Salazar said in June. “But we do know that unfortunately what’s happening right now after six months of Mr. President being in office, that we’re losing thousands and thousands of workers [that] the ICE leadership has called ‘collateral damage.’”

The writing has been on the wall for a while, and has only grown more apparent with each passing month, as President Trump viciously attacks the very community that bolstered his campaign in the name of safety and anti-immigration. No one wants to see parents screaming in agony while masked men rip them away from their children—but that’s all these voters have seen, and worse. The buyer’s remorse seems to be setting in.

Groveling isn’t enough for President Donald Trump; he wants his Cabinet secretaries to cower in his presence.

While speaking to Senate Republicans at a White House breakfast Wednesday, Trump described his bilateral meeting with “tough man” Xi Jinping, heaping praise on the Chinese president’s secretaries.

“And every one of those people were standing like this,” Trump said, thrusting his arms back and his chin up. “They were at attention.”

“And I made a comment to one of them, and got no response. I said, ‘Are you gonna answer me?’ I got no response. And President Xi didn’t let him have any,” Trump said, adding: “I said, ‘I want my Cabinet to behave like that.’

“I never saw posture like that. I’ve never seen men so scared in my life,” Trump continued, as Republicans laughed uproariously at the president’s request for stoic compliance.

But Trump’s Cabinet meetings are already a well-documented spectacle of sycophancy, with each of his secretaries taking turns to hail Trump’s supposedly splendid saving of the country. In August, his secretaries took a whopping three hours to kiss the ring in a televised horror show.

“Why don’t you behave like that? JD doesn’t behave like that. JD butts into conversations. I want to have that for at least a couple of days, OK, JD?” Trump said to his vice president.

Specifically, Trump seemed to appreciate the silence of “the equivalent of a vice president,” although it doesn’t appear that Chinese Vice President Han Zheng was actually in attendance at the meeting. Those who were there included Secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party Cai Qi, Vice Premier He Lifeng, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

The 2025 special elections went exceptionally well for Democrats, with local and state candidates flipping red areas across the country.

While most of the national attention has been on Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in New York, and to a lesser extent Democratic gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia, victories in even more local districts reveal a lot about where the parties stand in the lead-up to the midterms.

Erie County, Pennsylvania, which narrowly supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, voted overwhelmingly for Democrat Christina Vogel in its county executive race by 24 percentage points. In Virginia’s 66th state House district, Nicole Cole defeated 36-year Republican incumbent Bobby Orrock, who usually coasted to victory in every state election and was the longest-serving Republican delegate in Virginia’s legislature.

Democrats in Georgia managed to win two statewide races for public service commissioner, their first nonfederal statewide wins since 2006. Alicia Johnson defeated incumbent Tim Echols, by a 58 to 41 percent margin, while Peter Hubbard ousted Fitz Johnson 61 percent to 39 percent. The positions deal with utilities, and have “exclusive power to decide what are fair and reasonable rates for services under its jurisdiction.”

Even in the deep Southern state of Mississippi, Democrats were able to break the supermajority in the state Senate by flipping three seats after 13 years, taking away Republicans’ ability to override the governor’s veto and easily propose constitutional amendments. These victories, coupled with Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race and the Democratic wins in Virginia and New Jersey, have predictably caused President Trump to melt down.

“‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday night. But whatever Trump and Republicans around the country are saying to themselves on Wednesday, the fact is that the GOP was soundly rejected on Tuesday. Now the task falls on Democrats to make their case for better results in 2026 and 2028.