His second term is marked by seemingly bottomless hostility to the Constitution and to his hometown — but local leaders aren’t meeting the moment.
New York has mostly whistled past a lot of graveyards already this century, starting with 9/11, the fiscal crisis and the pandemic shutdown.
Those catastrophes all ended up doing far less long-term damage than was widely feared in the moment, in large part because of federal policies and funds that were boons to the state and city.
One hundred days into the second Trump administration, that era is gone for good.
The Trump Two assault, 100 days in and before he’s signed many laws or a single budget, is already bringing the Bannonite ideal (that’s Steve Bannon, Trump’s longtime political adviser) of “flooding the zone with shit” past the journalists it was initially intended to overwhelm. Now it’s America’s international relations, the federal government’s relationship with the states and their cities, and the president’s nakedly corrupt favoring of friends and targeting of enemies, among many other things that are being nastily flooded.
Judges are being arrested, the attorney general is writing memos about how warrants aren’t a necessity for entering the home of an “alien enemy” gang member, and America is officially in a new era of North American Peronist politics. It’s marked by inflation, palace intrigue and a personality fandom or cult as the president ratchets up his assaults on the Bill of Rights’ First, Fourth, Sixth and Tenth Amendments, not to mention the plain language of the 14th Amendment.
Never mind laws, this is government by late night posts on the Truth Social network he personally owns.
The old line about how one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic is being applied to governmental abuses. There are so many punishments and threats and indignities that it’s impossible to keep track, which is the point.
New York can forget about getting extra help from Washington to get through rough moments until at least 2029. The new normal even after that will be much less reliable support for the state or the city as Washington’s promises, once a gold standard, are already scraping junk bond status.
In the meantime, the president will keep creating new points of leverage, like his executive order this week “protecting American communities from criminal aliens” that aims to remove federal funding from these “death traps” — his word — that don’t fully comply with the federal mass deportation effort that’s just gearing up. The order doesn’t define what makes a “sanctuary city” or what would constitute “compliance.”
The old line about how one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic is being applied to governmental abuses.
Most of these threats may be emanating from Washington, but New York City is probably being hit hardest — and not only because we’re the nation’s immigration capital, not to mention its global capital.
William Gibson famously said that the future’s already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. For a quarter century, New York has benefited from that dynamic, as a safe port for the world’s money amid its many troubles.
Now, those troubles are hitting here directly as global confidence collapses in America’s promises and currency while a vengeful president takes a “common sense” chainsaw to the administrative state and any conception of regular procedure and due process. None of that squandered credit is going to be easily restored by a future administration. Just as past administrations had been bound by the promises of their predecessors, future ones will be limited in what they can promise by the current one’s willingness to tear up inherited commitments and expectations.
Bestowing favors to friends and flunkies and punishments to foes and schmendricks is a politics of personality rather than procedures or principles. This is a Page Six presidency, where the allegedly corrupt mayor is no longer facing criminal charges, but instead is in the president’s personal debt and expected to comply with his mass deportation agenda that’s just gearing up in an arrangement that the judge overseeing his case wrote, “smacks of a bargain.”
This isn’t a problem that gets fixed simply by voting out Eric Adams in November. The leading candidate to replace him, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is the subject of a new criminal referral to the Justice Department, which is also looking to prosecute the state attorney general in part as payback for her victory in a civil case against Trump.
There are weak spots to test with everyone, and not just through prosecutions, including a wholesale pressure campaign aimed at the governor and focused on demolishing a congestion pricing scheme that’s reducing traffic and bringing in money the trains the city relies on to keep running, just as intended.
Trump is treating a previous federal approval, and the word of the government, like a mere suggestion for his personal whims.
It’s a win-win politically as he sees it: Either the “shithole” trains his secretary of transportation (and another potential future scapegoat) is railing against get worse, which gives him more reason to bash the state’s Democrats and conditions, or they somehow improve and the glory goes to him.
Same for his abrupt seizure of control of the long-in-the-works Penn Station renovation plan.
It’s a personal praise Ponzi scheme where the buck never stops, and there’s always a slaughter line of scapegoats.
He’s taking that same approach to key New York City-based institutions from big law to higher ed, singling out actors to demand compliance or punishment with little regard for proof or procedure while yanking grants from nonprofits and threatening anyone who helps support them.
The idea is to get institutions and people to either go along with his agenda, with him reaping all credit for perceived improvements and them on the hook for any failures, or be destroyed by a federal government that’s less and less of an administration and more and more of a one-man wrecking ball.
Which requires a brief aside about the New York Post, which led the way over the past couple of years in using NYPD sources, mostly speaking on background, to turn a series of very real moped robberies and purse snatchings and chain store pillagings by young men tied to Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aruga into a supposed “invasion.” That’s the thin gruel the administration has used to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the first time in decades, but with even less due process for anyone caught up there than alleged Nazis received during the second World War.
It’s a personal praise Ponzi scheme where the buck never stops, and there’s always a slaughter line of scapegoats.
Much of this was foreseeable, and foreseen. A first Trump term that could have been an interregnum, another near miss or last chance for the country’s institutions and leaders to get their house in order, turned out to be merely a prelude to what many people are already feeling directly while others are still reading about the shockwaves that will reach them soon enough, and further wallop an already staggering New York.
That’s obvious, though you wouldn’t know how bad things already are, with much worse to come, reading about the quarter-trillion-dollar budget Albany is about to pass.
The increase in spending from last year and from what the governor first proposed for this year is less than in years past — as if that were sufficient to cover huge holes that Trump’s first federal budget is about to tear into the social safety net and the state’s finances.
Or from the politicians running for mayor making expensive new promises, as if much tougher choices about protecting the services the city already provides weren’t rapidly approaching.
It’s everywhere and all at once, and more than fits into any single column. It’s also painfully obvious — more text than subtext. The people who can’t see it simply don’t want to.
Trump is counting, with reason, on Democrats overstepping and making martyrs of dubious characters, whether those are campus radicals or illegal immigrants, to give people an excuse to look away from these naked abuses and to justify his dragnet approach to everything that boils down to “you don’t have anything to fear if you don’t have anything wrong” — with him and his lackeys deciding at every step what’s right or wrong.
This president’s plan — drawn from a playbook Argentines and Turks and Russians and Chinese and others around the world know all too well — is to take firm control, juice short-term economic growth to buy space for him to increase social control by constantly circumscribing the range of acceptable dissent and requiring people to demonstrate their compliance before it’s demanded. To get people to police themselves before the cops get to them.
Talk’s been cheap in New York City for a long time, buoyed by ever-rising property values and tax collection and lots of space from the feds for the State and the City to take their own approaches to matters ranging from policing protests to safe injection sites.
Now, the table stakes of resistance are much higher and the choices much harder. All that rhetoric about core beliefs and budgets as expressions of values is now in play, and it’s time for New York to decide where it wants to put its money and its mouth over the uphill 1,361 days remaining in this presidential term as it starts fending for, and defending, itself.