Harry Siegel: A chaotic mayoral election with Trump looming
An uninhibited and revenge-oriented President Trump is escalating his full-scale assault on his enemies, very much including New York City and State.
His administration is revoking student visas and even green cards with no due process to speak of — often without informing those students or their schools it’s done so.
He’s personally threatening to pull all federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities like ours that don’t always cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
Big law firms based here are lining up to kiss the ring, with their chiefs pilgrimaging to the White House and Mar-a-Lago to pledge hundreds of millions each in pro bono services to causes favored by Trump in the hopes of purchasing or at least renting his indulgences as the president issues executive orders targeting individual firms and broadly demands lawyers stop working with or on behalf of his personal and ideological foes.
All this is prelude to a militarized mass-deportation agenda that, even before it’s fully operationalized, is already leading to dystopian arrests and manhunts of working moms and semi-random college students the government is flimsily tying to an expanding number of officially designated terror organizations.
Meantime, the White House is gleefully promoting torture-porn videos of people it’s shipping away seemingly almost at random to a hellhole El Salvadoran prison while pretty much mocking a federal judge’s order, affirmed by the Supreme Court, to try and return one of them after a Justice Department attorney conceded he’d been sent there due to an “administrative error.”
It’s a parade of horribles that’s just kicking off.
What’s the opposite of a spoiler alert? It turns out Trump wasn’t interested in ending “the weaponization of the federal government” but in wielding it as part of his full-on stress test of the United States Constitution.
That’s starting with the First Amendment’s protections against the government creating speech or religion winners and losers, the 14th Amendment’s race-blind promise that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” and Article I’s commitment that “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”
A message to my “common-sense” friends fed up with rolling riots of not always peaceful protesters and the compliant experts, journalists and administrators making endless allowances for these supposedly spontaneous movements on behalf of an increasingly ridiculous Democratic establishment whose combined excesses helped Trump convincingly win a second term four years after Americans handily rejected him:
This avalanche isn’t ending with your enemies.
Back to New York, you won’t hear much about any of this from Mayor Adams.
He’s a prime beneficiary of Trump’s indulgences, having publicly pledged not to criticize the White House even before it dropped the federal corruption charges Hizzoner was scheduled to stand trial on later this month in a move that Judge Dale Ho wrote “smacks of a bargain: Dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
Sure enough, Adams had his first deputy mayor sign an executive order allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement back onto Rikers Island for the first time in a decade.
Adams, who was elected as a Democrat and is still registered to vote as one, is running for reelection as an independent now — meaning the city is primed for what would be its first meaningful general election in 12 years.
It’s a boggling contest, with a ranked-choice Democratic primary open only to registered party members followed by a most-votes-win general election that could include five different candidates ranging from a democratic socialist to a Guardian Angel, with three centrists sandwiched between them potentially cannibalizing votes from one another.
That’s cracked open a window for an historically unpopular mayor to somehow win a second term. At the least, it’s buying Adams a few more months where he’s not a pathetically lame duck.
Trump is just starting his term, and the city is about to commit to its course for the remainder of it.
Registered Democrats, who continue to have outsized electoral say here, should rank their top five picks in June and in the order they actually want them no matter their chances of winning to get most out of their vote.
And every New Yorker who has the right to vote still has time to register and then show up in November to decide on a mayor who will represent the city as our shared values are determined and then pressure-tested.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.