ZOHRAN MAMDANI TROUNCES TRUMPISM

POWER & POLITICS

- PRABHU CHAWLA

N the neon-drenched canyons of New York City, where skyscrapers pierce the heavens like defiant spears, a seismic shift has occurred. It echoed the thunderous collapse of empires past. Last week, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a 34-year-old fiery democratic socialist, stormed to victory as the second-youngest mayor in the city's storied history. Born to an Indian Hindu mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, and a Ugandan Muslim father, academic Mahmood Mamdani, this son of immigrants didn't just win an election.

He obliterated the remnants of Trumpism in its spiritual heartland. With 50.4 percent of the vote, Mamdani crushed former Governor Andrew Cuomo, running as a desperate independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

This wasn't a mere ballot-box triumph. It was a brutal exorcism of Donald Trump's personalised politics, his toxic brew of division, and his so-called 'Trumpian economics'. Ironically, in this very city, where extreme terrorists brought down the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 Americans and others in an act of unimaginable horror, voters have chosen to repose unyielding faith in multiculturalism. As the confetti fell and the crowds roared, one truth crystallised. America's flirtation with autocratic individualism is unravelling, and Trump's plummeting acceptance is the harbinger of his inevitable fall.

Trump's rise in 2016 was a carnival of chaos. He peddled fear as policy and identity as weaponry. He ascended on the backs of the dispossessed, promising walls against 'the others' and tax cuts for the elite disguised as populism. But less than a year into his second term, the cracks are widening into chasms.