MAGA Finds New Scapegoat for Zohran Mamdani’s Mayor Win: Curtis Sliwa

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.

White House deputy chief of staff and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller posted an ominous, captionless threat after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday night. 

“Almost 50 percent of New Yorkers live in households with at least one immigrant,” the screenshot he posted from NYC.gov titled “Family Household Types by Immigration Status” read. “Over one million children, equaling 62 percent of the children in New York City, live in a household with at least one foreign-born family member.” 

It should come as no surprise that the man who has engineered President Trump’s sweeping, violent immigration crackdowns would react with vitriol to a democratic socialist Muslim immigrant winning a major mayoral election—and rebuking multiple political establishments in the process. 

“A New York family with one immigrant member, you say?” one user replied, posting an old picture of Trump and his third wife, Melania, an immigrant from Slovenia, and another of Trump and his first wife, Ivana, who was born in Czechoslovakia. (Trump’s mother was also born in Scotland.) 

“The fascist is making overt threats to deport a bunch of children because New Yorkers voted for Zohran,” Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski commented.   

By now, Americans should have realized that Republicans’ claim that they’re  “only going after the worst of the worst” was a complete lie. Miller is simply against nonwhite immigrants existing in America in any capacity, regardless of criminality, and he makes that clear here in this weird, wordless post.