Zooming In at The UnPopulist

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Berny Belvedere: Renée DiResta, thanks for joining us on Zooming In, our flagship podcast here at The UnPopulist. You’ve been on before a couple of times. You’ve done podcasts with us, you’ve spoken at LibCon—in fact, during our first LibCon, LibCon 2024, your book generated intense interest. It seemed to be the book of the summer. You remember that?

Renée DiResta: I do, thanks so much.

Belvedere: It felt like at every other session, some panelist would say something like, “and to explore this further, I really recommend Renée DiResta’s new book, which is just wonderful.” Right? I don’t know why I did that in a nerd voice. Your endorsers are wonderful people.

But Renée, welcome again. I want to dive right in. You have a new report out. It’s put out by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was written by you and two co-authors, Rachel Kleinfeld and Margot Treadwell. That’s a powerful lineup. We’ve run Rachel’s work in our pages before and it’s top notch. The report is fantastic. It did not disappoint. For anyone interested in how the broader world of news and opinion discourse works today, it’s immediately one of the most useful resources to pick up. And it’s especially useful for practitioners, for people who work in the space, like we do.

But to help with some scene setting, can you tell us about the report in broad brushstrokes? We’ll then narrow in from there.

DiResta: So I think about this as report part two. Last year, in September, almost one year to the day, we put out a provocation saying: “institutions need to change how they communicate in order to compete in the new media environment.” And we wrote a framing on why that was, on how social media was no longer this niche thing that those people over there did. If you wanted to reach the public, this is where people are—and you have to reach them where they are and in a manner that they find appealing. The way that you communicate is just different now.

That attracted a lot of attention and it got us a ton of inbound, particularly from philanthropy, because we were also telling philanthropists you have to change how you think about outputs and outcomes that matter. For a lot of academics and others, participation in the public conversation is, if not discouraged, it’s not really encouraged. It doesn’t move the needle for your tenure committee, that sort of thing. How could philanthropists shift the thinking on why communicating to the public actually was critical? We got a ton of inbound on it and the question we got most often was: “How?”

This report is the how. The basic premise is that most Americans now get their information and form their opinions through creators, podcasts, Substacks, group chats. Most traditional institutions have only minimal engagement or presence in those spaces. So that ecosystem runs on a very different model of legitimacy. People are following people, not institutions. They’re following people that they find appealing or relatable. Somebody coming to you from their kitchen. Credentials and institutional polish actually can read as almost a sort of distance now.

Those are the elites saying that stuff from over there, whereas this person is just talking to me in their kitchen. They’re real.

We write about how fact-based institutions have often thought about this shift to social as a repackaging job. “All right, how do I take my massive PDF”—and, by the way, this report is a massive PDF—“how do I take that and put out a couple screenshots on social media or generate a reel?” They see it more as engaging when you have something to release, when you have just put something out. So it’s very self-serving. They’re not using social media as a communicator in an ongoing conversation where they’re having a back and forth with their audience. They’re using it as a broadcast tool and they’re reformulating the thing that they wanted to broadcast into a format that nominally works but is missing that dialogue.

So our guide argues that it’s a strategy problem—and that CEOs and boards have to own this. They have to think about it, not as the thing that happens after you’ve done your work, but as an active part of your ongoing relationship to the public. We framed the report as a series of questions to guide that thinking. We did a bunch of case studies, really spanning the communication ecosystem we have. How Jon Haidt turned some of his work into a movement. We have how Turning Point became a juggernaut. We have some of the Mamdani campaign stuff. Not endorsing any position there—but saying, “here’s some interesting stuff that you can learn from how this group strategically chose to engage the public through these means.”

Belvedere: I thought the guide did a really great job of bringing in real world examples. You also brought up David French and the reception he received. His case is a fascinating one because of what it represents and what it says about the subcommunity that he had that parting of the ways with, and the way they gate-kept him from continued access to it.

But I want to pick up on something that you mentioned in passing just now in your broad overview. There’s a line in the report that really struck me as I was reading it. As you put it, credentials and institutional polish—the CV virtues—now read as distance and disconnect rather than authority, which is what it used to read as. Do you think that’s a permanent rewiring of how trust just works now?

DiResta: It’s an interesting question. Trust and authoritativeness are distinct. You trust your neighbor without necessarily thinking they’re an authority. You just find them a trustworthy person. You would give them your keys. They can feed your dog, that sort of thing. And it doesn’t matter what they do or what their professional credentials are. What matters is just that you have a relationship. You feel that this person is somebody who would support you if you need it, that they’re going to level with you. They’re going to tell you the truth, even if you might not want to hear it.

That’s the idea of trust as something that is deeper than expertise. Sure, it goes hand in hand with it at times. We would like it to be tightly coupled. We want people to trust experts, but the idea of relatability instead is: “Why would this person who seems just like me lie to me? Why would they deceive me? What do they get out of it?” Whereas people sincerely believe that elite institutions are working to serve their own agenda, and that is often seen as being at odds with the average, everyday person. You see this in politics when people ask, “Why is this politician talking about this thing, performing this action, when I just care about putting food on the table for my family?” You see that gap in what lands and resonates with people versus what people in elite or institutional positions want to talk about.

Sometimes this is a disconnect that gets lamented in liberal spaces, particularly as, “well, if only they listened, they would understand that my policy proposal for this thing does help them 10 degrees and five years later.” But in the immediate here and now, it’s that question of: Do I trust the person who’s speaking to me? Do they seem just like me?

I had this experience when I was a new mom. I was one of the first in my friend group to have kids. I didn’t know what to do. I was living across the country from my family and didn’t have much support. So I turned to the internet, right? Who are the people who are going to help me understand what I’m supposed to do with this baby? How do I make him sleep? How do I make him eat? How do I not screw this up? I think it’s a very personal experience that a lot of people have where that sense that reading a PDF on an institutional website is not the same thing as somebody sitting there with you taking the time. There’s a phrase that I think it was Jeff Jarvis who once said to me in conversation: “the media talks to the public and the influencers talk with them.”

I think that’s the best framing I’ve heard for that. Content creators understand how to talk with their audiences, where even people who may have better information, more expertise, authoritative content, are not necessarily communicating that in a way that feels real and connects to a sense that this person is telling me the truth.

Belvedere: I’m wondering what’s the right read on this broad question of trust that we’re all grappling with. Take, for example, the aftershocks from a specific high profile instance of trust collapse—something like Covid. I think Covid’s a really instructive episode in many different ways. There’s been a lot of revisionism about it. What was different about Covid compared to other past trying moments in society is that Covid became politicized in a particular way by an extremely potent right-wing discourse-shaping machine. That’s not going to stop being in place.

“A lot of institutions are taught to stay on message at all times—if you hand your message to somebody else, you lose control of it. But you can’t tell them what to say. They’re going to say what they want to say. They might get it wrong. But counterintuitively, I think that actually generates more dialogue, more attention, and provides you with a way to accomplish something you might not be good at yourself. Your CEO might not actually be the best face to talk about this thing—the 20 year old you hired, who is much more comfortable with this, is actually the person who should be out there engaging, putting out the message, or working with a creator or creator lab and essentially briefing them.” — Renée DiResta

So my overriding fear is that Covid is not an outlier. And that anything in society like Covid that requires elite management, whether it’s the dissemination of information, policies that help curb some of the worst effects of not abiding by certain standards, all of that is going to run up against an information machine architecturally designed to demagogue that issue, to create a trust collapse, to point out any little mistakes and amplify them as though they’re an example of the elites just completely botching everything. Is there any hope that that wanes?

DiResta: That’s a very interesting question—let me give you a couple of answers.

Two things were true about Covid. I was writing about this in The Atlantic during the pandemic: the institutional communicators really dropped the ball—in my opinion, but I think that’s been quite backed up at this point. I remember writing that it would be nice to see the CDC’s website look more like Wikipedia, where you can see the change log, the public can understand in this fast moving situation—you can go back and read the edit history, you can see who made the change, you can understand how consensus forms in a scientific community. Because there’s such a time lag, right? They are waiting until they are absolutely, 100% sure before they say something. In that time, the people are still looking for information, and they’re going to get it from whoever is willing to give it to them. On social media, there’s an incentive structure: if you’re first, you get rewarded; if you’re sensational, you get rewarded. If you’re right? That doesn’t really matter. Maybe you’ll get a Community Note, maybe a fact check, but that’s not really the point. The point is: Are you first, are you relatable, do you seem authentic, can your stuff go viral? It’s a very different communication style and game.

So the first thing that was true is that the institutions dropped the ball in comms during Covid communications. And I was writing about it as it happened, because my job was to study social media rumors and narratives around the vaccine. I was like: “Come on, guys! You gotta get in the game here! You’re not going to content-moderate this out of existence—that’s just not how it works. You’re going to turn this into forbidden knowledge.” We did everything we possibly could to try to systematically change that. And the people who did respond were the first-person speakers who began to emerge: physicians. You saw doctors working shifts at Bellevue doing live updates about the morgue trucks—those were the people who managed to break through, because they had the credentials, but they were also able to say very directly to the public: this is the truth, this is what you need to know, Covid is real, even as the institutions weren’t doing that.

But the second thing that’s true is that, as you note, the failures, flaws, and missteps get immediately weaponized. That turns into: “you can’t trust those people, they didn’t tell you the truth then, never forget what they did to us.” That rhetoric isn’t really about finding truth, or understanding a novel pathogen, or whether a vaccine works—remember, this was the first time one had ever been rolled out in an emergency setting. It turns into: “here’s why you can never trust those people, and you can only trust me.”

That got reinforced through litigation. They lost all their court cases, but they still sued people who tried to deal with the falsehoods and misleading content, and any effort to label it or fact-check it got reframed as censorship. It was really wild to see what that machine juggernaut managed to do to reinforce that only it was going to tell its base the truth, and they couldn’t trust anything on the outside. That’s the kind of rhetoric you usually see from cults—“you can’t trust anybody but me.” It’s a very different style of communication, and I found it personally alarming to see it happen in the context of a pandemic, because it has serious downstream consequences.

Belvedere: Yeah, and I mean, think about the way you just described that—an informational cult kind of environment, scaled up to half the country, or at least to a large share of people getting their news from less-than-ideal sources. I think it’s going to continue to be a problem.

DiResta: Let me follow up on that quickly. I spent about [six months] watching the vaccine rollout—February through August of 2021, as Operation Warp Speed rolled out. I watched what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other long-standing—just to be clear, long-standing—anti-vaccine activists did. These weren’t people who simply didn’t like the Covid shot; no, these were people who had been telling you vaccines cause autism, dating back to the 1990s. I watched them capitalize on this in the most incredible ways. They were absolutely transparent about it—they were like, “this is our chance to undermine confidence in the entire vaccine enterprise.” And that is exactly what they did. They didn’t hide the ball—they were live-streaming taking about it. “This is our chance to tell the public that all of these things are poison.” And now we have kids dying of measles.

That’s the downstream effect of this: they managed to connect that distrust to other things. They didn’t just create distrust around one incident or fact; they created the idea that nobody in the medical establishment has your best interests at heart. That’s what they managed to achieve as a result of Covid.

Belvedere: I want to stay on this, because I think we’re all trying to figure out the right posture here. You bring up Joe Rogan and his effect on psychedelics policy: a lot of people know him through segments where he talks through his drug trips, or a guest’s. Or, another example: online creators helping speed up the end of USAID. And there are other cases. But these are cases where influence and factual accuracy are completely decoupled. For organizations whose whole value proposition is getting reality right, being accurate—a lot of people in these spaces ask a question that is one neighborhood down but the same city: “Where’s the liberal answer to Joe Rogan?” We’ve been asking that question since the post-mortem on 2024, and even before. A lot of our institutions feel saddled by the sense that in order to compete on reach, in this new marketplace of ideas, we can’t really compete on accuracy’s terms.

Roger Ailes created Fox News in the ’90s. It wasn’t [presented] as a dominant player—it was a countervailing force: “the media is captured, so we’re going to bring balance back.” “Fair and balanced”—that whole thing; a whole alternative institution positioned against the media itself. So [this side] has had an insurgent mindset from the start—Rush Limbaugh and others. I’ve brought this up a lot. Even the Ailes project, Fox News, it had institutional trappings, institutional clothing, but it really had this insurgent energy, whatever it said about itself early on. That posture was able to scale beautifully once podcasting, YouTube, and the internet more broadly made these tools available. It was disintermediation. People like Ben Shapiro with The Daily Wire, Charlie Kirk, really ran with the ball a lot better in these spaces, it seemed like. It never felt like liberals had their own Ailes moment, because it felt like they were fine with The New York Times and The Atlantic.

Is the real gap here about talent, effort, and ability, or just needing to catch up after playing behind for so long? Or is it more that this is a different language, that [that side] can easily and naturally slot into, and for us it has to be more performative, a little contrived—like a theater kid having to learn how to act?

DiResta: It’s funny—there’s so much in what you’re saying there. First, when you can position yourself oppositionally—“we’re the underdog, we’re David, they’re Goliath”—that’s an archetype, a story everybody knows, that people immediately understand where you’re positioning yourself. “They are all telling you the same thing”; “that is a monolith, that’s the state propaganda machine manufacturing consent, we’re the plucky little outlet trying to break through.” And then, of course, they maintain that outsider branding and status even as their audience becomes massive—quite a lot larger, in fact, than some of that so-called establishment media.

You see this with a phrase that comes out of QAnon: “we are the media now.” What they’re saying is: “we can break through, we can make stuff trend, we can make stuff go viral, we can take our (in the context of QAnon, I think it’s fair to say) crackpot ideas and put them out there, get them seen, get them part of the discourse, and then people have to pay attention to us.” That’s where “we are the media now” comes from. It was popularized by Elon, because he picked up that phrase and it is so much in the ether on X—I don’t even know if he understands the provenance. But “we are the media now” becomes the idea that we’re the opposition now, and all that legacy stuff—including Fox, mind you, which is legacy too—is old. You actually see the schisms now, especially since they’re in power everywhere on the right: influencers going to war with Fox News.

“I once had someone screenshot every social media post where I’d used a curse word and send it to my dean. And I was like: “I said all of that. That’s 100% real.” This is the internet, after all. Would I use that language in a talk? Probably not. I’m from New York, so sometimes I do. But if you’re constantly second-guessing, clarifying, checking yourself … and you do need to be correct, because in some cases your credentials are on the line when you’re speaking about the thing you’re actually presenting. But your delivery can afford to be a bit more flexible, a bit more relaxed.” — Renée DiResta

Venkatesh Rao wrote about this in “The Internet of Beefs”—one of the most astute assessments of how social media works, in my opinion. If you have conflict, that’s fantastic: it benefits both parties, gets both parties attention, and there’s no incentive to actually win the conflict, because the conflict itself is like a soap opera—it just keeps going. That’s where you start to see right-wing influencers say, “Fox News is establishment, Bush-era media, and we’ll tell you the truth—on social, on our platforms, on our streams, on our podcasts.” That’s where you start to see that shift.

There’s also something Rachel and I wrote about in the first report: institutional and academic speakers are media-trained for a very different world, where you get a three- to five-minute segment. If you’ve never done TV before, they tell you roughly what you’ll be asked, you prepare your talking points in advance because you have so little time, you deliver the soundbite, and the segment’s over. That’s completely different from what I experienced doing Rogan in 2019—a two-and-a-half-hour conversation with no prep. I’m going to be there and you either know your stuff or you don’t. His audience either likes me or it doesn’t. Half of them hated me!

And that’s fine—it is what it is. I showed up for a reason. There’s a completely different vernacular, style, and approach when you’re having a two-hour conversation with somebody, where you’re going to listen to what they have to say, and you’re responding back much more as a human than as a person who’s there to digest for the public, in a three-minute hit, what you said in that report over there or what happened in the world and why you, the expert, with your credentials and your chyron should think about it. It’s a completely different experience.

So does it go back to the old way? I don’t think it does—I haven’t thought that for the better part of 10 years now. I started writing about the anti-vaccine movement in 2015, as a mom, saying: “I have got to say something about this.” What became MAHA is now a political movement that sits in power at HHS. What they understood was that empathy and relatability, the feeling that they are talking with you, matters so much more than a PDF or an academic paper that sits behind a paywall that nobody can read without an academic library license. That’s not going back to normal. So the question that’s motivated me and Rachel is: How do you teach people who do have the knowledge and the skill set to compete differently?

Belvedere: On that note, on liberals’ broad failure to penetrate a lot of these spaces, these subcommunities, these niche places where people gather … think about all the subcultures we have in the United States—there are plenty that liberals are just really poor at reaching, or at having any presence within at all.

DiResta: I’m an independent. My complaint is about how liberals communicate versus how conservatives communicate. I spend a lot of time in both ecosystems, in person, and I try to engage with the media apparatus on the right too, partly because they make up conspiracy theories about me, so I feel like I have to. But there’s a difference in how carefully you have to think through what you’re about to say—what performance are you putting on in that moment? Conservatives use the word “based”—you’re talking in a way that’s almost intentionally provocative at times, and sometimes it goes way off the rails; sometimes it’s not good at all. But there’s a sense that when you’re hearing from the liberal establishment, you’re hearing qualifiers—everything is qualified.

This is something I used to talk about when making content: on Instagram Reels, you’ve got three seconds to hook your audience. If you start with a qualifier about how what you’re saying doesn’t necessarily apply to all people, in all places, at all times, you’re done—that took three seconds, that’s it, we’re done. So the question is: How do you get comfortable either owning an opinion unapologetically, or framing it in a way where you’re just like, “yeah, whatever, somebody on the internet is always going to yell at me, I don’t care, I’m going to say the thing anyway”? That’s a limitation I just don’t see in conservative spaces.

Again, that means things can go way off the rails, and some of it is genuinely not good. But the flip side is that [liberal content] can sound stilted, practiced, polished. And the incentive structure is scary for the participant—for the academic who decides to try being more casual in their presentation. I once had someone screenshot every social media post where I’d used a curse word and send it to my dean. And I was like: “I said all of that. That’s 100% real.” This is the internet, after all. Would I use that language in a talk? Probably not. I’m from New York, so sometimes I do. But if you’re constantly second-guessing, clarifying, checking yourself … and you do need to be correct, because in some cases your credentials are on the line when you’re speaking about the thing you’re actually presenting. But your delivery can afford to be a bit more flexible, a bit more relaxed.

What I’ve loved over the last few years since Covid is watching public health experts and epidemiologists start presenting as themselves: “here I am, I’ve got this expertise, and I’m also going to tell you about my kids, or this dress I bought, or this thing I did.” It makes them more relatable, more human—because they are, in fact, relatable and human. It’s not an artifice. But they understand that doing this actually helps establish their credibility, more than just the credential. So if me saying a curse word on Twitter … normal people curse on Twitter.

Belvedere: And not to be too cynical about it, but this is something intuitively understood by people on the wrong side of things. Trump will have a word randomly capitalized as a marker of his style, and without it, the message would feel too polished—even though, grammatically, it would be correct.

One reaction people sometimes have to a discussion like this is: “all you’re talking about is communication, this is social media stuff, it’s more fluff than substance.” I think that couldn’t be more wrong, because if we care about the issues we’re writing about, if we want action taken on them …

DiResta: Yes! It is a persuasive process.

Belvedere: … if we want people to care about authoritarianism or corruption in government, raising the salience of those issues becomes really important. If we’re collectively bad at it, if we don’t have the “juice” that the other side does, our issues stay dormant, untouched, unlistened to, uncared about, while the other side’s issues will be front and center, driving the conversation. You talk about issue salience needing to travel across networks before it becomes a thing. Could you unpack that? You’ve got multiple creators, adjacent communities … help us understand how that works.

DiResta: So, often times, when you open your social media feed—whatever ranked platform you use, which is almost all of them—you’re seeing what the platform has decided is important for you, and that’s not the same as what’s important to the person sitting next to you on the train. So you innately think a lot of people care about something, or are talking about something, when it turns out—take X as an example: you log in, there’s a “trends” feature, and it’ll surface a trend when there are maybe 200 posts about something. That’s not a trend in any national sense; it’s basically the platform tweaking a small number of people who’ll respond to it. They see it and think, “there are 2,000 posts about this, I care a lot about that thing, I’m going to add my voice, retweet it, reshare it”—and if a sufficient number of people do that, it gets bigger, and eventually it shows up on something like a mass-movement leaderboard.

I spent five years at the Stanford Internet Observatory taking a network-science approach to this. Let me give a specific example—we can stick with the pandemic, because I think it’s quite important as a case study. I don’t know how many people remember the Plandemic video. It featured Judy Mikovits, a woman with serious credential issues and at least one retracted paper, who’d had a series of dramatic career incidents that led to her being put into the autism-conference crankosphere. She was releasing a book and doing a lot of book promo, but she was never especially polished doing those direct engagements herself. The director, Mikki Willis, made the video—kept her on task, shot it very strategically. It’s about 20 minutes long, and it argues that the pandemic is being used to keep people from “healing microbes on the beach,” and that’s why they are locking down beaches, and so on—a very conspiratorial film.

Now Mikovits had been saying these things on prior podcasts for a while, but it stayed confined; it got almost no reach outside the anti-vaccine networks, where that kind of content is normal and expected. What was different about Plandemic is that because of the polish, the packaging, the formatting, and Willis’s own reach and network, it hopped out of the anti-vaccine ecosystem and started landing everywhere. We had a tool called CrowdTangle that let us pull where URLs were winding up and being shared, and the Plandemic link was showing up in the Corgi Club, the Beach Club, local school-board groups—everywhere. We could only see public data, so I’d imagine that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The public really found it compelling. Reading the comments as part of that analysis, people were saying things like: “she seems so authoritative, she has this personal beef with Anthony Fauci, who I’ve also been hearing is untrustworthy; they are keeping us locked down in our houses, why is that happening?” It really landed and resonated. That’s an actual moment where normally this speakers and those topics stay confined to a very specific niche part of the internet, with this video, they managed to absolutely blew out of the water. Here is how it works when you take something and you frame somebody in the right way, you make them seem relatable and resonant and you edit the content in a very compelling, exciting, and mysterious way. This is how you create a mass conversation about something. Ordinarily this person would have stayed confined to her niche, but in that particular moment, with that particular piece of content, they nailed it.

Belvedere: I asked about that because on our side, we’re trying to do some of the same work you’re outlining. ISMA puts out LibCon and The UnPopulist—The UnPopulist is our flagship publication, LibCon is the conference series that we put out. The UnPopulist has buy-in from figures across the ideological spectrum; and the whole model of ISMA is to build a coalition—a realignment of liberal versus illiberal—and for us to be on that liberal side, spanning classical liberals, center-left, and center-right: people who are single-issue defectors, who have enough qualms with the authoritarianism we’re seeing that they come over to our side. At our last LibCon, we had C-SPAN in the same room as a bunch of streamers broadcasting. It was an interesting mix, and that’s the sort of work we’re trying to do. As I said earlier, though, it’s not necessarily the language that’s easy for a lot of liberals to speak—it takes intentional partnerships, looking through different content forms, finding where a good ally or partner can be found.

“These weren’t people who simply didn’t like the Covid shot; no, these were people who had been telling you vaccines cause autism, dating back to the 1990s. I watched them capitalize on this in the most incredible ways. They were absolutely transparent about it—they were like, ‘this is our chance to undermine confidence in the entire vaccine enterprise.’ And that is exactly what they did. They didn’t hide the ball—they were live-streaming taking about it. ‘This is our chance to tell the public that all of these things are poison.’ And now we have kids dying of measles. That’s the downstream effect of this: they managed to connect that distrust to other things. They didn’t just create distrust around one incident or fact; they created the idea that nobody in the medical establishment has your best interests at heart. That’s what they managed to achieve as a result of Covid.” — Renée DiResta

It used to be that an organization could get away with just publishing a headline, an article image, and letting the feed auto-populate. Now every platform, the whole online space, requires more thoughtfulness, more intentionality, more strategic thinking. At the risk of asking for a One Neat Trick: is there one thing that, if a capacity developed overnight, would be a game changer for us on this path that we want to take—to be better communicators, to help the issues we care about get that amplification and resonance?

DiResta: I think it is that co-creation and that incorporation of people who are innately good and talented at this. I was at LibCon this year with Whick and Soypill, two of the streamers who were there, because the first night of the conference happened to be the night Trump gave that speech about the election being rigged by China. As it happens, I have a lot of experience looking at Chinese influence operations around the 2020 election, so I’d been on Whick’s stream before, and he asked if I wanted to come on. I said let’s do it, and we broke it down live for the audience—here’s what Trump’s saying, here’s a Georgetown professor who can help explain it—but done conversationally. It’s funny, because you still carry that credential with you; you’re still saying, “here’s how I know this stuff.” And, of course, later on I’m going to write about this for Lawfare, I’m going to write about it on my Substack, I’m going to put it out as personal content. But in this moment the most impactful thing I think I can do is discuss it live with people who are watching it in a community, trying to make sense of it together. That’s something streamers in particular are very good at—they bring people together to watch jointly.

I don’t know how many people have watched a Destiny stream, or, on the other side of the spectrum, a Hasan Piker stream, but it’s the same appeal: people who are in a community, like-minded, enjoying that back-and-forth, not only listening to the streamer but participating in the community itself. It reminds me of being in New York in my 20s, gathering at someone’s house to watch TV together on a Sunday night—that feeling of experiencing something together, reacting to it together. When you watch a news broadcast by yourself, it’s not like that. When you’re watching a stream, there’s as much back-and-forth and community-building happening among the audience as there is between the audience and the influencer or streamer. That creates a feeling of belonging and participation, and when you want to ask people to take political action, there’s a feeling that we’re all in this together, we all want to see this thing accomplished. You see this when you watch political streamers across the spectrum doing fundraisers and things like that—“how can we galvanize and generate momentum?”

This isn’t limited to partisan politics—you can do the same with issue-based advocacy as well.

One of the reasons institutions [struggle here] is a fear of relinquishing control. A lot of institutions are taught to stay on message at all times—if you hand your message to somebody else, you lose control of it. But you can’t tell them what to say. They’re going to say what they want to say. They might get it wrong. But counterintuitively, I think that actually generates more dialogue, more attention, and provides you with a way to accomplish something you might not be good at yourself. Your CEO might not actually be the best face to talk about this thing—the 20 year old you hired, who is much more comfortable with this, is actually the person who should be out there engaging, putting out the message, or working with a creator or creator lab and essentially briefing them like you would brief media: “here’s your embargoed copy of my report, I’d love it if you talked about it, no pressure, no requirements, this is just me providing you with information about something we’ve done that I think your audience might care about—and then wherever it goes, goes.”

Belvedere: And as you note in the report, this is already the cultural air a lot of these younger staffers breathe—they have to code-switch to seem more “professional,” to be someone who …

DiResta: … doesn’t curse on Twitter.

Belvedere: Exactly. But that also gives them the advantage of understanding the discourse, the environment, the information landscape, far more natively. So they can put a message that the CEO might want in a way that will have more effectiveness.

I want to bring up two of the case studies I found fascinating—David French and Zohran Mamdani. David French was trying to bring a [pluralist], depoliticized message into a very hostile, ideologically policed, polarized evangelical base. Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor of New York, built his campaign almost entirely on vibes, aesthetics, joy—messaging, sure, but messaging that met people where they were and responded to what they actually needed. One of those approaches got crushed by the gatekeepers; the other was able to bypass them. It’s not that one was effective and the other wasn’t—David French ran up against a buzzsaw that no Christian thinker, however winsome or articulate, probably would have fared well against. Mamdani certainly was very skilled in how he approached his campaign and carried it out. In these two profiles, is there a lesson there about why one got crushed and the other persevered?

DiResta: It’s very interesting, and I’ve thought about this a lot. So, first, some of it is: How heavy a hold does the establishment party have on the space you’re speaking into? Are you entering fresh ground? Mamdani, of course, ran against an egregiously terrible establishment candidate. I mean, it was one of those “is this really the best we’ve got to offer?”

Mamdani’s politics weren’t mine, but I’m from New York—I lived there for 30 years, still have a house and family in Brooklyn—and I watched that race, and I just thought … every time I saw Mamdani content in my feed, and there was a lot of it, because I’m still plugged into New York, I was like, “this is so inspiring. This is a person where that love of the city comes through.” I remember he did a thing with a bodega cat. I had a bodega cat, and it was amazing! In a way, the politics and the policy was almost secondary to the feeling that you were watching something genuine.

The candidate he was running against—well, there were two, of course, including Curtis Sliwa, who really nailed it on the “genuine” front. I mean, my God, that man gave interviews that left my jaw on the floor—where he’s like, “here’s how they’re trying to pay me to drop out of the race, let’s talk about that.” It’s a very New York political moment.

Belvedere: Zero filter.

DiResta: Oh, no filter. I mean, Cuomo doesn’t lack a filter either. I’m New York Italian too—you know that. Someone should send him to his dean!

It was wild watching that race and seeing what landed with the public. There was such a sense of “God, we need something new! We just need something new”—and that landed, I think, in a way, more than anything else, regardless of your opinions on specific policies. It was the way in which he turned people who found him personally appealing into organizers—fans became organizers. That’s really the story of the Mamdani campaign. With French, by contrast, top-down control still held much more strongly. I don’t think many New Yorkers love the Democratic Party establishment enough to say, “we really need to listen to what they tell us”—if anything, an official endorsement had become a bit of a negative signal by that point. That’s at least how I experienced New York politics.

Mamdani was also an unknown quantity, French was much more of a known quantity, so he had this experience of gatekeepers who used character assassination to attack, not so much his ideas as his person—finding things he’d said or done previously and using them to attack him personally and make it costly to associate with him and his ideas by extension. Once an establishment is well-networked enough to mount that kind of opposition, it’s much harder to win. French was moving into a hostile, contested, polarized space. Mamdani, by contrast, faced an establishment, in his case the more centrist wing of the Democratic Party, that simply didn’t have the social media clout or networks to make its attacks land. It was a very different dynamic.

That’s why we put French in a section of the report about figuring out what kind of space you’re actually trying to participate in. Are you putting forward a policy or a vision that’s going to be actively and adversarially rebuffed by very entrenched, well-networked forces? Or are you moving into a much fresher space—a new issue, a new take, less contested ground—where you are potentially going to run a very different kind of strategy?

Belvedere: I think that’s a great point. Trump is a good example in the political space—the GOP establishment was set against him initially. They had money behind other candidates, Jeb Bush chief among them, and had a war chest that was insane backing Jeb Bush. And that was … nothing in the end. It didn’t amount to anything. All the work French had done in the past, caring about the Bill of Rights, about a constitutionally constrained vision of limited government—the intellectual energy the Republican Party used to draw on more heavily—had given way to something else. David went a different direction than a lot of evangelicals did, and there are enough of them to effectively block him now.

Whereas Mamdani, I think, was able to bypass a lot of that resistance because there was more overlap with what a standard Democratic candidate might have offered—a lot of the same campaign substance, just a different approach on some issues. There were enough people who weren’t already set against him. That’s unlike the evangelical space, where mentioning French’s name is practically like saying “Voldemort.” Which is sad, because on a lot of issues, especially theological tenets, there’s still broad alignment between them.

This is something that your report presses people to internalize: the idea that who you’re speaking to matters, and how you’re speaking to them matters. That’s a lesson a lot of liberals still need to work out. There’s a lot of trial and error right now, a lot of figuring out how to be effective in this new information landscape. But the report is genuinely helpful. I imagine a lot of people will read it and think: “okay, everything I thought I knew about what it takes to project credibility has been turned on its head, and I need to account for that or risk being left behind.” That’s what makes it such an important read.

DiResta: Thank you. We really tried to make it as tangible as possible—which is why it’s long. We went back and forth at the end about whether to release different versions for different audiences: a philanthropist version, a C-suite version, a version for op-ed writers. In the end we put it all out as one document—you can always Control-F to find what’s most relevant to you, there’s an index, and AI can digest it too.

But, in all seriousness, though, there has to be a shift. You mentioned Trump. His energy came from the internet. He was so good at tapping into … because he was almost a meme candidate at first; people didn’t quite believe he’d be a serious thing. This was right around the time … I bring up Gamergate not for its specifics, but because it was a moment when people started realizing the internet could actually affect the real world. The Arab Spring was another one of those moments—realizing that people’s voices online could genuinely accomplish things.

“When you have this sclerotic sense that nothing happens in the United States, that no one is listening to you, that no change happens, that nothing you want to see in the world will ever be realized, that’s an intoxicating moment. ‘Damn, we are the media now’—that phrase is literally about empowerment, the sense that someone powerful is listening to you and making something happen. That’s the complete opposite of the faceless institution where you leave a comment in a form and never hear back, where nothing ever changes, your taxes don’t change, your cost of living doesn’t change. That’s what Mamdani tapped into as well: ‘we are actually going to change things, we are going to do things, the world is going to be different starting day one, and here’s how it’s going to happen.’ Whatever you think of the man’s politics, he nailed that sense of empowerment—’this is a movement, and you’re part of it.’” — Renée DiResta

You mentioned my book. I’ll give a shameless plug here—but only because the paperback just came out and it has a new epilogue. If you bought the Kindle version, go refresh it, because the new epilogue gets into exactly this. What was the appeal of DOGE? It was that the government was going to be transformed—that’s great, it’s a huge incentive for people who cared about that. Even liberals were like, “Maybe it’s time to shake some stuff up.” But what DOGE did for the public, particularly Trump’s base and Elon’s base, was this: they’d tweet out some grant they found ridiculous, often with no real idea what it actually did, and Elon would respond with something like “killed,” “nuked,” “through the wood chipper,” about USAID.

Belvedere: And a lot of those actually got Community-Noted on themselves—people pointing out that he was egregiously misreading the grant. They got fact-checked by their own system.

DiResta: They did—but it didn’t actually matter, because what mattered to the people participating was: “I said a thing, somebody powerful listened to me, and then a change happened.” When you have this sclerotic sense that nothing happens in the United States, that no one is listening to you, that no change happens, that nothing you want to see in the world will ever be realized, that’s an intoxicating moment. “Damn, we are the media now”—that phrase is literally about empowerment, the sense that someone powerful is listening to you and making something happen. That’s the complete opposite of the faceless institution where you leave a comment in a form and never hear back, where nothing ever changes, your taxes don’t change, your cost of living doesn’t change.

That’s what Mamdani tapped into as well: “we are actually going to change things, we are going to do things, the world is going to be different starting day one, and here’s how it’s going to happen.” Whatever you think of the man’s politics, he nailed that sense of empowerment—“this is a movement, and you’re part of it.” That’s the same thing Trump tapped into online back in 2015: “we’re going to change things, this is your movement, and I’m going to accomplish this for you.” Which can go off in some weird ways, when you look at exclusionary populism and authoritarianism, which you guys at ISMA focus so much on.

I want to mention one more thing. In San Francisco, we recalled the school board: a very local, niche race that ended up becoming a story of national attention, for the same reason—people saying, “we’ve got to change something, what can we do?” The groups that grew out of that were advancing a very liberal policy—this was not the far-left, not the far-right doing it: “we’d like eighth-grade algebra back, we’d like schools reopened.” This is late 2021. “It would be nice for my kid not to have three years of no school.”

It was an unapologetically liberal politics that was powering that, and it was unapologetic in how it framed itself, how it spoke, how it used social media. And I thought, “Okay, now maybe liberals will see”—again, not Democrats, but liberals, people who believe in the core liberal values—“people will start to see that there’s real power in direct, unapologetic appeals.” And it is my sincere hope that we start to see that in a movement that rises to push back against the excesses of MAHA and things like that.

[In the new edition of my book], the new epilogue is really about how these dynamics play out once a group is actually in power—because a lot of people think of social media as a tool of insurgency, and once you’re in power, that’s supposedly the end of it. What’s been interesting watching Trump and DOGE is that they’ve kept that cycle going: people still believe they’re having an impact, shaping policy.

We saw a version of this with Obama, who was a very digital candidate—he rose to power on a lot of popular digital support, did interviews with content creators, that kind of thing. There were creators in the White House—my friend Destin Sandlin, who runs Smarter Every Day, did an interview with Obama. There was a sense that the administration was beginning to engage with new media, but there was still a divide: the new media was media, engaging with the president on certain terms, at certain times, in certain venues. What you’re seeing from this administration is they’re literally the press corps, seated front and center. Some of them are even working as special government employees, which is wild—and there are some real ethical issues there. But there’s still a sense that the online movement, that source of validation that propelled someone to a win, is actively in there, working with them on governance and policy.

Is that a mirage, to some extent? Yes—there’s a veneer of them wanting to do something anyway and using online narratives to justify it. And I’d argue that once an influencer becomes a special government employee, they’re no longer independent—they’re speaking as an agent of the government at that point. But setting that aside, you really do see the way those boundaries are shifting, and that sense of personal participation is what keeps this particular populist movement feeling valuable to its participants.

Belvedere: I remember when Madison Cawthorn infamously hired only comms people rather than policy people, and a lot of people in conservative-adjacent spaces saw that as the start of a new era. The model is no longer Paul Ryan-ing your way through, nor is it about governing—Cawthorn was actively, explicitly building a kind of image-only candidacy, seeing how far that element alone could carry him. It didn’t carry him very far; a few things tripped him up, like, hilariously, a visit to Hitler’s home. But he was building toward being a comms-only operation as the only thing that matters now. When Trump did the whole Alligator Alcatraz stunt, that’s the same understanding at work—it’s an ongoing comms exercise, you have to keep the performative aspect going, because the campaign never really stops.

We’re out of time. Thank you so much, Renée.

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Welcome to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. “Populism” is one of those words that gets used constantly, but it’s rarely pinned down. Everyone agrees we’re living in a populist era, but almost no one agrees on what that means or how you’d measure it. For the past two years, ISMA, the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist, has been trying to do exactly that: a national survey built around specific, testable definitions of populist attitudes, first fielded on the eve of the 2024 election, and now repeated in June of 2026.

The second round results just came back, and the headline finding is a bit of a surprise. Trump’s hardcore populist base has shrunk by about a third.

To walk through what the survey found and what it tells us, ISMA policy fellow and The UnPopulist's senior editor, Andy Craig, is joined by the man who designed and ran it, Tom Shull, editor at large of The UnPopulist and ISMA’s director of survey research.

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Welcome to this special live (of sorts) joint episode of the liberalism.org show and Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I am Aaron Ross Powell, senior director of liberal projects at the Institute for Humane Studies, and I’m joined today by this esteemed panel. We have two of the most thoughtful columnists at The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie and David French. And we have Harvard University’s Danielle Allen.

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In this episode of Zooming In, The UnPopulist's editor-in-chief, Shikha Dalmia, talks with Greg Sargent of The New Republic about whether America has truly turned against immigration—or whether Trump's 2024 victory has been badly misread. Sargent argues that the election reflected a thermostatic, economy-driven backlash rather than a durable cultural shift, and that the past year and a half of mass deportations, ethnic purges, and high-profile cases like Kilmar Abrego Garcia's has snapped majorities back toward a consensus favoring legal pathways, humane treatment, and border security—but not Stephen Miller's vision of ethnic homogeneity. Along the way, Dalmia and Sargent dig into the thwarted history of comprehensive immigration reform, why a radical minority in the GOP has repeatedly blocked it, and the split among Democrats between the "salience bros" who counsel silence on immigration and those who see an opening to win the argument on favorable terms. They examine how figures like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico make the connection between immigration and authoritarianism in different registers, take apart David Frum's "if liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will" thesis, and close on why both believe the country's pro-immigrant, "shining city on a hill" ethos runs deeper than the populist rage of the last decade.

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Welcome to Zooming In. I’m Berny Belvedere for The UnPopulist. The World Cup is finally here! It’s hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s the largest World Cup in history. On Thursday, Mexico kicked off the competition by beating South Africa 2-0, and the U.S. followed that up the next day with possibly its best-ever performance in the World Cup, a thoroughly convincing smackdown of Paraguay. Both Mexico and the U.S. started really strong and have their fanbases dreaming of World Cup glory.

On Wednesday, the eve of the cup, I sat down with León Krauze, contributing columnist at The Washington Post and host of the Boca de León podcast, to discuss the great tournament. Our focus wasn’t so much the soccer aspect of it all—but rather how this World Cup, thanks to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant maximalism, has in some key ways betrayed its own promise.

What makes León the perfect guest for this episode is that not only has he extensively covered the sport of soccer, including the history of Mexican soccer—but he’s also a leading commentator on U.S.-Latin American relations.

In our time together, we covered a number of incidents that are quite troubling. A FIFA referee from Somalia was detained at a U.S. airport and sent home. Iran’s federation had its ticket allocation pulled days before their first match—and the squad has had to relocate its base in Mexico. The acting ICE director [Todd Lyons] told Congress he wouldn’t rule out arrests at stadiums, contradicting the assurance that Secretary of State [Marco Rubio] had given Miami’s own host committee a week earlier. And Amnesty International published a report calling the United States, on the eve of the world’s party, a country facing a “human rights emergency.”

There was so much to cover we didn’t even get to everything. Iran’s players were issued visas only after being warned not to abuse the system, then ordered off American soil the same day as each of their matches. These are professional athletes that the U.S. is telling: “Don’t stay the night on U.S. soil.” In another instance, a Moroccan player was held up and nearly denied entry at a U.S. airport, reportedly due to his father’s appearance—specifically, his beard. Although DHS says ICE won’t be deployed for immigration enforcement at venues, its new secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said before the cup that “ICE is always going to do immigration enforcement.” Germany’s football federation has actually issued an official advisory to its own players to stay quiet on politics at this tournament. And looming over all of it: FIFA, under Trump’s personal friend Gianni Infantino, invented a “FIFA Peace Prize” out of thin air and handed it to Trump, who was sad over not winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

In our conversation, we hope the following comes through: We couldn’t be more excited for our favorite sporting event to get underway, but we couldn’t be more disappointed in how the build up to this tournament has in some ways proceeded in direct contradiction to how it was initially sold.

We hope you enjoy.

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Welcome to Zooming In. I'm Berny Belvedere, senior editor of The UnPopulist. I'm joined today by Raymond Roberts, author of A Democratic and Republican Faith, a theologically serious and hopeful book that recovers what authentic Christian faith actually demands of its adherents, at precisely the moment when so much of American Christianity has lost the plot. Today we discuss what a genuinely God-centered public theology looks like, why MAGA evangelicalism represents a profound departure from it, and what it might take to find our way back. We hope you enjoy.

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Our latest installment of The UnPopulist Live took place on Friday, April 24, when senior editor Berny Belvedere sat down with Center for New Liberalism co-founder Jeremiah Johnson and New York City New Liberals political director Tibita Kaneene to discuss NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first 100-plus days in office.

What follows is the full video and transcript (lightly edited for flow and clarity) of the conversation. We hope you enjoy.

Berny Belvedere: Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Berny Belvedere, senior editor at The UnPopulist. I’m joined by Jeremiah Johnson of the Center for New Liberalism. Jeremiah, tell us about your newsletter.

Jeremiah Johnson: I write a blog called Infinite Scroll where I talk about the politics of the social internet—the ways that social media is changing culture and politics and how we discuss things. It’s a little bit unserious nonsense, and a little bit very serious stuff.

Belvedere: As all good cultural commentary is, so you’re within the acceptable range. Tibita, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit?

Tibita Kaneene: Hi, I’m Tibita Kaneene. I’m the political director of the New York City chapter of the Center for New Liberalism.

Belvedere: The topic today is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. As liberals, we’re [naturally] interested in how he’s doing as mayor. I was hoping we could start with something that Mamdani himself said at an event marking his 100 days in office, which was about 10 days ago. I have a quote from Mamdani that sets up the first question I want to think about together with you—on this issue of democratic socialism versus other types of liberalism out there today, like an abundance variant or even more mainstream liberalism.

So here are Mamdani’s own words: “On January 1st, I told New Yorkers that City Hall would hold a singular purpose—to make this city belong to more of its people than it did the day before. For 102 days, we have endeavored to do exactly that.” And he cited achievements that he thinks fulfill that claim, such as the opening of new childcare centers and buses running faster. After he did that, he said: “That is the change that government can deliver.” And this is the critical part: “It’s the change that democratic socialism can deliver.” He said: “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom Mamdani brought in for that 100-day event, said: “I have been on platforms with hundreds and hundreds of mayors and all kinds of public officials. This is the first time I’ve ever been introduced by someone who talked proudly about democratic socialism.”

I want to start on this theme. Thoughts?

Kaneene: I think it’s interesting that the two accomplishments he highlighted were delivering actual positive change, abundance type change. More schools, more seats in preschool—the whole idea of abundance is that we should have more good things, and that government should be functional and competent. And then the buses operating better: more and better transit is a pretty fundamental abundance issue.

Belvedere: Just to follow up on that point: he promised both faster and free busing, and he’s been able to deliver on one of the two—on “faster,” but not “free.”

Kaneene: Yeah. There’s this idea going around: “affordability in the front, abundance in the back.” Affordability is a very popular campaign issue and idea, but it’s also an empirical goal. So once that’s established, to deliver on it you have to focus on consequences as opposed to ideological or rules-based things. You have to actually make the rent cheaper. [It’s not enough] to merely enact policies that can be seen as pro-tenant and anti-landlord—they have to have the effect of making housing better, cheaper, more plentiful. Now that he’s in office, he has to do that. Democratic socialism is a broad idea, but when it gets down to brass tacks and you’re an executive, then you have to actually do things—appoint competent people and enact policies that actually have results. I think that’s what his challenge is, and what he’s doing for the most part.

Johnson: The grand rhetorical gestures are what they are, and he has a point of view on how he views the world. I am not a socialist, but if you are going to tell me that I’m going to have a socialist mayor, probably the variant that I would want is what has sometimes been called sewer socialism. This comes from Milwaukee. Generations ago, they had a couple of mayors who called themselves socialist, but rather than focusing on revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, they really focused on civic governance. How do we make the city work better? How do we provide public infrastructure? How do we make the sewers operate without overflowing? And by solving practical problems, they maintained their popularity.

That is what I see Mamdani doing, at least in the first 100 days. He’s not been all that focused on the big rhetorical flourishes, the big ideological ideas. He’ll talk about them if he’s asked. He’ll mention it in a speech. But if you’re in New York and you see what’s actually happening and you see the things he’s doing on the ground, a lot of it is just more like: “We’ve got a big sidewalk shed problem and I’m going to tackle it.” Or we had a big multi-week blizzard here in New York and he had a campaign about shoveling the snow faster than it’s ever been shoveled before. Just competent, good governance stuff.

I think that’s what’s allowed him to maintain his popularity thus far. The question is, as he moves deeper into his term, past the first 100 days, as he starts to actually focus more and more on the grand ideological projects, the publicly owned grocery stores, the free buses, all these big ideas that he has—are those going to work as well as the more basic stuff has worked? Because no matter what you call it, everybody likes it when city government functions efficiently. What comes after that is not quite as clear.

Belvedere: I think a fair assessment of Mamdani would have to include that he is taking a few shots here—not just the kinds of things that might be dismissed as [Band-Aids]. They’ve attempted to put a plan in place for free childcare, and they’re extending that to younger and younger ages—for the first time, two-year-olds are in play for getting free childcare. That’s not a small thing. That’s not like filling a pothole. But he is including enough of that other stuff that makes me think there’s going to be a significant element of incrementalist-style change that he’s going to produce, and then there will be a battle about what is driving that—is some kind of democratic socialist vision driving it, or is this mainstream liberalism or abundance liberalism dressed up as something else?

“There’s this idea going around: ‘affordability in the front, abundance in the back.’ Affordability is a very popular campaign issue and idea, but it’s also an empirical goal. So once that’s established, to deliver on it you have to focus on consequences as opposed to ideological or rules-based things. You have to actually make the rent cheaper. [It’s not enough] to merely enact policies that can be seen as pro-tenant and anti-landlord—they have to have the effect of making housing better, cheaper, more plentiful. Now that he’s in office, he has to do that. Democratic socialism is a broad idea, but when it gets down to brass tacks and you’re an executive, then you have to actually do things—appoint competent people and enact policies that actually have results.” — Tibita Kaneene

I think all of us invested in the wider Mamdani discourse have to keep a couple of things in mind at all times. First—and this is the thing from which all other evaluative mistakes about Mamdani flow—you have to know that he is committed to the advancement of democratic socialism. It’s not just something he’s flirting with, it’s not something incidental. Time and again, he brings this up. Now, his actions might be different, but we’re just talking about how he’s casting his own story and the story of his government.

Every politician at this level is capable of downplaying philosophical influences. They know how to make passing nods to their past associations or affiliations while simultaneously creating distance from those views now. They all know how to do that. Mamdani could easily, if he wanted, tell a compelling story about how the ideology was critical to his formation and that he will keep with him the good parts—kind of like Obama after the Reverend Wright situation—but that he owes the people of New York a commitment to their well-being, not a commitment to a political program. Or he could say that what matters are results, not labels. There are a thousand ways for a politician to put a philosophical influence in the passenger seat, the rear seat, or even outside the car entirely. But Mamdani is fully leaning in rhetorically to the advancement of democratic socialism. So the idea that it was empty campaign rhetoric, and that he would, once in office, pivot to a rhetorical downplaying of democratic socialism’s influence on his decision-making—that idea should at this point be put to bed.

When we think about that, the second thing naturally comes up about Mamdani, especially for those of us who really want to analyze him correctly. There’s a lot of people out there who weaponize him as a prop in their broader culture war takes. But for those of us doing our best to give his mayorship a good-faith assessment—we have to focus on the things that he’s doing, not on the story he’s telling about the things that he’s doing. We have to not worry so much about socialism as a term. What he does matters more than what he says. That’s not a grand philosophical conclusion, but I think it has particular application to Mamdani in one extra way. Given that he’s rhetorically committed to advancing democratic socialism, the invocations of it will continue—those won’t go away. But here’s the really interesting thing: he’ll find ways to frame his actions and policies—even ones that aren’t exclusively democratic socialist—as though socialism is the thing driving them.

Johnson: Well, yeah, this is what happens when you win an election and you’re a young, popular guy and you have a very good social media team—you get to set the terms of the debate. You get to set the framing through which you are viewed. And that’s how things operate in the early days. But in the long run, it’s hard to hide from the results. Whether you want to or not, four years from now—three and a half, I guess—he’s going to be running for reelection. People are going to be asking: “Did my rent actually go down? Did groceries get less expensive? Is the city well run?”

The free childcare thing, right now, is just a very limited pilot—it’s like 2,000 seats. They have plans to expand it to the whole city, but for now it’s very limited. The benefit of popularity is that it gives you a little bit of a leash. It lets you kick your own team to some extent. You can betray the cause a little bit and they’ll forgive you. But ultimately, you do have to succeed. You do have to actually make things better. And that’s the open question: Is there going to be enough funding to actually make free childcare a thing city-wide? Or is it going to remain a limited pilot?

Belvedere: I agree—it’s empirically going to be borne out whether he can achieve the things [he’s promised]. He’ll need to. We’ll see in the data whether he’s succeeding. But this actually happens more subtly than just, “let’s check to see if the rents have gone down.” Think about the term you brought up—”sewer socialism.” That is a subtle way for him to retain the democratic socialist mold even though he’s talking about things that mayors from totally different political persuasions would be doing also.

Years ago, when Pete Buttigieg was first emerging as a candidate for [national political office], he went on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Klein gave him a chance to talk about what he was proud of accomplishing as mayor. Buttigieg said: “filling potholes.” He expressed how it can seem silly and mundane, but that it makes people’s lives materially better. He was giving an incrementalist pitch for what he was doing. If Mamdani is doing the same things, but leaning into the frame that instead encompasses all of that under democratic socialism—even when a lot of the policies are the kinds of things that candidates from other persuasions do—that’s why I’m saying it’s not so much the words or how he labels what he’s doing but the actual things he’s doing that matters.

Johnson: What’s interesting about that is this is very different from how democratic socialism normally operates in the United States. Because the median person who is a democratic socialist and is in a position of public power is a member of Congress. We don’t have a lot of extremely far-left, explicitly socialist mayors, but we do have a lot of the Squad [in D.C.]—your AOC, your Bernie Sanders, that group of people. And the incentives when you are in Congress are frankly to just simply be as extreme as you’d like. You’re in a deep blue district, probably D+70, and so you just need to be as pure and say as many outlandish things as you want to. There’s no punishment for any of that.

But being an executive is different. We’re already seeing this with the budget hole that New York City faces. Mamdani has a budget hole that he constitutionally has to fix. New York City cannot run deficits. So he has to fix that, and there’s a limited number of ways he can do it. He can’t just pick the policy he wants. There are state laws about which taxes can be raised and which cannot. So he needs the cooperation of the governor and the legislature if he wants to do certain things.

When he made a video about, “well, we’re going to increase property taxes on second houses,” he made sure to highlight a particular person’s $200 million mansion. But now that guy is upset that he got singled out and is saying, “maybe I’m going to cancel my $6 billion planned center in New York and take it somewhere else.” Actions have consequences when you are an executive in a way that they very much do not when you are a legislator. So that’s something to watch—he’s going to face a lot more constraints than are typical for his kind of politician.

Kaneene: Yeah, that’s true. I think we’ve seen him be very practical on policy [issues]—the biggest example would be the SEQRA reform at the state level that’s been proposed by Kathy Hochul. He supported her version. If you look at it relative to other U.S. states, it’s one of the best environmental review reform bills—better than California’s, for example.

Belvedere: What is SEQRA?

Kaneene: It’s the State Environmental Quality Review Act. It’s an environmental review required for any project, be it housing or energy, and it generally slows things down a lot. Its purview extends far beyond things that you and I might describe as environmental, and it’s a huge source of red tape. The state legislature was trying to attach a prevailing wage requirement to that bill, which would have made building housing particularly expensive. Mamdani did not support that. Carl Heastie, who’s the assembly speaker, is not a DSA person—he’s to the right of Mamdani. You could see a world where Mamdani would attach to that proposal in opposition to Gov. Hochul, but he did not. And it worked: just yesterday, the State Assembly removed the prevailing wage, and that battle has been won. So SEQRA will probably go through now with no prevailing wage.

“Some of this is messaging strategy. Mamdani comes from a family in the arts. His mom is a professional filmmaker. His videos are very well produced. He understands clipping culture—what really matters is not the event itself, it’s the 20-second clip that comes out of it that will get played a million times on social media. Part of it is just the messaging strategy itself. But I also think—look at what Mamdani doesn’t do. He doesn’t dress weird, he doesn’t try to do memes. His accounts never post memes. He’s never dressing in funny outfits. He’s not cursing. He’s well-dressed and presentable and optimistic and he talks like he wants to change things. I think there’s an impulse among middle-aged, moderate liberals sometimes to be like, ‘To chase the kids, we’ve got to do the memes. Someone get me a 20-year-old who knows memes for my internet account.’ And it’s just very cringe-worthy. It’s terrible. What people respond to is when you believe what you’re saying.” — Jeremiah Johnson

Another thing—shortly after the election, a DSA candidate named Chi Ossé announced that he was going to take on Hakeem Jeffries, who’s the Democratic leader in the House, in a primary challenge. And Mamdani not only declined to endorse—he publicly said, “You should not run.” He went to a DSA meeting and made a speech saying, “We should not endorse Ossé.” And Ossé actually dropped out. So that is him going to bat, not for a DSA person, but for a centrist Democratic leader. He’s done very practical things both on the politics and on the broad policy side that I would say deviate from purely ideological DSA framing.

Johnson: I want to give the two possible paths forward if you are Mamdani, speaking in broad generalities. I think what a successful Mamdani mayorship looks like is: he essentially uses his popularity to kick in the teeth of certain special interests. Political popularity lets you do things that piss off your own side, and they’ll forgive you for it. If Mamdani wants to take on certain union requirements—New York has hundreds of regulations about when you have to use union labor, and it drives up costs and there’s a lot of bureaucracy around it—if he wanted to take some of that on, the left would forgive him because he’s so charismatic and popular among his base, and it would lower costs. Whether it’s the environmental laws that Tibita is talking about, or unions, or getting rid of the community board veto that makes it so hard to build housing—using his popularity to kill off some progressive sacred cows could let him get a lot accomplished.

The other thing that could happen is that he falls into the “everything bagel” paradigm—where, “I want to maintain my popularity, so I’m not going to try to piss off anybody in my coalition. I’ll give the environmentalists all the environmental regulations they want, I’ll give the unions everything they want, I’ll give this group and that group” … until you end up in the same place the Biden administration ended up. They passed a lot of really ambitious legislation without actually being able to accomplish any of it because of this thicket of red tape, this kind of anti-abundance approach. There’s a middle ground in between, but those are the two paths I see in terms of how he actually uses and leverages his current popularity. It’s an open question. It’s still early days.

Belvedere: So, Tibita, I wanted to bring up the piece that you wrote for us a while back, where you did a profile of Mamdani.

What I thought was brilliant about that piece—and I hadn’t seen it anywhere else—was that you took the abundance liberalism frame, assessed his democratic socialist tendencies and some early manifestations of what that could look like, looked at some of his projected hiring, and assessed what his mayorship was trending toward. I wanted to see if you had a follow-up to your own pre-Mamdani-in-office assessment now that he’s governing. The title was: “Will Mamdani Govern More as a Democratic Socialist or as an Abundance Liberal?” And the subtitle was: “His policy evolution and the team he’s assembling suggests that he could be moving in a market-friendly direction.” What do you think about that now?

Kaneene: Sure. So that piece came out three days before the election. On election day, Mamdani came out in support of the pro-housing initiatives on the ballot. Those were very abundance-oriented. We already thought he supported them, but that was good confirmation. Then his first deputy mayor, Fuleihan, is just a very experienced, very competent person to run the city. He’s not ideological—he’s competent, has experience under a variety of past administrations; he’s older, senior, knows a lot of people, and just helps get things done. Would be a good deputy mayor for a Democrat of a variety of political stripes. His Deputy Mayor for Housing, Leila Bozorg, is just an amazing person. She was Deputy Commissioner of HPD. Everyone there who I know thinks she’s amazing. The most prominent DSA person would be Cea Weaver—she’s a longtime tenant advocate. But there’s really not a super ideological DSA person in the senior executive team.

Then I mentioned some of the things he’s done from a policy standpoint. On the rent freeze—since that piece came out, he’s reconciled somewhat with the guidelines board. They’re voting on May 7. They’re probably going to freeze it for a year. But he has had to come up with ways to offset the rent freeze by lowering costs for landlords. He looked at the math, he has good advisors around him, and so for the first year he’s going to provide some relief on insurance costs. Affordability in the front, but abundance in the back in the sense that he has to make the math work. He can’t actually force landlords to lose money because many of these buildings are already underwater. What would happen is we’d just lose supply because these buildings would fail to operate.

Belvedere: Let me ask you about that, because “abundance in the back”—abundance is very far in the back there. I don’t know many YIMBY advocates who on this point would say the answer is to freeze rent.

Kaneene: Yeah, I mean—among his housing policies, it’s the most problematic. That’s why I focused on it in the piece. It’s a price control, which reduces supply, which is counterproductive for trying to increase housing supply and thereby reduce the price of housing. Now, he has done some other positive supply-side things. For example, the ELURP—the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure—he’s actually used that process to approve a housing development in the Bronx that was previously blocked by Vicky Paladino, the only MAGA city council member who, prior to the ballot initiatives, was able through member deference to unilaterally block development in her district. She even made a speech saying, “before, I blocked it; now because of this expedited process, I’m not able to block it.” So she’s letting it happen. So that’s a victory. He was able to green-light new housing supply within the first few months based on a new law that he has shown no shyness in using.

There are a bunch of other projects. There’s one in my community board district, the Bloomingdale Library, where they put out an RFP for a private developer to come in, build a new library and build a bunch of housing—mainly market rate with some affordable housing built in—at no cost to the city. He also has the Sunnyside Yards, a project in Queens above a rail yard that should produce over 12,000 homes. He famously went to see Trump at the White House and convinced him to sign on.

Belvedere: I want to get to his relationship with Trump in a second. But first, you’ve given us good information about how Mamdani is doing on the housing front, and you’ve mentioned some things you wish he’d do differently. Let’s move on to some of his food policies for a second. He had the food vendor reforms, and then the grocery store stuff. He wants essentially a publicly run store—one per borough?

Kaneene: Yeah, one per borough.

Belvedere: Maybe that’s an incremental approach where he wants more over time, but the plan is for one per borough for now. Some essential goods would be at a significant discount, and not necessarily all products. The rest would be at normal price. Thoughts?

Johnson: Yeah, I think this has the potential to quietly undermine … and none of this has broken ground yet, none of this is happening as of right now, but there’s a plan, and the details of the plan do not fill me with confidence. What you need to know is that grocery stores, by their nature, are a very competitive, very low-margin business. This is already a fiercely competitive field. It’s very hard to make money in it. And so anybody with any sort of rational expectation here should expect the publicly owned grocery stores to lose a lot of money, because they’re going to be poorly run relative to traditional private grocery stores. And maybe you just don’t care—maybe you’re like, “I don’t care if they lose money because I just value having a public grocery store.” But this is one of those things where it really easily could turn into that second scenario I talked about: he makes sure to give unions a lot of giveaways when he’s building this type of grocery store, the actual building of the thing takes twice as long as we thought and twice as much money because of all the rules we had to follow.

“I think there is moral clarity. I don’t think there’s been any moral compromise. I think that [Mamdani] can say, ‘Trump, I want you to pay for this housing development in Queens,’ and morally there’s been no compromise at all. … he still says Trump is a fascist. He still speaks out against a lot of his policies. I don’t think there’s been any moral compromise. I think he’s like a moral beacon in a time where we don’t really have any kind of moral leadership in the executive branch in Washington.” — Tibita Kaneene

He’s already talking about the one they want for Manhattan. They’ve picked out a site. It’s going to be something like three years and an obscene amount of money—far more money than it should take. Thirty million dollars to build one grocery store, which is far above what it would cost a private actor. And on top of that, the original justification for this whole thing was that there are food deserts in the city. Where he’s chosen to build it is not a food desert. There’s like five grocery stores within a 10-minute walk of this place.

Belvedere: He talks about people being priced out of essential goods. And so he would need to substantiate that in a way that justifies this kind of cost and disruption.

Johnson: We have tools to address that. If people can’t afford food, that’s why SNAP exists, that’s why food stamps exist. Giving people money is such an easier solution than trying to build an entire public-sector grocery store that is going to be terribly run. Every time anything happens at that grocery store, the media is going to pounce on it. There’s going to be shoplifting. If Mamdani lets them shoplift, it turns into a national story. If he has them arrested, also a story—that pisses off the left. There are landmines all over this, and it seems to me like he’s going to end up stepping on some of them. There’s going to be needless scandals about how they were built, which contractors got cushy deals. If you have a limited amount of political capital, one grocery store per borough is meaningless. It doesn’t do anything. Why would you waste your time on this?

Belvedere: And what you were saying, when you called food assistance just the easier option—not only is it the easier option, but it’s the option where there is the least amount of state intervention required to achieve the eventual goal of getting people these goods. You don’t have to have a state-run market—you can give people the tool that they use to then exchange at that market. It’s a more back-end kind of assistance. But it also, as you were saying, allows you to focus on a whole lot of other things you said that you wanted to do for the city, rather than engaging in something where, yes, you’re connecting a campaign promise to an actual thing that you’re doing—there’s consistency there, you can win from that—but the potential pitfalls you noted could really be an albatross. And as a different kind of objection to just “easier”: as liberals, we want to do the least government-involved version that we can whenever we can.

Kaneene: I’m a little more sanguine about it. I’m agnostic about whether we should have a state grocery store or not. The main thing for me is I don’t think it’s going to provide any savings, for the reasons Jeremiah said—they’re low-margin businesses. This one is a 17-minute walk from a Costco. You’re not going to beat the ability to use your SNAP card and order from Amazon. All that being said, this was a campaign promise he focused on. I think during the campaign he realized that these stores are not going to actually be able to provide cheaper food without the city simply taking a big loss—and that’s why he kept repeating that it’s going to be one per borough, it’s going to be a pilot. So I think it’s something that he needs to do. He’ll struggle to break even, he’ll do his five, and the positive side is it will actually prove that these grocery store chains, whatever you might think about them, are operating pretty efficiently. And we might have reasons to hate Amazon, rightly or wrongly, but that’s actually the cheapest food you can get. So I don’t think it’s as terrible as maybe Jeremiah thinks.

But I do share the concern of it becoming a bigger issue, where he says now we’re going to have publicly owned gas stations. I don’t think there’s any risk of that. I would bet money there’s not going to be more than five. There might not even be five.

Johnson: And my thing is more just—look, this is not going to sink the city, the fact that we try this experiment with five grocery stores. This city of nine million people will be fine. But it’s one of those things that if I were him, if I put myself in his shoes trying to accomplish his goals, I would not want to waste my time on this, because there are just landmines everywhere. You’re going to get caught up in some extremely stupid controversy—some worker at the store is going to complain that their boss mistreated them. And all of a sudden, it becomes DEFCON 5 because you’re a socialist and how can you not side with the workers? There are so many things like that that have the potential to sap away your political capital. Why would you want to spend your political capital on something that frankly does not matter? It will not make food more affordable for nine million New Yorkers. It will be a cute little thing for like a couple hundred people who live near it. Why are you wasting your time on it?

Kaneene: The base wants it. So he has to—while he’s doing all the efficient and effective things that we want him to do, he does have to maintain his base. There are a lot of people who, if you ask them—casual people who don’t follow politics—“name three things that Mamdani says he’s going to do,” they would say: freeze the rent, fast and free buses, and grocery stores. They might not know anything else about him.

Belvedere: And there’s a listener who just chimed in and said: “I thought the idea was to bring fresh food to food deserts, not replace grocery stores.” That tees off a question about Mamdani that we’ll find out as his mayorship continues: is this incrementalist approach—this sewer socialism, now recast in a positive light as something worth doing, this more bite-sized approach to reform—is it a beginning point to a far broader vision for how things need to be organized and done? Or is it the terminal point, where he’s okay with one per borough?

I think that question goes to how we interpret these actions. Are they a kind of red carpet for a farther-reaching democratic socialist reconfiguration? Or something you’re just sprinkling in? Some people fear that it’s the prelude to a far greater push. The way they’re doing childcare is in that kind of phased, gradual way—by this year we’re going to hit this amount of two-year-olds, then eventually we’re going to cover down to six-week-old children, etc. So are we fine with the grocery stores because of their limited nature? If they were a prelude to a greater push, would people worry about them a little more?

Johnson: Well, I’m sure there are some people out there who have that view, that Mamdani is doing this and we’re going to build on it, it’s going to be more and more of this kind of thing until we finally reach utopia. But reality has a way of smacking you in the face. The grocery stores are not going to be very successful, and therefore you won’t get many more of them. The childcare is nice right now as a pilot for just 2,000 kids, but it’s also very expensive even for just 2,000 kids—the price tag is well over a billion dollars. Somebody’s going to have to pay for that, and it’s not going to be the city. The city absolutely does not have that money. So it has to be the state.

Belvedere: Can I tell you what he said? You evaluate it—you and Tibita. What do you think about this promise? He said: if you make less than a million dollars, you don’t have to worry about any further taxes. And if the tax burden doesn’t increase on people making fewer than a million dollars per year, that’s something that many New Yorkers will find palatable.

Johnson: Well, but it’s also nonsense. Like—reality will slap you upside the head. This is the thing that Democrats have been doing that pisses me off, frankly. Mamdani says it’s up to a million dollars. Cory Booker is trying to introduce some bill in Congress: if you make less than $120,000, you shouldn’t have to pay income taxes. Everybody’s saying no tax on tips, no tax on pet products, no tax on Social Security, no tax for the elderly, no tax on property. Everybody wants to be the anti-tax party, and say only millionaires and billionaires should ever have to pay a tax of any kind.

Look, I’m not on the far left, but if you want to have a welfare state, if that’s a thing you desire out of your government, the middle class has to pay taxes. There is no way to make the math work, that you can just tax billionaires exclusively and have this rich, lush, Scandinavian-style social democracy. It does not work. Reality will kick you in the face. You’re going to eventually have to break your promises or deal with the reality that you can’t deliver. Some of this stuff is fantasy land, and that’s where it ultimately will come down.

Kaneene: Yeah, I mean—that’s the main bulwark against any expectation or fear of him really bringing on real European-style socialism, is that he’s not willing to tax the middle class. And that’s the real reason we don’t have to expect—or worry, to put it neutrally—that we’ll have any such program in the United States, because a middle-class tax increase is just politically untenable.

“This is what happens when you win an election and you’re a young, popular guy and you have a very good social media team—you get to set the terms of the debate. You get to set the framing through which you are viewed. And that’s how things operate in the early days. But in the long run, it’s hard to hide from the results. Whether you want to or not, four years from now—three and a half, I guess—he’s going to be running for reelection. People are going to be asking: ‘Did my rent actually go down? Did groceries get less expensive? Is the city well run?’” — Jeremiah Johnson

But to go back to the idea of the childcare pilot—actually, if you look at it, already the numbers of new seats are behind the ramp-up he had said he was going to do. And if you look at the budget, he’s not budgeting for more money for pre-K seats. There’s no more money. He’s not increased the money coming from the state. And other examples—like the city FHEPS, which are basically housing vouchers—during the campaign he said he would support a lawsuit to increase housing vouchers, a classic demand subsidy which, as we know, is not good for increasing housing supply or lowering prices. But he came into office and now he’s not going to increase housing subsidies. Again, the reality presented itself and he’s made a choice. There are things he has to continue with as pilot programs, as ideological statements, that he’s not going to bust the budget for or increase taxes on the middle class for. He’s at least being advised correctly that even on taxing the wealthy, there’s a maximum point of revenue—there’s a point beyond which if you increase the marginal tax rate, you actually bring in less money. Taxing the rich has an actual objective limit, which he has to take into account because he cannot run a budget deficit at the city level.

Belvedere: I want to ask about his relationship with Trump, but in the form of a thought experiment, to put the point provocatively.

Imagine we’re all sitting around 30 years from now talking about this era in politics, and we’re talking to people who didn’t live through it, telling them about the world-historical awfulness of Trump, and threat that he was—the would-be authoritarian who did more than any other president in our annals to degrade our institutions and veer us off a liberal democratic path, even in a fascist direction. Biden famously said “semi-fascist,” some people have moved beyond that [and have dropped the qualifier]. This is the kind of figure we’re talking about. The man who defied federal judges to deport hundreds of people to foreign gulags. And they’re now flipping through images and footage from this era and they see Mamdani in photos with Trump. They see and hear him in interviews, maybe downplaying his awfulness. He’s had a recent interview where he said he has a “productive relationship” with Trump. Trump threatened to deport Mamdani—a U.S. citizen. What do you think about his stance toward Trump? Is there any worry there? Is it refreshing that he’s able to just work with him despite his awfulness? I have some issues with the way he’s approached the Trump relationship. What do you guys think?

Johnson: Yeah—again, this is something I’ve said several times here, but the purpose of popularity is that it lets you kind of stab your own team in the back, at least a little bit. If a moderate Democrat went down to the White House and shook hands with Donald Trump and took a smiling picture with him and said, “I have a productive relationship with him and we’re going to work together on important things,” the left would howl in outrage about how this is an unbelievable betrayal, that this person is a Republican in disguise enabling fascism, and so on. If Mamdani does it—he’s popular. He’s their guy. He’s so charismatic and popular among his base that they’re like, “oh cool, it’s a strategic play, he’s doing this for us.” It lets you get away with things that you otherwise couldn’t get away with. From the perspective that Mamdani’s got a strategic streak to him, it makes sense that he would rather the president not be persecuting the city, and so he’s going to try to make that happen.

Kaneene: I’m a consequentialist. He went to the White House with a goal of getting funding for the Sunnyside Yards project. He thought making that a Daily News cover would be a means to that end. He was correct. He went down there, took a picture, came back. During this time he was asked if he still thinks Trump is a fascist. He said yes. Trump has since lashed out at him on social media saying he’s terrible. I don’t think that privately he’s saying nice things to Trump, or that Trump has any illusion that Mamdani likes him. I think Trump is actually impressed with Mamdani and kind of respects what he did—something that Trump could never do, which is get elected mayor of New York City, winning over the kind of elite Manhattan class that never liked Trump. He realizes Mamdani has a very powerful political base that he has to reckon with.

So I don’t have any issue with what he’s done with Trump. He’s constantly opining on issues—whether it’s the Iran war or tariffs—on which he disagrees with Trump, doing so eloquently and powerfully on social media.

Belvedere: Take the Iran war, for example. He told a story in an interview of a woman who was being harassed because she maybe looked Iranian or Middle Eastern, and it’s a powerful story about how the war is creating divisions at home. He told it through a vivid narrative. You hear it and you start to gravitate toward his side because he’s telling something that matters to human beings. He’s a really capable politician. I’ll give him that, and I want to see how he continues to navigate what is an extremely thorny proposition, but I’m a little worried. He’s been able to keep ICE off New York City streets based on whatever overtures he’s made to Trump—that is a real gain, for sure. He’s essentially told Trump, “You can be the FDR to my LaGuardia.” He’s casting Trump as someone who is actually going to make a positive contribution to New York. It’s just too glowing, for me, about a guy who’s undoing a lot of what we think of as important in America.

In the most prominent interviews he’s given [recently], he’s backed off from that strong language about Trump. That’s something to think about moving forward, how he handles that relationship. I would like a little more moral clarity from him when it comes to Trump, [even given that he has to have a working relationship with him].

Kaneene: I think there is moral clarity. I don’t think there’s been any moral compromise. I think that he can say, “Trump, I want you to pay for this housing development in Queens,” and morally there’s been no compromise at all. I think that in a time where we have …

Belvedere: … He was asked directly, “Is Trump trustworthy?” And he said, “I’m going to keep talking to him.” To me, it’s like—are we at a point where we can’t say he’s not been trustworthy? He absolutely has not been trustworthy. Declining to say he’s untrustworthy … it’s just a small warning to me that he’s not willing to interact with Trump in the way Trump deserves.

Kaneene: Yeah, but—it might be the case that he feels he can trust what Trump says to him in a personal meeting. That might genuinely be true. And he still says Trump is a fascist. He still speaks out against a lot of his policies. I don’t think there’s been any moral compromise. I think he’s like a moral beacon in a time where we don’t really have any kind of moral leadership in the executive branch in Washington.

Johnson: It’s just, what are you trying to accomplish? Is anyone’s life better off because he called Trump a fat pig who deserves to die? What are we talking about here? It would be one thing if he was being like, “Well, Trump is going to help us fund this housing project, so we’re going to help him with ICE in the city.” But he’s not doing that. He’s just being less than maximally mean.

Belvedere: We’re almost out of time, so let’s get from you guys your broadest possible assessment of his mayorship so far. A hundred days in, a little more than that now, what do we think? What’s your assessment?

Johnson: Given what I expected out of him, seven out of ten so far.

Belvedere: Tibita?

Kaneene: I’d give him a B so far. A big reason—we’ll see what happens with the city budget and with the rent freeze. Those are, I think, the two things for the first year. He has a chance to move to a B-minus/C-plus or up to a B-plus in the next 60 days based on those two things.

Belvedere: What would it look like for him to crush the next part of the year, from your perspective?

Kaneene: On the budget, on the merits, I think the city council is correct. If he came around to that, that would be a big deal. If he followed through on proposing substantive property tax reform—which I think he will do eventually—but if he did that, that would be a big deal.

Johnson: That’s the white whale of New York politics, actually reforming our property tax system.

Kaneene: In particular, if he got rid of the tax disadvantage for multifamily homes, I think that part is doable. That would be a big deal.

Johnson: If you’re outside New York City, you should just know our property tax system is a mess. We have high property taxes, but beyond the fact that they’re high—maybe that’s fair, New York does a lot of things—the system itself is just a confusing maze. The valuations are all over the place. There’s just weird stuff all over the place with our property tax system. Every mayor would love to regularize it, normalize it. And there’s enough special exceptions that it’s really hard to do without people getting furiously angry who benefit from the special exceptions. So if he could get that done—holy crap, yeah.

Kaneene: Yeah. Speaking of pissing off some supporters—I think he has the political capital to piss off some homeowners in order to reduce the costs for apartment dwellers. I think he can do that, especially if he’s seen as someone who is freezing the rent and doing the grocery stores and what have you.

Belvedere: Jeremiah, one last question for you. You’re a culture watcher. You spot trends and memes and people’s reactions to politics. What do you think it is about Mamdani—and some of the others in his cohort—that they seem to do really well with younger people? What can liberal politicians learn from this cohort? They have vastly different characteristics—Bernie Sanders is an old white dude, Mamdani is very different—and yet they have the same kind of buzz and ability on that front. What can liberal politicians do better to match that?

Johnson: Yeah, I mean, some of this is messaging strategy. Mamdani comes from a family in the arts. His mom is a professional filmmaker. His videos are very well produced. He understands clipping culture—what really matters is not the event itself, it’s the 20-second clip that comes out of it that will get played a million times on social media. Part of it is just the messaging strategy itself.

But I also think—look at what Mamdani doesn’t do. He doesn’t dress weird, he doesn’t try to do memes. His accounts never post memes. He’s never dressing in funny outfits. He’s not cursing. He’s well-dressed and presentable and optimistic and he talks like he wants to change things. I think there’s an impulse among middle-aged, moderate liberals sometimes to be like, “To chase the kids, we’ve got to do the memes. Someone get me a 20-year-old who knows memes for my internet account.” And it’s just very cringe-worthy. It’s terrible. What people respond to is when you believe what you’re saying.

Belvedere: That wraps up our time together today. Thank you guys for joining me. I’m Berny, senior editor at The UnPopulist. Tibita is the political director of the New York City chapter of the Center for New Liberalism. And Jeremiah Johnson is co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, and his newsletter is excellent. Thanks for joining. See you next time.

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Welcome to Zooming In at The UnPopulist.

The last few weeks have been, to put it mildly, politically difficult for the president—as his draconian deportation crackdown, the Iran war, soaring oil prices, and inflation crater his approval ratings. At this moment, it seems everyone except his core MAGA base has abandoned him, including staunch supporters in the influencer class.

Meanwhile, with the midterms coming up, some centrist Democratic pundits are prodding their party to engage in soul searching and move to the right to win back the working-class voters it lost to Trump.

What does the MAGA elite’s loss of faith mean for the rest of the Trump presidency? Will it temper the president or make him more dangerous? And are centrist Democrats onto something or will their advice diminish their party’s moral authority?

To discuss these issues and more, we are joined by The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie. We also discuss Jamelle’s vision for a more assertive Congress to push back against the imperial presidency.

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

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© The UnPopulist, 2026

Trump Proved to be Unimaginably Bad for the Free Market Cause: A Conversation with Veronique de Rugy

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