Since I haven’t written about this here, I wanted to share a few thoughts about Zohran Mamdani’s big Democratic mayoral primary win in New York. If you’ve been saturated by coverage of this race, these won’t strike you as terribly original points. I’m just sharing my perspective.
First, I see three reasons why Mamdani won.
The first is the simple fact that Democratic voters are angry and dissatisfied with the incumbent Democratic political class. We see this everywhere. It’s much less about ideology than it is often portrayed. We live in an angry, distrustful, populist age. Since the greatest expression of this mood has come from the right, Democrats have often been in the uncomfortable position of leveraging against this tendency, holding the line for institutional continuity, preservation over destruction and many other situationally understandable impulses. But the twin effects of Trump’s comeback victory and the often fractured and feeble response to it by the Democratic leadership in Washington has washed all of that away.
On the federal employee pension plan: In order to pay for the megabill, Senate Republicans are considering substantially hiking “federal employees’ retirement contributions to 15.6 percent of their salary — compared with the 9.4 percent required in the initial version of the bill — while carving out an exemption for members of Congress and their staff,” POLITICO’s Lawrence Ukenye reports.
I think “substantially” manages to understate the hike here.
I wanted to update you on the story I flagged yesterday in which the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Scott Turner, decided to bogart the offices of the Trump-beleaguered National Science Foundation (NSF) at least in part to build a Sky Mansion for himself on the building’s top floors. Stories like this have always had a special fascination for me. You can’t say it’s a bigger story than the US going to war with Iran or the US military low-fi occupying a major American city. But in addition to its immediate impact on three or four thousand people — the employees of HUD and NSF — it captures so much of what 2025 Trump-era Washington is about. As probably goes without saying, there appears to have been no formal process behind this at all. There’s a very Sopranos feel to the whole caper: ‘Nice place you got here. It’s mine now.’
Politico says there’s the beginning of a Big Beautiful Bill mutiny. I’ll still place my chits on they’ll find a way to make it work. But the key states where Senators are up for reelection face crushing cuts to the funds that keep rural hospitals going. Enough? Probably not. But definitely real enough to keep an eye on.
I’m still trying to find out more about this. But as I do, I just wanted to put it on your radar because it’s completely crazy and epitomizes the Trump presidency. The National Science Foundation is already in the process of being gutted — in perhaps a not quite as drastic way as its peer biomedical agencies such as NIH and elsewhere. But out of the blue yesterday, word emerged that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is taking over the NSF’s building, evicting all of its more than 1,800 employees. Multiple NSF employees leaked word of this yesterday to journalist Dan Garisto. After Garisto reported the information on Bluesky I independently got word of this from NSF employees and now it’s been officially announced at a press conference by HUD Secretary Scott Turner, Gov. Glenn Youngkin and GSA Commissioner Michael Peters.
Adding to the wildness, the top floors of the building are, according to the AFGE Local 3403, going to be retrofitted into a kind of executive mansion for HUD Secretary Turner, including an executive suite, executive dining room, reserved parking for the Secretary’s five cars, exclusive use of an entire elevator, special space for his various assistants and a planned gym for the Secretary and his family. Turner wouldn’t be the only Secretary with nice office space. But this does sound like it’s on the extreme end of the spectrum. Equally eye-catching, there appears to be no plan for where the NSF staff will go.
With the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” there’s been a general assumption. It’s super, super unpopular. And, also, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to pass anyway. That assumption is very likely true. Perhaps they’ll hit some speed bumps that prevent the bill from passing in time for July 4th, as Trump wants and has demanded. But these kinds of bills tend to be “failure is not an option” type affairs. You have obstacles but they get crumpled like things that go under a steam roller or mashed up in an industrial trash compactor. That’s particularly the case in Trump’s second term, where hints of the old ungovernable GOP caucus get flattened when word comes from Trump that it’s over. But here we see again the central tension point of the Trump presidency: he owns, dominates and controls everything but public opinion.
That much of it is almost conventional wisdom at this point. The bill thing is really, really unpopular. Even the inside-DC sheets say as much. So Republicans are starting to do something we’re used to seeing Democrats do with some of their more aspirational policies. Which is basically this: You think it’s unpopular. But that’s just because you’re not polling it right.
We have a stage five political freakout on our hands.
The Supreme Court kept its tradition of ending its term with a series of blockbuster, and, in some cases, disastrous cases. The same nine justices will be back next year.
Signs may be surfacing of a DOGE-linked disruption in DC’s economy.
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