The Buttered Summit

Forgive me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, for filching your line: I felt a great disturbance in the Blueksy realm, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced with a maw-swallow of SSRIs.

A brinded image, dependent on your disposition. The left inkblot: The dashing coiffed collectivist with a heart capacious enough to gut Jeff Bezos in the street and shower the homeless shelter with redistributed Amazon.com profits versus the amber-glowing fascist who revels in stomping brown babies to death. The right Rorschach: the greatest, most conservingest conservative president in God’s United States putting a pipsqueak champagne socialist who’s never washed a dish or dug a ditch in his humiliating place.

The impression of the dozen “independents” who wander the lush America’s wilderness like unicorns: two unctuous hand-shakers who talk good game, but are powerless before the entropic machinations of liberal-democratic government.

Gotham mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met President Donald Trump in the Oval Office after months of exchanging more barbs than the Gallagher sibs after bombing Coachella. The confrontation was hyped to Tyson-Holyfield proportions. Would Mamdani sling his righteous shot at Goliath Trump? Could the President gnaw his new, blue bogey’s ear off? Or maybe… MAYBE… Melania Trump and Caroline Levy would bust through the Oval’s doors, clad in busty WWE lycra, and proceed to double-drop-kick the smarmy commisar out the window into the cemented Rose Garden? All while Dan Scavino TikToks the busomy team-up, soundtracking “YMCA” to the throwdown?

We weren’t treated to such instaviral hijinks. (Sad!) Our spectacle-addled senses received something stranger still: a congenial rapprochement, like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson sitting down to dinner after the Revolution of 1800.

Trump was conciliatory towards the man he was just calling Stalin’s keyster-kisser a week afore; Mamdani didn’t morph into a shrieking, purple-haired, septum-pierced scold, but stood still, flashing his snow-coated dentures. Contact theory affirmed. All naggish mothers shooing their layabout sons outside and off the PlayStation can take a victory lap around the kitchen. As George Orwell said, “when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas.” Sh*t talk is easy on Twitter. But face to face, mano a mano, it’s easier to grin pleasantries.

The new broship elonged beyond pro forma photo ops. When Mamdani was quizzed about his previous reviling the President as a “fascist,” and if he still believed Trump was a grotesque chimera of Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet, a stammering, equivocal quasi-denial seemed imminent. Until a magnanimous Trump intervened to pull the stinger out: “That’s ok, you can just say yes. It’s easier than explaining.” Bullet dodged, powder keg defused, boiling pot cooled, starving alley mutts separated, awkward contretemps avoided! The President wasn’t even needled about his once assailing Mamdani as a “communist lunatic,” an epithet not entirely off the eye, but beyond polite company.

So was that it? We Americans, who aggressively cheer on grown men crashing into one another over a piece of stitched leather on Sundays, spoiled for a saber-clash, commie v. nationalistie. Instead of we were served The McLaughlin Group without the 8th grade crosstalk. The colloquy was a horseshoe of bland hopes to “succeed.” Even the Founders, those avatars of consensus, didn’t settle for such sunny conviviality.

The reason we were stripped of our national birthright of boxing pols has to do with the nature of Trump and Mamdani, who are two sides of the same canaille coin. Both are a cast of class traitor populares: of wealthy pedigree promising to cast clams upon the snapping demos. Soppy crowd pleasers know how to turn the dial on their attendant supporters. They also know when to holster arms and put on a smile show. So if the occasion demands a chummy handshake, then, by gum, those mitts will meet before the camera lens.

Donald Trump playing hospital host isn’t suprising: his personal style is all butterball and softsoap, even toward avowed enemies. (Hands aren’t the only needed to erect skyscrapers; lotsa lips-to-tush time is required.) Mamdani, in turn, is supposed to be a coldly moralistic ideologue, an Ernest Defrague willing to slit any billionaire’s jugular in hopes the carotid artery will splay gold upon the hoi polloi. Yet he can’t detach from the oleaginous sludge that is politicking.

Already, the reality of governance in our stare decicis system is styming Zohranomics. NYC tankies are shaking sickles at their red champion nominating real estate developers and financiers to his transition team. Police abolitionists are crying foul that Mamdani is keeping on Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. Tisch is a holdover from the blue-friendly Adams Administration—the opposite spectrum from Mamdani’s erstwhile “defund the police” for queer liberation stance. Even progressive-poli fans are being shin-split over the incoming mayor’s refusal to endorse against drip House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Democratic Socialists of America are receiving a harsh education in what the Tea Party of old once internalized: the trappings of authority defang the bitingest opposition. How long before restless leftists, fed up with the institutional obstacles to create a DMV greengrocer, start raising furious fist for a real socialist mayor of America’s biggest city?

My money’s on next March.