Donald Trump, a real estate developer with a huge ego and an aversion to telling the truth was recast as a fascist dictator seeking to turn the United States into the USSR. Today one can debate whether those warnings were prescient or merely guesses. But back then, the apocalyptic warnings were hyperbolic, hysterical, overblown and unmoored from the man himself.
A decade later, and an identical virus has jumped species, infecting the right. The target of this new frenzy is Zohran Mamdani, the socialist mayor of New York City, who triggers a near-identical brand of apoplectic foam-frothing among his conservative critics. It’s called Mamdani Derangement Syndrome (MDS). The moment his name comes up, reasonable commentary evaporates, replaced by an urge to treat his every word and action as a plot against Western civilization.
Consider the recent collective breakdown over "Pengate.” When Mamdani signed an executive measure and asked NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to hand a ceremonial 9/11 pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem—a defense attorney who once represented Guantánamo detainee Ahmed al-Darbi—the act was instantly framed as a treasonous subversive gesture. Commentators spent 48 straight hours analyzing hand movements as if decoding secret Soviet ciphers, insisting that the pen-passing somehow amounted to a slap in the face of every decent American.
The mania reached peak volume at the Ground Zero 9/11 memorial, where a brief, televised moment showed Mamdani exchanging a smile with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while victims' names were read in the background. Was it an optics blunder? Absolutely. When you’re the mayor of New York, standing at a solemn memorial, surrounded by media hitmen desperate to assassinate your character, you don’t smirk, giggle or indulge in social banter. You stand there looking like an Easter Island statue. It was sloppy and tone-deaf, and handed his loudest detractors an easy win.
Yet the conservative reaction abandoned proportional reality, framing a lapse in situational awareness as proof of evil. The commentary didn't stop at calling out bad manners. Instead, it leaped to declaring the mayor a secret, radical operative orchestrating a stealth takeover from within City Hall. Painting a charismatic, democratic socialist politician as a covert jihadi isn't a sensible political strategy. It’s self-destructive. It actively helps the left by making the right look completely insane to middle-of-the-road voters who just want their trash collected on time.
Critics refuse to accept the fact that Mamdani remains genuinely popular among a huge swath of New Yorkers. He won a democratic election because his brand of retail politics resonates with people tired of standard corporate managerialism. He’s social-media savvy, fluent in the language of modern digital culture, and backed by a disciplined, highly organized political network in the Democratic Socialists of America. Trying to defeat that kind of momentum by screaming about stolen smiles and ceremonial pens is ill-advised.
If opponents want to defeat Mamdani and the DSA movement, they'll have to stop looking for cartoonish supervillain traits and start practicing real politics. That means setting aside the cheap swipes, stepping away from the daily cable news outrage cycle, and addressing the substance of his agenda. Legitimate policy targets abound: questionable economic proposals, municipal tax hikes, rent control mandates and public spending initiatives with staggering price tags. Those are legitimate issues that directly affect the lives and wallets of citizens.
Defeating Mamdani requires showing that his economic models will eventually fail to deliver the basic services the city relies on. It requires offering a compelling, practical alternative that appeals to people who live in the real world and can tell a radical socialist from a radical Islamist. Until the right recognizes that policy critiques win voters while exaggerated paranoia only alienates them, Mamdani will likely become even more popular, and the DSA’s message will resonate with more Americans.