Saturday, October 03, 2026
Mamdani Is Showing the World How It’s Done
Mamdani Is Showing the World How It’s Done
Mayor Zohran Mamdani filled over 200,000 potholes to restore trust in government. Hosting global leaders and peers, he pursued municipal fixes and a DoorDash settlement. His approach suggests cities may renew faith in democracy.
A few days before the leaders of the world streamed into the cavernous, marble-lined General Assembly Hall to deliver their speeches on the grave crises convulsing our combustible world, Mayor Zohran Mamdani offered his own, somewhat surprising solution to the problem of rising authoritarianism: filling potholes.
“If politics cannot deliver on the block where you live, why would you trust it to deliver anywhere?” Mamdani asked a gathering of mayors from big cities across the world, explaining his obsession with potholes, more than 200,000of which have been filled across the city since he took office. “If you are making a New Yorker’s life a little smoother, so too you are making their journey to believe in government’s ability to deliver for them.”
It is commonplace to lament the ineffectual talking shop that the United Nations General Assembly has become, with its blustering speeches and endless unread communiqués. Wars of aggression are raging in Ukraine and Iran; Israel has carried out a genocide in Gaza; climate catastrophes impoverish and kill. In the face of these calamities, the organization appears powerless.
Today, the body’s soaring aims — to create a more peaceful, humane world that respects the sovereignty of each nation and the dignity of each human being — seem like a fantasy from another dimension. Citizens the world over are dissatisfied with their governments and in many places are souring on democracy itself. Can it be any surprise that this supranational body comes in for such contempt?
And yet Mamdani sensed an opportunity to reclaim some of its founding spirit. Racing across the city last week, he seemed to be offering an antidote to globe-spanning distemper. To restore faith in institutions, you must begin from the bottom up, starting with things as simple as potholes. Politics, as he put it, “has to translate to the pavement.”
New York City has long held a singular spot on the international stage, and its mayors have become global figures. But Mamdani, by dint of his youth, his improbable rise and his unusual background, brings a vivid symbolism to the role. African by birth, South Asian by heritage, American by choice, Mamdani in many ways embodies the cosmopolitan ideal at the heart of the United Nations’ founding.
World leaders lined up to spend time with him. He went to Queens with Ireland’s prime minister for a bingo game at an Irish American community center. He met with Brazil’s octogenarian leftist president and breakfasted with Spain’s dashing left-wing prime minister. Norway’s prime minister tagged along with him to visit a New York City classroom and talk about artificial intelligence in education.
Even President Trump couldn’t resist some time with the mayor. Last Monday he dropped by Gracie Mansion, spending about an hour behind closed doors with Mamdani — an eternity in presidential scheduling. Trump seemed in no rush to leave as the two took questions from reporters, beaming as he declared, “I want him to be a great mayor, and he’s certainly got potential, got great potential.”
Mamdani’s agenda, as befits a mayor, was mostly municipal. He visited a wastewater treatment facility with his counterparts from Helsinki, Rome and Barcelona; welcomed families moving into public housing with the mayors of Paris, Amsterdam and Greater Manchester; and handed out fliers to delivery workers explaining their rights with Mexico City’s mayor.
When he wasn’t hanging out with his fellow mayors, he celebrated the city’s victory in court against the delivery service DoorDash, wresting over $131 million from the company in a settlement for underpaying or not paying its workers. He also announced a new initiative to give out 70,000 free tickets to the Metropolitan Opera House, part of his push to make the city’s most exclusive cultural offerings accessible to everyday New Yorkers.
Mamdani’s many critics have tried to portray him as fixated on distant hobbyhorses, like arresting Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes in Gaza. But if anything, it was Netanyahu who seemed obsessed with the mayor. In his thundering speech at the United Nations last week, he called Mamdani an antisemite with “Hamas buddies.” He darkly name-checked the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and even castigated Mamdani’s wife for her likes on social media.
When I caught up with Mamdani by phone late last week, I asked him what he had hoped to get out of his first General Assembly. “We are a city that is home to hundreds of nationalities and even more languages,” Mamdani told me. “If any city is an illustration of what the United Nations principles hope to achieve, it is ours.”
But no matter how admirable those principles, the weakness of institutions like the United Nations in the face of the world’s spiraling chaos is an invitation to ask deeper questions, Mamdani said: “In a moment of a rising far right and the questioning of institutions that have otherwise been durable over many decades, it is also an opportunity to rethink what has been at the heart of those institutions, and the question of who they can serve and who they seek to serve.”
I heard an echo of Mamdani’s words in a speech the next day by a young world leader from South Asia, Prime Minister Balendra Shah of Nepal. “The United Nations was born from humanity’s experience of horrific world wars,” he said. “Its promise was that sovereignty would matter. International law would matter. The dignity of every human being would matter. Today, that international system is under strain. Too often, military and economic power determines whose voice is heard.”
In August, a glacier on Nepal’s border with Tibet collapsed, sending a deadly torrent of water and debris hurtling through a gorge. At least 1,300 people died and thousands more are missing in the villages and towns buried under the torrent. Scientists have concluded that rising temperatures caused by fossil fuel emissions played a critical role in destabilizing the Himalayan glacier. The disaster was merely the latest blow to Nepal: It faces soaring prices for fuel and fertilizer caused by the Iran war.
Besides South Asian roots and a history as a rapper, Shah has another thing in common with Mamdani. Before he was elected prime minister earlier this year, Shah was the mayor of Kathmandu, Nepal’s biggest city and its capital. Like Mamdani’s, his victory was driven by young voters, fed up with the country’s self-serving ruling elite. Along with Britain’s Andy Burnham, another former mayor turned prime minister, he shows how successful stewardship of a city can translate into national power.
Mamdani, of course, will never be president of the United States — the Constitution forbids the office to those not born in America. For Mamdani, this may be a blessing. The minute the midterms are over, the news media and the political world will shift their focus to the 2028 presidential race, as if the most important political question on earth is who will replace Trump.
But Mamdani seems to be asking a different question: How can we renew faith in politics and close the gap between citizens and their representatives? The answer, he suggests, lies in the city itself. If cities gave birth to democracy, perhaps they are the best place to midwife its rebirth. After all, more than half the world’s population lives in urban areas, and if current trends hold, by 2050 that figure will rise to almost 70 percent.
That’s a lot of trust to build — and a lot of potholes to fill.
Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.
U.S.-Russia Talks on Ukraine Now Involve an Oil Deal Tied to Trump Allies
U.S.-Russia Talks on Ukraine Now Involve an Oil Deal Tied to Trump Allies
Putin proposed a Lukoil asset sale to Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, linking Ukraine talks to a deal involving Todd Boehly, Middle Eastern investors, and the U.S. government. Approval depends on Trump and Putin.
President Vladimir V. Putin brought up a sale of Russian energy assets with President Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, pushing a deal that raises new questions about conflicts of interest.
The Trump administration’s talks with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine have expanded to include a multibillion-dollar oil deal that would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
The deal, which is contingent on approval from the U.S. government and the Kremlin, is for a sprawling set of oil fields, refineries and gas stations around the world owned by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies.
The leading group seeking the deal includes an American investor, Todd Boehly, who has donated $2 million to President Trump’s political causes; two Middle Eastern groups that have done business with Mr. Kushner or Mr. Witkoff’s family; and an arm of the U.S. government itself.
The monthslong negotiations, which were described by eight people familiar with them, shed new light on Mr. Trump’s latest approach to settling a four-year war that has killed hundreds of thousands. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
There is no indication that Mr. Kushner or Mr. Witkoff themselves stand to profit. But the pending deal represents a striking intermingling of personal business ties with geopolitics, even for an administration that has regularly dismissed concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia brought up the deal when he met with Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner at the Kremlin on Sept. 5, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Putin proposed it get done as a way of showing Russians that they can do business with the United States, according to one of the people.
The Americans responded that they would work on it, the person said, seeing it as a way to build good will with the Kremlin while also lowering global energy prices. But the deal is also a lucrative one for the buyers: U.S. approval for the sale would release the assets from American sanctions, instantly increasing their value.
In Moscow, the decision on the deal is widely seen as Mr. Putin’s to make, even though Lukoil is technically a private company. The upshot is that the giant transaction, involving assets as varied as oil fields in Cameroon, refineries in Europe and gas stations in New Jersey, comes down to Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump has been promoting the promise of business deals with Russia since early last year, describing the country as a “tremendous opportunity.” The deal again brings Mr. Trump’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company — co-founded by Mr. Witkoff — into focus. One of the investors in the Lukoil deal is a part owner of World Liberty.
Potential Lukoil investor group has ties with Trump, his family and his allies
Ivanka Trump
Trump and Witkoff sons
Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat Brother investors
Sheikh Tahnoon Emirati royal
Todd Boehly Group lead
Donald Trump
Steve Witkoff
Jared Kushner
invested in a private equity firm founded by
developing a multibillion luxury resort in Albania with
donated $2 million to political causes supporting
Negotiating with Russia to end the war in Ukraine
and has equity in World Liberty Financial which was founded by
Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, who have traveled repeatedly to Russia for meetings with Mr. Putin, have argued that the potential to rebuild economic ties with the West could convince the Russian president to compromise in Ukraine. The administration has recently signaled it is open to deals with Russia even before the war ends, as a way of showing it is serious about resetting the United States’ relationship with Moscow.
The Lukoil sale, people familiar with the matter say, is one of those deals.
In a statement, a senior administration official confirmed that Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner played a direct role in helping negotiate the financial terms of the investment by the federal government in the deal to ensure that it included “a substantial upfront payment and profits interest for the United States.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Witkoff said that he “takes no salary and travels the world on his own plane, at his own expense, working on behalf of President Trump to negotiate peace and bring hostages home to their families.” She added that Mr. Witkoff “has no conflict of interest and no financial stake in this matter.”
A Stalled Bid, and a New Contender
Numerous potential bidders expressed interest in at least part of Lukoil’s international holdings when the assets went on the market last fall, including U.S. energy giants like Chevron.
The Washington private equity firm Carlyle reached a tentative agreement in January to buy a large share of the assets, after making the pitch that bringing Lukoil’s international portfolio under U.S. ownership would further the Trump administration’s goal of “energy dominance.”
But in recent months, as U.S. approval for Carlyle’s bid stalled, a different group emerged as the leading bidder: one led by Mr. Boehly, a billionaire supporter of Mr. Trump’s, alongside well-connected figures in the Middle East and the U.S. government itself. The members of the partnership were reported last week by The Financial Times.
Mr. Boehly is a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and donated $1 millionto MAGA Inc., the Trump-aligned political committee, in December 2025. He gave another $1 million through his investment firm, Eldridge Industries, to Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
The U.S. government is taking a stake in the deal through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, an agency that invests in and lends to projects overseas. A D.F.C. official said in a statement that the potential Lukoil deal “would advance the Trump administration’s commitment to strengthen U.S. economic security, advance U.S. foreign policy and lower energy prices for everyday Americans.”
But it would not be an all-American purchase.
A major equity holder would be the Qatar-based conglomerate controlled by Moutaz Al-Khayyat and his brother Ramez Al-Khayyat, both of whom attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2025 and have since formed a partnership with Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, one of Mr. Trump’s daughters, to help finance a multibillion-dollar luxury hotel resort project in southern Albania.
Another major stakeholder would be an Abu Dhabi-based investment fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’s top national security adviser, who controls another fund that purchased a large stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty, run in part by Mr. Witkoff’s son.
Sign up for the On Politics newsletter. It's a pivotal moment for American politics. Join us for 2026 and beyond.
Steve Witkoff was a co-founder of World Liberty, and Mr. Trump’s sons are also involved in the company, which generated $799 million for Mr. Trump last year, in part because of an additional cryptocurrency purchase worth $2 billion that Sheikh Tahnoon’s affiliate made in 2025. Mr. Witkoff himself has sold off his stake in World Liberty, a person close to him said.
Sheikh Tahnoon also helps oversee an Abu Dhabi investment fund called Lunate, which is among the largest stakeholders in the private equity firm Mr. Kushner set up after he left the White House at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term. This means Sheikh Tahnoon is effectively a business partner of Mr. Kushner’s as well.
An ‘Alarming’ Set of Entanglements
Hui Chen, a former Justice Department prosecutor and a white collar crime and ethics adviser who served until the start of Mr. Trump’s first term, said the connections between Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner to players in the Lukoil deal illustrated why friends and family members of Mr. Trump’s should not be top foreign policy advisers.
“This is an alarming and very concerning set of entanglements,” said Ms. Chen, who has also worked as a corporate compliance lawyer. “And it means you have to question how the Trump administration is evaluating the different bidders involved here. Are the personal interests involved going to wrongly influence the outcome?”
Lukoil’s international division, which is based in Austria, hired its own Washington-based consultant who is close to Mr. Trump, Bryan Lanza, who served as a senior adviser to Mr. Trump’s 2024 election campaign and now works at Mercury Public Affairs. He is no longer working for Lukoil, a person familiar with the matter said.
The deal is not yet final, and would need to be approved by the Treasury Department, which oversees sanctions enforcement.
But in the case of Lukoil, people involved said, the key decisions are being made at the White House. Asked about its approach to the Lukoil decision, a Treasury Department spokeswoman said that the agency’s Office of Foreign Assets Control “implements foreign policy as determined by the White House.”
The Sept. 5 meeting with Mr. Putin was the first time that Lukoil came up in the Russian president’s conversations with Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, one person familiar with the matter said.
But Kirill Dmitriev, Mr. Putin’s economic envoy, has been closely involved, people familiar with the sale process said. He traveled to New York and Washington for meetings last month, and told reporters that “dialogue” with the United States was “continuing across many areas, including energy.”
Lukoil’s refineries in the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Romania play an important role. They produce diesel and jet fuel, which have been in short supply since the start of the Iran war, which has driven up prices and given Mr. Trump an incentive to support a deal that could provide more access to energy.
Lukoil valued its international assets at $20 billion earlier this year, but the price and structure of the proposed deal are not clear.
An official with the D.F.C., the U.S. agency investing in the deal, described participation in the purchase as a way to strengthen the energy security of U.S. allies. The official also said the deal would produce significant profits for the American taxpayer and keep strategic infrastructure away from adversaries.
Scramble for Assets
The Trump administration imposed sanctions on Lukoil a year ago, describingthe move as new pressure on Mr. Putin to “stop the killing.” It also created a lucrative opportunity: Lukoil was forced to sell off its sprawling portfolio of international holdings.
Investors around the world scrambled to bid on the assets, but the U.S. government held veto power because it controlled how to enforce its sanctions. Because of Russia’s autocratic system, Mr. Putin was seen as the final decision maker in Moscow.
The bidding frenzy accelerated last November, when the Treasury Department rejected an initial offer by Gunvor, a Swiss-based energy trading company with past ties to Russia, which had moved to buy Lukoil’s foreign assets. The Treasury Department said in a statement that “as long as Putin continues the senseless killings, the Kremlin’s puppet, Gunvor, will never get a license to operation and profit.”
Carlyle secured a “nonexclusive” agreement in January with Lukoil to sell its international assets. It was up to the Treasury Department to then sign off on the deal. As months passed with no final deal, other bidders intensified their efforts to step in.
Mr. Boehly has little experience in the oil and gas industry. He has made most of his money through investment firms such as Guggenheim Partners and Eldridge Industries, as well as sports team and entertainment industry investments, including Bruce Springsteen’s music catalog.
But over the last several years, the billionaire Khayyat brothers, who were born in Syria before moving to Qatar during the Syrian civil war, have begun to amass a collection of oil industry assets and planned projects in Syria,Libya and Iraq.
Even while the Lukoil negotiations were underway, the Khayyats were continuing to work with Mr. Kushner and Ivanka Trump over plans to build the luxury resort in Albania, an effort that included a meeting involving Ramez Al-Khayyat and Ms. Trump earlier this year in Albania, The Times reported.
The decision over Lukoil’s fate has taken so long that the Treasury Department has had to repeatedly issue extensions to its sanctions action, so that Lukoil gas stations in the United States and other businesses around the world could continue to engage with other financial partners. The most recent extension lasts until Oct. 29.
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.“
Friday, October 02, 2026
Thursday, October 01, 2026
The Supreme Court Just Took What Will Be the Blockbuster Case of the Term
The Supreme Court Just Took What Will Be the Blockbuster Case of the Term
“The Supreme Court accepted Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha to review the Trump administration’s interpretation of Sections 236 and 235(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act allowing mass detention. ICE detained roughly 65,000 people, mostly without criminal convictions.
Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a weekly newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team.
On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted what is sure to be the blockbuster case of its 2026–27 term. In Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, the justices will consider the Trump administration’s novel interpretation of federal immigration law that has given it legal cover to systematically detain any immigrant who entered the U.S. without permission, regardless of criminal history and without assessing whether they are a public safety threat or pose a flight risk. Hundreds of lower court judges, Democrat and Republican appointed ones, have been rejecting the Trump administration’s application of the law for the past year, and yet it’s enabled immigration agents to continue to hold tens of thousands of people in detention centers all over the country, a practice that has enabled some of the Trump administration’s most inhumane immigration policies.
The justices will consider head-on whether the Trump administration’s interpretation of two sections within the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 236 and 235(b), is lawful. The law gives federal authorities two options when faced with a deportation case: keep the noncitizen in federal custody while their immigration case goes through the courts or release them on bond or parole. In recent history, all U.S. presidents choose to only apply the detention standard to recent border crossers, and any immigrants who have been living in the U.S. with established families and careers were eligible for bond or parole, so long as they were found not to be a public safety threat or flight risk. Last year, this standard drastically shifted, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tasked with accomplishing the president’s mass deportation agenda, announced in July 2025 that the agency would begin detaining any and all immigrants facing removal orders, regardless of when they crossed the U.S. border, or if they had an established life here in the U.S.
Slate's 30th Anniversary Sale
Unlock this story, our entire 30-year vault, and ad-free podcasts for a special anniversary offer of $19.96 for six months.
Your membership will automatically renew at a rate of $119/yr after the special offer period. Cancel anytime.Already a member? Sign in here.
This interpretation has enabled ICE to round up immigrants en masse, with roughly 65,000 people in federal detention centers as of July 2026. About 70 percent of these detainees have no criminal convictions. And as countless immigrants were rounded up, the courts were flooded with immigration cases, to the tune of over 20,000, prompting lower court judges to assess the Trump administration’s legal strategy and overwhelmingly reject it. U.S. District Court Judge of the Southern District of New York Lewis Kaplan wrote an especially damning decision when approving an immigrants’ habeas corpus petition last year: “The subject of immigration—including who lawfully can come into or remain in the United States, from where, for what reasons, in what numbers, and by what legal processes—is a subject committed by the Constitution to the Congress.” He went on to emphasize that the Supreme Court has also previously affirmed that immigration is a subject Congress has complete legislative power over and that the executive branch must only “take Care that the Laws—enacted by Congress—be faithfully executed.”
Kaplan continued by saying that the Trump administration has every right to disagree with the way Congress wrote the Immigration and Nationality Act, but the only way it can seek remedy is by going to Congress and asking to change the law, and mustering up the necessary votes to pass new legislation. Recognizing the uphill battle that presents, the Trump administration chose not to go that route and instead applied a never-been-used-before interpretation of the INA in hopes of getting away with it for as long as possible, until the current Trump-friendly Supreme Court could weigh in.
It’s anyone’s guess how the justices will rule on this case, but it’s worth spending a minute considering how they’ve been ruling on immigration cases the Trump administration has routed its way over the past year. The court’s conservative majority has thus far allowed the president to end temporary protected status for over 300,000 immigrants, turn away people seeking asylum at U.S.–Mexico land borders, and racially profile people targeted for immigration arrests. But the justices have also curbed the president’s deportation agenda with decisions that stopped unlawful deportations to El Salvador through the Alien Enemies Act and allowed the long-standing birthright citizenship clause of the Constitution to stand.
Will it allow the president to continue its mass detention policy? That is anyone’s guess, but the justices cannot come to that decision without also considering how the Trump administration’s interpretation of the INA has spun an astoundingly cruel immigration system. “Trump’s entire immigration arrest and detention policy regime *depends* upon its novel reading of the statutes,” Steve Vladeck, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of the newsletter One First, noted on Bluesky.“
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)