New Yorkers steel themselves before Trump’s return

Fleeing the United States ahead of a “fascist takeover” by Donald Trump on January 20 has been the talk of liberal circles, and nowhere more than in deep-blue New York City. A New York Times story revealing that tech billionaire and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman was “weighing a move overseas” because he feared “retribution” from the next president added fuel to already smoldering speculation ignited by the relocation of the anti-Trump TV celebrity Ellen DeGeneres and her wife to England. I tend to ridicule such quailing as absurd and unpatriotic, if not downright cowardly. 

I was thrown off my leftist assumptions, however, when my plumber visited our family’s weekend house on the East End of Long Island, inside deep-red Suffolk County, New York. Before discussing our broken furnace, he asked, with no perceptible irony, “So what’s your exit strategy?” My plumber fits the profile of a pro-Trumper, but he isn’t one. On the contrary, he regularly berates East Enders about Trump’s character deficiencies. He is convinced that Trump “isn’t leaving” at the end of his second term.

If New York is deep blue, Manhattan’s Upper West Side is midnight blue

“No exit strategy,” I replied. “I’ll be drilling with the New York State militia.” Now my plumber was taken aback. He’d evidently forgotten that the Second Amendment guarantees not only “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” but also the maintenance of “a well-regulated militia,” which is “necessary to the security of a free State.” Indeed, America has a long and storied tradition of state militias sworn to defend against “enemies, foreign and domestic.” Beware, President Trump, of sending the US Army or the National Guard to enforce unconstitutional edicts in the Empire State, including arbitrary round-ups of our more than 600,000 undocumented immigrants. 

If New York is deep blue, Manhattan’s Upper West Side is midnight blue. Little chance, then, that I would encounter pro-Trumpers at Robert and Ina Caro’s annual New Year’s Day party, where the elite of New York’s journalism and letters squeeze into three rooms of an apartment for intensive conversation. Hard at work on the fifth volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, Caro spent much of 2024 being lionized on the fiftieth anniversary of his superbly written biography The Power Broker, an epic recounting of the life of Robert Moses — designer, builder and destroyer of modern New York.

Unscripted exchanges are the best thing about literary parties, and I bumped into a good one between Caro and the writer Daniel Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn explained that he’d just surfaced from six years of submersion in Homer’s Odyssey. (His new translation will be published in April.) Caro thought this put the avalanche of tributes for The Power Broker into proper perspective. “Only fifty years old compared with thousands of years,” he said, in tribute to Homer. 

New York remains America’s media capital, and the city’s press and TV barons whisper nervously among themselves about the next president’s campaign to intimidate publishers and journalists with defamation suits, even though they’re protected by the first amendment and the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan Supreme Court decision, which dramatically raised obstacles for libel plaintiffs if they’re public figures. Robert Moses, for example, would have had a snowball’s chance in hell of legally defeating Robert Caro, or Caro’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf. But when ABC, owned by Disney, made its Mickey Mouse settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against TV host George Stephanopoulos for $16 million (Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found liable for “rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case, instead of the more juridically precise term “sexual abuse”) the chill could be felt from one end of Manhattan to the other. Now everyone in publishing has memorized the deductible on their libel insurance policy, for what’s to stop Trump or his proxies from suing us while he’s president? (I’m reliably informed that emailing about the subject is being discouraged for fear of discoverability in future litigation.)  

Liberalism isn’t dead, despite all the doom-saying about imminent dictatorship. This was proven last week before a sell-out crowd at the School of Visual Arts Theatre on West 23rd Street, where Harper’s magazine sponsored the very droll podcast Red Scare in conversation with the art critic Dean Kissick about his cover piece in Harper’s last month (“The Painted Protest: how politics destroyed contemporary art”). Anna Khachiyan and Dash Nekrasova were so languorously peaceful that I forgot the accusations posted on X — when news of our collaboration with the pro-Trump podcasters went viral — that we were promoting “fascism” and “fashionable fascists.” In October 1941, the screenwriting partners Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur titled their production of an anti-Hitler rally in Madison Square Garden “It’s Fun to be Free.” On the program cover, a smiling Mickey Mouse carries a flag emblazoned with a blue “V” for victory, leading Goofy and Donald Duck into battle. On Inauguration Day on Monday, I hope New Yorkers keep their sense of humor.