If anything, Mamdani has run perhaps the most explicitly pro-immigrant and even pro-cosmopolitan campaign in recent memory. Mamdani’s innovation is not simply creative cost-of-living, take-on-the-elites politics. It’s also that he’s demonstrating how to do this without retreating from the defense of immigrants and of pluralism writ large, and without shirking the mission of centralizing Trump’s authoritarian lawlessness as an overarching fact of contemporary American public life. Obviously Mamdani is running in a blue city that’s full of immigrants, so his precise immigration message might not work as well in swing areas. But the point is, if we’re going to talk about Mamdani’s political innovations, we should also discuss this one: He doesn’t allow that there’s a conflict between emphasizing economic populism and taking on Trump’s authoritarianism. Indeed, Mamdani sometimes explicitly connects these things. “I will be a mayor who doesn’t bow down to corporate interests, doesn’t take his orders from billionaires, and sure as hell doesn’t let ICE steal our neighbors from their homes,” Mamdani said recently, emphasizing that last clause in a huge applause line. “There are no kings in America, whether that’s Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, or the Republican billionaires who fund both of their campaigns.”