A sometimes-amusing bout of liberal hand-wringing appeared in Sunday’s New York Times, as reporters John Leland and Hurubie Meko scoured the streets of Manhattan and found triumphant Trump supporters and scared but still pompous liberals.
When progressives held a post-election march in Manhattan last weekend, one New Yorker knew she had to be there.
With her Trump flag.
Mikaela Widlanski, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, does not display the flag in her famously liberal neighborhood. But this was a special occasion.
“If they’re upset,” she said, waving her flag at the demonstrators, “it’s not my fault.”
More than a week after Election Day, New Yorkers are still grappling with a changed reality, not just in Washington, but at home as well. The city, which had resoundingly rejected Donald J. Trump in his first two election bids, inched closer to him this year.
The paper summarized Harris's substantial vote decline in the city, while adding a baleful judgment:
She received nearly 600,000 fewer votes in the city than Joseph R. Biden Jr. had in 2020, while Mr. Trump gained almost 100,000. Where once New Yorkers could see Mr. Trump as somebody else’s doing, now the city was implicated.
Mr. Trump improved his results throughout the city, but some of the biggest gains were in neighborhoods with large low-income or immigrant populations. This was especially hard for some progressives, who campaigned for immigrant rights and a strong social safety net.
So much for tough New Yorkers!
Eight years ago, when Mr. Trump won a surprise victory while losing the popular vote, New Yorkers took the lead in the resistance, a bond that seemed to hold disparate elements of the city together. People raged or wept openly on city streets. This year, the mood in the city felt more subdued than apocalyptic.
Sophisticated urban liberals apparently can’t handle proximity toward someone who might not agree with them politically, or was dressed in, gasp, patriotic colors in a liberal neighborhood.
The day after the election, Nandita Shenoy, a playwright and actor, was walking near her home on the Upper East Side when she saw a cluster of people she took to be Trump supporters in red, white and blue regalia taking photos of themselves -- something she had never seen in her neighborhood.
“I felt uncomfortable and gave them a wider berth,” she said.
The election has made her feel less safe in the city. “Democrats have been called scum and vermin,” she said. “That is specifically what makes me feel nervous.”
She should hear what Democrats call Trump supporters!
Reading between the Times lines revealed liberal intolerance and intellectual snobbery among New Yorkers, even when they think they’re reaching out.
At the Protect Our Futures march, many demonstrators said they had simply stopped talking to relatives or acquaintances who supported Mr. Trump.
But one, Masha Rojkova, 29, tried to start a conversation. She approached Ms. Widlanski, who was waving her Trump flag at the crowd, and asked her why she supported Mr. Trump.
....
Afterward, Ms. Rojkova, an actor, said she felt bad for the other woman, saying she was “undereducated.”
“Poor girl,” she said, adding that what she felt was “not quite pity, it’s more like empathy. I hope she finds her way.”
