NEW YORK TO TRUMP: DROP DEAD.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: POLITICS

THERE IS AN alternative universe where not only did Hillary Clinton win in 2016, she won by 60 percentage points. Guns are scarce and arduous to legally obtain; bikes are ubiquitous. Public transit is so widespread that millions of adults don't even own cars. People disdain Donald Trump and look down at the intelligence of his supporters.

This place, this progressive near-utopia, is called New York City. And it is run by morons.

"It's time for Big Oil totake responsibilily for the devastation they have wrought," New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, recently reelected by 39 percentage points, tweeted in January. He went on to announce he is suing five of the world's biggest oil companies for the damage caused by Superstorm Sandy and starting the process of divesting $5 billion in city pension-fund investments from the oil sector. That night the Empire State Building was lit up green. "At the local level we have to act now," De Blasio said on Morning Joe, "especially because our national government is not."

New York politics, city and state alike, are dominated by hostility toward the loud New Yorker currently residing in the White House. "NYC must lead the way in standing up to Trump Administration bigotry, injustice & corruption," ran the first sentence in the voter guide from my local city councilman, Brad Lander (who won a third term in November 2017 unopposed).

Lander's email bulletins are filled with organizing announcements about "the resistance" and defiant subject lines that might as well have been written by Dumbledore's Army about he-who-must-not-be-named. "We won't let him destroy our kids' planet (or their country)," reads one. "Time to start talking about (the road to) impeachment," reads another.

Silly me--I just want the subway to occasionally function and the airports not to be garbage dumps.

The sad truth, acknowledged in private to me by multiple senior New York Democratic Party officials, is that Lander, De Blasio, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo are all just responding rationally to the political marketplace. New Yorkers might not have any clue who their borough president or state assemblywoman are, but they sure do hate Donald Trump. In New York, all politics are national.

A local brownstone real estate agent on the main commercial thoroughfare of my Brooklyn neighborhood spent the first several months after the November 2016 election displaying in his shop window pictures of the president's face next to a pig's ass...