When a city breaks, it rarely starts in its richest zip codes. That’s what makes this moment so damning. If the Upper East Side can’t get its trash picked up or its streets plowed, what does that say about Queens, the Bronx, or Brooklyn, where residents already live at the back of the line? The symbolism is brutal: towering piles of garbage for regular New Yorkers, pristine sidewalks for the mayor’s own block at Gracie Mansion.
Celebrities who once cheered progressive politics are now publicly asking, “What happened?” They’re not attacking from the right; they’re expressing betrayal from inside the tent. Mamdani’s shrug — “I’m new to the job” — lands like an insult in a city that expects competence before ideology. New Yorkers can tolerate a lot: noise, crowds, chaos. What they won’t tolerate, for long, is a leader who preaches collectivism while living above the mess he helped cre