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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Trump's Emergency Tariffs Face Supreme Court Skepticism; A Coming Clash Between Trump and the Supreme Court; Will an A.I. Bubble Crash the Economy?; Helping Young Readers Understand Antisemitism. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired November 09, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:59]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, Donald Trump's biggest global disruption, sky high tariffs on foreign goods.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Tariff to me is the most beautiful word.

ZAKARIA: Is in the hands of the Supreme Court. Is it possible that America's highest court will strike them down? I will ask two constitutional scholars, John Yoo and Noah Feldman.

Also, the stock market is at record levels, and the "Financial Times" has said that 80 percent of the market's gains this year are accounted for by one industry. Artificial intelligence.

Are we in an A.I. bubble? I'll ask Andrew Ross Sorkin, the author of a new book about the crash of 1929.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

For some years now, the Democratic Party looked as if it could do nothing right. It lost the presidency twice to Donald Trump. The Biden victory looking more like an interregnum now. One solid blue states turned red. Its working class base eroded. In 2024 even nonwhite voters drifted away.

This week's elections mark a reprieve, and perhaps the start of a recovery, but only if Democrats draw the right lessons.

The race that drew the most attention was Zohran Mamdani's, a stunning rise from near obscurity just 10 months ago. But Mamdani is a singular figure, unusually charismatic and politically deft. And New York City is unlike most of America. He won with 50 percent of the vote. Bill de Blasio won his 2013 race with 73 percent. The more telling bellwether was Virginia, a state with a popular,

outgoing Republican governor, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger trounced her opponent by nearly 15 points. Mikie Sherrill did the same in New Jersey, winning the governor's mansion by 13. Both women ran as centrist Democrats focused on the economy and studiously avoided getting drawn into the culture wars. Even Mamdani, though clearly progressive, ran a campaign relentlessly centered on affordability.

There's an ongoing debate within the Democratic Party about whether to move left on economics or right on culture. That debate misses a deeper shift in American life. The largest chunk of voters still say the economy is their top concern, but they increasingly view the economy through a partisan lens. When their party is in power, they think the economy is strong. When the other side takes over that same economy suddenly looks dire.

In effect, politics now shapes people's sense of economic reality, not the other way around. And people choose their political tribe using two markers the left has long struggled to navigate --culture and class.

Across the democratic world, the pattern is familiar, as I outlined in my book "Age of Revolutions." The changes of recent decades, globalization, the digital revolution, mass migration, new gender and identity norms, have produced a backlash that is primarily cultural. It has appeared in countries that have boomed like the U.S. and Poland, and in those that have stagnated, like France and Italy.

It's arisen where inequality is high as in America and where it's low as in Sweden or the Netherlands. It's shaken economies that still make things, Germany, and those that rely on services like Britain. A 2023 Ipsos global trends survey showed that in many advanced democracies, large majorities think the world is changing too fast, including 75 percent in Germany and nearly 90 percent in South Korea.

[10:05:12]

The right has learned to weaponize people's unease, offering a story that is emotionally coherent even when factually thin. It promises a return to the world many people remember, if only the global elites are cast down. The left, by contrast, tends to counter emotion with information. But people do not want to be told that they are wrong to feel uneasy. They want leaders who acknowledge that unease and help them navigate it.

If culture has been the first great shock to the modern left, class has been the second. The divide today is not between capitalists and workers. It's between those who flourish in a credential driven economy and those who feel locked out of it. The right has exploited that perception masterfully. Trump's movement has never followed through on an anti-elitist economics. His Cabinets have been packed with billionaires, but it has been ferociously anti-elitist in culture.

His enemy is not the hedge funder, but the Harvard professor, not the CEO, but the columnist. The professors are the enemy, Nixon once quipped, and J.D. Vance has repeated the line. Trump turned it into a strategy, waging war on America's cultural institutions.

This inversion, the rich as rebels, the educated as oppressors, has redrawn the map of American politics. In 1996, Bill Clinton won voters without college degrees by 14 points. By 2024, Kamala Harris lost that same block by 14 points.

The answer is not to tear down the meritocratic elite. The alternative is worse. An aristocracy of birth or the family and friends' cabals surrounding Donald Trump's White House. Better to rebuild a genuine democratic meritocracy, one that wields its advantages with humility and a sense of stewardship. That means expanding access to education and networks so that mobility is real while cultivating leaders who can see beyond their class and credentials.

Renewal and reconnection are possible. Denmark offers a model. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen tightened immigration rules and demanded integration, but those measures are paired with robust social investment. Critics on the left call the prime minister's approach illiberal, but it worked. The Danish Social Democrats Coalition won a majority in 2022, and the party had its best performance in two decades.

The lesson for Democrats is not to copy Denmark's laws, but to emulate its sensibility. That means marrying the party's best instincts, compassion, inclusion, reform, with a tone of steadiness and respect. It means remembering that patriotism is not the property of the right, that liberalism, too, can speak the language of tradition.

In the 19th century, nationalism and liberalism rose together as revolts against imperial hierarchy and arbitrary rule. The task now is to reunite them, to make the national project a liberal project rooted in dignity, pluralism and fairness. Right-wing populism is not destiny. It's nostalgia. Liberal democracy has been counted out many times before, only to prove itself remarkably resilient because in the end, it remains the best roadmap because it addresses the most powerful yearnings of human beings. For betterment, progress and for freedom.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and to buy my book now out in paperback anywhere books are sold. And let's get started.

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that President Trump has called life or death for the country. His unilateral authority to impose sweeping tariffs. His tariff agenda broadly began on liberation day in April when he upended decades of American free trade policies by announcing broad levies on imports from around the world. He was relying on a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

But at Wednesday's Supreme Court arguments, many justices, including conservatives, questioned whether this law actually gives the president the power he claims.

To unpack it all, I'm joined by two constitutional scholars. Noah Feldman is a law professor at the Harvard Law School. He was recently named a university professor, which is Harvard University's highest distinction for a faculty member.

[10:10:03]

And John Yoo is a former Justice Department official under the Bush administration and a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Welcome, gentlemen. Let me -- let's get right into it. So the Trump administration's claim was that this -- the president has this authority because this was not a case of raising taxes, which clearly the Constitution gives Congress the authority to do. And that it has the power to do this under these emergency provisions.

Noah, are those arguments persuasive?

NOAH FELDMAN, PROFESSOR, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: Well, there's something plausible about both of them. The statute does say that the president, in the circumstances of emergency, which he declares can, quote, "regulate importation." And so he says, well, what's a tariff but a regulation of importation? So there is something to that argument.

There's also some precedent on the administration's side because under a predecessor statute, which had the same language, the Nixon administration actually imposed a tariff and a lower appellate court upheld it, and then Congress adopted the law in question. So I think the Trump administration doesn't always have good arguments when they assert executive power. They do have some OK arguments here, although it looks like they probably are not going to win.

ZAKARIA: John, the central question, it seems to me, is, and one that courts are reluctant to take on, is that the president is claiming this is an emergency. This is a massive emergency for the country and in general courts tend to defer. But, you know, on the face of it, this seems highly implausible. You're talking about trade deficits that the United States has been running for 50 years. You're talking about a national security emergency that somehow covers every country in the world, including tiny countries in Africa.

Do you think the Supreme Court can and will say, you know what, this doesn't look like an emergency to us?

JOHN YOO, PROFESSOR, UC BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW: Fareed, I think you put your finger on what is the most important question in this case. And it could be, as President Trump says, the most important case for many decades. And this is a question our judges are going to review, a president's determination of a national security emergency. And as you say, this would be a peculiar emergency because we've had the trade deficit for 50 years. It goes up, it goes down.

But if you look at it as a size of the percentage of the economy, it has really stayed the same since the middle of the George W. Bush administration. So it's about the same size it was 20 years ago. Now, if President Trump had said, I'm declaring a national emergency against the threat posed by China, and because of that country, I'm going to impose, right, financial penalties on imports and exports, I don't even think this would have gotten to the Supreme Court. The problem is declaring a national emergency for a broad social and

economic problem. And this troubled, you could hear this in the oral argument, this troubled some of the justices, especially Justice Gorsuch, for example, who said, well, if we say that's a national emergency, then do we have to accept that climate change is a national emergency and a future president could impose a global carbon tax on all imports and exports?

So I think the court is going to be very leery of blessing a national emergency, even declared by president under a very lenient standard review and a broad grant of statutory power over something that isn't an event, over something that's not a country's threat, but is a broad economic and social progress and development.

ZAKARIA: Noah, for the Chief Justice John Roberts, this seems to run into something that he regards as very important. This is something, this is his baby, and it's called the major questions doctrine. Can you help everyone understand what is the major questions doctrine and why does this case pose a problem for that theory?

FELDMAN: It's always fun to explain a brand new doctrine to viewers. Justice, the chief justice invented this doctrine out of whole cloth in 2022. And what the doctrine says is if the president claims authority from Congress to do something that is very big, it's major, and which he's never done before, then we're going to presume that he doesn't have that authority unless Congress very specifically and explicitly said that he does have that authority.

So basically, the major questions doctrine is a way for the Supreme Court to say that the president doesn't have certain powers that the president is asserting. And in the first two times that that was used in big ticket cases, it was used by the conservative majority of the court to block the Biden administration from doing environmental regulation and from doing its student loan forgiveness program. And the liberals hated that doctrine.

[10:15:04]

Today, however, the shoe is on the other foot, and the chief justice, to his credit, wants to apply that doctrine to the Trump administration. And now the liberals are, conveniently enough, saying, well, that's already the law. And so they sounded at oral argument like they're ready to get on board with that view. And seen from that perspective, this particular invocation of power by Donald Trump is going to fail because it's a big deal.

These tariffs are as big a deal as anything has been in our economic life and certainly in living memory. And no one has ever claimed before that this statute gives the president this kind of enormous authority. And so the upshot is it shouldn't be within the president's authority, according to the major questions doctrine, unless Congress said so, and they didn't say so explicitly.

ZAKARIA: Stay with us. Donald Trump has said things that seem designed to intimidate the Supreme Court into ruling for him. So what happens if they don't? I'll ask our guests. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:20:27]

ZAKARIA: I'm back with Noah Feldman, who teaches at the Harvard Law School, and John Yoo, a former senior Justice Department official in the Bush administration.

John, what does happen if, you know, the court rules, what, in a way that it certainly seems like it's heading towards, which is in some way to limit or rein in the president? And, you know, the president has and this administration has in many ways signaled to courts like, don't rule really, you know, strongly against us because we will only partially follow the rulings or will find ways to get around them.

In that context, what happens if the court upholds the lower court ruling and says all this tariff stuff is illegal, unconstitutional?

YOO: Fareed, on the face of it, this is just an interpretation of the IEEPA statute as you quoted it early on. But you're right, behind it is this struggle between the judiciary and the Supreme Court on the one hand, and the White House and President Trump on the other. For example, in this case, even though you're interpreting a statute, the bigger question of how intrusive are courts going to get when they review President Trump's decision of a national emergency?

It's going to reverberate for a series of other cases that are coming up behind this one that are going to be, I think, even as important or more important. For example, deportation of Venezuelans, maybe drug boat attacks in the Caribbean, ability to fire independent agency commissioners, trying to take control of the personnel of the Federal Reserve. These are all coming up potentially. Some of them are coming up this term. Some are going to be following.

And if President Trump loses this one early, and then I think responds by attacking the court, raising some of these I think irresponsible claims that we're going to disobey the judiciary and not follow the Supreme Court's decisions, I think actually the Supreme Court is going to get its back up, and it makes it more likely that President Trump may lose those following cases.

When, I agree with Noah, the Trump administration sometimes has bad arguments, and a lot of these cases that are coming, they have very good arguments. Sometimes they're repeating the very arguments that past Roberts courts decisions have made, particularly about firing subordinate executive branch officials. But if the administration goes too far in overreacting here to a loss, and I agree with you, Fareed, I think this looks like a loss for the Trump administration, they jeopardize, I think, their agenda at the Supreme Court, that's a very large agenda that are coming up in the next year or two.

ZAKARIA: Noah, do you worry that we're in a world where the presidency already has enormous power? I mean, I remember, you know, George Will, constitutional conservative, saying, you know, Congress was meant to be the first branch of government. How did the president somehow accumulate all these powers? And this court has really ruled quite generously in that.

The most famous one being that the president can, you know, as they say, can in his, if he's doing it in his official capacity, could order a Navy SEAL team to assassinate his political opponent and there would be no legal remedy. The only remedy would be impeachment.

FELDMAN: Yes, I worry, Fareed, very deeply about the overreach of executive power and particularly with this court allowing it. And just this term, they're already -- they've already telegraphed that they intend to allow the president to fire anyone in the executive branch, including people whom Congress has specifically said he can only fire for good cause. So this is a court that has maximized presidential authority,

And I really want it to be the case, I'm hoping for it to be the case that they'll reverse course and begin to limit the president, and nothing would make me happier than to see this case as the first step in that direction. But I can't -- I can't be certain that that's going to happen. Even if the Trump administration loses in this case, there may be others on the court who think, well, we've taken one thing away from him and so now let's give him some other things.

And so I think, you know, I don't want to prejudge that, although I would be thrilled if this were an inflection point, as John suggests, that it might be.

ZAKARIA: Thank you, folks. That was a fascinating conversation. We will be watching the ruling very carefully. We might have to bring you both on again. Thanks.

Is the United States headed for a market crash like the one that preceded the Great Depression? Andrew Ross Sorkin, the author of a new book, "1929," will answer that question.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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ZAKARIA: The American stock market has rarely looked hotter. Investment in A.I. is high and the Trump administration wants to add to the momentum, loosening regulations on the financial sector and stirring up cryptocurrency mania.

So are we headed toward a market crash?

Who better to ask than Andrew Ross Sorkin, the author of the new book, "1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation."

Andrew, welcome. First of all, terrific book.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, COLUMNIST AND EDITOR, NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: And so vivid the stories are, I mean, so many people who are colorful characters. You know, I've always known about the crash, but I didn't really know about the people who were involved in it. SORKIN: Right.

ZAKARIA: But what I'm going to ask you is, so when you -- when you look at that, what are the echoes that you're seeing right now? Because, you know, Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize winning economist, has this index, which is -- tracks basically how stocks are valued.

[10:30:04]

And right now it is the highest in years. The only two comparable peaks being 1999 right before the dotcom crash and 1929 right before the market crash. So do you think his chart is correct?

SORKIN: I think his chart is correct. And the truth is, when I began this project, it took me eight years to write this book, I didn't know that I was walking into a situation where, as I was writing, I would be seeing these parallels in real time. That was not the objective. But as I've now lived in this universe from, you know, the 1920s and '30s, I think to myself, the amount of euphoria that was taking place in the '20s is so similar to the euphoria taking place in this A.I. bubble.

You know, back then, it was automobiles and technology and --

ZAKARIA: Radio.

SORKIN: And radio. Radio was the Nvidia of its time. It was like a meme stock. The thing back then was it was about leverage. It was about how much debt people taking on huge amounts of borrowing. The real question now is how much borrowing is actually taking place. How much are the economics really makes sense? I think there's lots of questions about that. Right now we have a lot of technology companies making massive commitments to buy chips from Nvidia and other things that aren't profitable.

And so at what point are they not going to be able to make payment? And at what point do all of the stocks, which people have bought in large part on margin, but not at the same level as 1929? I want to be clear about that. Does that all break? And that's the question.

ZAKARIA: And -- but yet, you can, you know, this thing can go on for a while, right? Like, I mean, people forget 1996, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, gave a speech basically saying the market is too high we're in a bubble. He said, you know, the market is sort of guilty of irrational exuberance. The bubble burst four years later and, you know, you would have been wrong, right. following his advice.

SORKIN: That's the thing about being a Cassandra. So back in 1928, Charles Merrill, who founded Merrill Lynch, told people to get out of the market. And maybe in retrospect, you'd say, oh, that sounds smart. Except that from the beginning of 1928 to September of 1929, the stock market went up 90 percent. And so that is always the question. You know, will there be a fall of some sort? There has to be. When and how deep? That's the question. I hope it's closer. I hope whatever happens looks a lot more like 1999

than 1929. I don't think it's preordained that we have to go into some kind of, you know, long, prolonged Great Depression. I think there were a lot of lessons that we've hopefully learned. You know, back then there were a lot of policy choices that were made that were in error. The Federal Reserve did nothing back then. There was no bank capital requirements. There was no SEC. So there was manipulation.

Today, I like to believe that things are slightly in a better place. The one big difference that is the wild card for me is government debt. Back in 1929, we had a budget surplus in America. We hardly had any debt. Today we have enormous debt and if there is a crash, what do you do? The lesson we've learned from '29 is you throw money at the problem, you bail it out. But at some point do bondholders say, excuse me, you know, we're happy to lend you money in the future, but you're going to have to pay us an extraordinary amount of money for the risk?

ZAKARIA: So you're right in pointing out that this time what's different is the big companies that are doing all the spending are enormously profitable.

SORKIN: Right.

ZAKARIA: And Google, Amazon, Meta, these guys have hundreds of billions of dollars they can spend. They're not taking on debt. But the constraint, it seems, is you don't have enough energy to power all these huge data centers.

Satya Nadella gave an interview recently where he said they have huge numbers of data centers with GPUs, with computer chips that are sitting unused because they have nowhere to plug them into.

SORKIN: Right.

ZAKARIA: Could this energy problem be the -- you know, the brick wall that --

(CROSSTALK)

SORKIN: There's no question the energy piece is going to be a problem. Having said that, I would argue to you, even though the technology companies have a lot of cash that they're pouring into this, there's a huge amount of leverage that's being used by energy companies for their own build out, by real estate companies that are building these data centers. And the other big difference between what's happening now and even 1999, when people were laying fiber in the ground, chips themselves depreciate quickly. There's a half-life to these things.

ZAKARIA: So after three years you have to buy them all again.

SORKIN: After three or four years, you're probably going to have to get new and better chips. And so that's a whole other sort of piece of the economic model that's different.

ZAKARIA: So when you look at it, do you feel like the people -- do you read, your research tell you human nature hasn't changed? Does it tell you that you're seeing the same kinds of people, or does it feel like we've learned?

SORKIN: Oh, my goodness. We are -- we are all human and we are exactly the same. And I think the lesson is, unfortunately, you know, how can we have a little bit of humility? You know, when people have sort of this confidence, when it looks like they absolutely know, that's when they probably don't.

[10:35:03]

ZAKARIA: And that's why they should read your book.

SORKIN: Thank you, sir.

ZAKARIA: Andrew Ross Sorkin, pleasure to have you.

SORKIN: Appreciate it.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Zohran Mamdani's successful bid for mayor of New York has raised questions about what is antisemitism, what is anti- Zionism? We will talk about just that when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ZAKARIA: In the more than two years since the October 7th attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, the world has seen a sharp rise in antisemitism. In the U.S., FBI data showed an increase of 63 percent in reported hate crimes against Jews in 2024 relative to 2022.

[10:40:08]

These troubling crimes against Jews come as Israel faces criticism for its tactics in the strip, where more than 68,000 Gazans have been killed. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes committed in Israel's military response.

So how should we parse these difficult topics, and how can young people navigate these trying times?

Bianna Golodryga, CNN anchor and senior global affairs analyst, and Israeli journalist Yonit Levi have written a novel for young readers. It is called "Don't Feed the Lion."

Bianna, Yonit, pleasure to have you on in person finally.

Why fiction rather than nonfiction?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN ANCHOR AND SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, the issue over antisemitism is something, as we know, sadly, has been with us for millennia and didn't start on October 7th, 2023. And as journalists, we think that we're the ones that are always asking the thoughtful, smart questions. And as a parent, you can relate it's usually the kids that surprise us with the questions that stump us.

And so going back several years ago, before October 7th, my then 10- year-old son asked me why, after we saw a flurry of antisemitic posts from popular celebrities like Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, asked, why do they hate us? Why, as a Jewish boy, should I feel uncomfortable going to a basketball game? Am I not welcome?

This was after the murder of George Floyd, social justice movements that we've had in this country and around the world, and all the resources that were put together in response to that at schools, I didn't have an answer for him, so I reached out to the school and said, what are you doing about antisemitism? And come to find out, there are books for kindergartners on Hanukkah. There are books for high schoolers on the Holocaust, and there was nothing for this very impressionable, smart, well-informed, curious age group.

So that seed was planted. And then, sadly, when October 7th happened and Yonit and I talked all the time and we anticipated another spike in antisemitism, we said, you know what? Let's write the book that we can't find for our kids.

ZAKARIA: So, you know, the argument that's going to be made is there is a big distinction between criticizing the Israeli government for what it is doing and antisemitism. How much do you think it's fair to say that a lot of the things that people have said, Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, that Israel is guilty of war crimes, Israel is, you know, permanently occupying -- you know, the Palestinians?

How much of that is just criticism of the current Israeli government or a succession of Israeli governments? And I ask that to you because in my experience, half of Israel feels that way, that Israel is doing terrible things in Gaza under the Netanyahu government.

YONIT LEVI, ACHOR, ISRAEL'S CHANNEL 12 NEWS: I mean, I would say a few things, Fareed. And again, thank you for this opportunity. First of all, Israel, as you well know, is a vibrant democracy. And Israelis criticize their government and indeed journalists criticize the government. That is the way of life in every vibrant democracy. And I think asking questions about the war or asking questions about the conduct is a legitimate thing.

Israelis do it as well. It's a vibrant conversation in Israel. Where I would draw the line is to say the rule of thumb being, if you criticize Israel, that's not antisemitism. If you only criticize Israel then that would raise a few eyebrows. And when you say things like, when we hear these protests and things being said, like Zionists keep out of campuses, then Jews understand what that mean. And I think that we should emphasize that most, the vast majority of Jews support Israel's right to exist.

So in that regard, if you say, you know what, I'm not an antisemite, I'm just an anti-Zionist, it's a little bit like saying, you know what? I'm not against the English, I'm just against the English who think that England has a right to exist. So I think that these things aren't actually very complicated. There is -- there are very distinct lines around what is antisemitism. And our book really happens before October 7th. It happens in 2022. And we wanted to talk about that, about that hatred, about that age old hate of Jews and what to do when you're a kid in this world and you're dealing with all of the issues that kids deal with, and how do you actually, you know, live when you're confronted with this kind of hate.

ZAKARIA: So the college is faced an interesting challenge. Like, on the one hand, the Trump administration is saying you should crack down on what they regard as antisemitism and antisemitic speech. A lot of the colleges are saying, particularly privately when you talk to them, look, you know, we want there to be an open debate and the best way to combat antisemitism is to actually have a vigorous debate and let people understand the issue, rather than tamping it down, which will only drive it underground.

[10:45:14]

What do you think is the right answer?

GOLODRYGA: Listen, some would argue, and I think I would agree, that withholding medical research is probably not the solution in addressing what we saw on college campuses, but I think we'd all be kidding ourselves if the response initially was not strong enough I think from leadership on down, from the heads of these universities, from government elected officials, too. Again, it seems to be that Jews are the only ones who are sort of gaslit in the sense that what we feel as antisemitism is being told to us, no, it's not, it's anti- Zionism, it's something else.

Students say they feel unsafe on campus, and the heads of universities are saying, let's debate what free speech is and what's not. If that had been any other minority, I really would like to ask them if that's how they would have responded.

ZAKARIA: Thank you both.

LEVI: Thank you very much.

GOLODRYGA: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, is Zohran Mamdani's rise part of a global Gen Z revolution? And what would that mean? When we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:53]

ZAKARIA: And now for "The Last Look."

The political news out of New York City on Tuesday night could be described as seismic. A 34-year-old Democratic socialist had been elected mayor of the largest city in the United States.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZOHRAN MAMDANI (D), NEW YORK CITY MAYOR-ELECT: The future is in our hands.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ZAKARIA: Zohran Mamdani was propelled to victory by a populist policy platform that was packaged in viral, trendy, social media videos that captured the attention of Gen Z, the world's first generation of internet natives.

Their impact on politics is being felt all over the world. Some sort of Gen Z revolution seems to be taking place. From Asia to Africa to South America, young people have surged into the streets demanding change. And while their political realities are vastly different, these protesters are often shouting about similar grievances. Economic inequality, high costs of living, and political corruption.

And although they speak a variety of different languages, their common tongue is the language of the internet. Memes and TikTok trends and slang that's practically unintelligible to anyone much over the age of 30. No cap, am I right? If you didn't understand that, that's the point.

Indeed, many of these movements were conceived of and birthed online and then transferred to the streets. While watching the news, you might have noticed this reconsidered version of the Jolly Roger. It's a common symbol that young protesters have rallied behind around the globe, and it comes from the popular Japanese manga and anime series called "One Piece." In the story, a group of pirates called the Straw Hats sail the seas, fighting injustice and a corrupt, quote, "world government," unquote.

Their signature flag contains a play on the classic Jolly Roger. That's the black pirate flag showing a grinning skull and crossbones. But in this version, the skull wears a straw hat. The straw hats Jolly Roger hung from burning government buildings in Nepal during the September Gen Z protest there that led to the ouster of that nation's prime minister. In protest in Indonesia, the flag became so popular that one conservative lawmaker equated its display to treason. The flag has also popped up in protests in Madagascar, Morocco, Peru and Bolivia, and in demonstrations in France and the United States.

As the straw hatted Jolly Roger pops up around the world, we see a physical manifestation of the borderlessness of online life and a demonstration of its power. And Gen Z is now showing how its energy and connectivity can be channeled into electoral politics, especially in a city like New York. As urban youth tend to be liberal and highly online, Mamdani took positions that were popular among this group, like addressing the cost of housing, taxing the rich, and support for Palestinians.

He then communicated with this crucial part of his base in digital native speak, filming his own candid Instagram reels, appearing in man-on-the-street style interviews, and even making his birthday announcement a humorous response to his critics.

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MAMDANI: This weekend I'll be making a change. I'm turning 34. You can get that out of here.

(END VIDEO CLIP) ZAKARIA: This core component of his campaign made him accessible to a generation that has grown tired of traditional politics and politicians. He spoke to them not as a politician, but as a neighbor. This newfangled style isn't confined to the left. Right-wing parties such as the far-right AfD in Germany have also found tremendous success on platforms like TikTok.

In the 2025 German parliamentary elections, the AfD increased its under 24 vote share from 7 percent in 2021 to 21 percent, a rise linked to its social media strategy, according to the European Center for Digital Action.

In the U.S., right-wing commentators like Charlie Kirk use TikTok style videos and conservative anti-woke online culture to amass a large following among conservative Gen Zs.

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Kirk then campaigned for Donald Trump and was influential in the '24 elections, which saw Trump perform better among young voters than any Republican candidate since 2008.

As Democrats look for ways to win back power, a Democratic socialist candidate like Mamdani may not always be a blueprint for success, especially in more conservative states. But there are key lessons to be learned from his campaign. The main one being that there is a new established Gen Z political culture today, one that demands authenticity and fresh ideas from its leadership, communicated through the language of the internet. And if Democrats want to capture this online generation, they will have to learn how to speak its language.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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