Trump Derangement Syndrome and the Urban Elite
25th March 2026
Liberal academic @Musa_alGharbi’s observations when he moved to Manhattan:
“One of the first things that stood out to me is that there’s a racialized caste system here that everyone takes for granted. You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver food to you… mostly minorities and immigrants and disproportionately women… And this is basically taken for granted in New York, that this is the way society operates. And yet… this is not how things are in many other parts of the country. Most other places, the person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling them are likely to be the same race — white — and the gaps between the buyer and the seller are likely to be much smaller. Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities the same way as the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle or New York; the infrastructure simply isn’t there. It’s these progressive bastions associated with the knowledge economy that have these well-oiled machines for casually exploiting the vulnerable, desperate and disadvantaged. And it’s largely Democratic-voting professionals who take advantage of them.
A few months after I arrived at Columbia, Trump won. I expected this to happen, but for most people, that was not the expectation. So here at Columbia, the day after Trump won, a lot of the students claimed to be so traumatized that they couldn’t do tests or homework. They needed time off. Now there are two things striking about that to me. First, these are students at an Ivy League school, overwhelmingly people from wealthy backgrounds — and even if they don’t come from wealth, they’re likely to be well-positioned… [but these] students seemed to view themselves as somehow uniquely vulnerable to Trump and his regime, as being especially threatened or victimized. And so they demanded all of these accommodations for themselves. Meanwhile, there was this whole other constellation of people [mostly minorities and immigrants] around them who seemed to be literally invisible to them. The people doing all the work on the campus… these ignored laborers — the people with the most at stake in this election — [were not] saying they needed time off because they were too traumatized. They showed up to work the next day and did their jobs. They weren’t making a scene, sobbing as they scrubbed rich kids’ mess out of the toilets. The juxtaposition was sobering…
When I left campus, walking around the Upper West Side, or other affluent parts of Manhattan, similar scenes were playing out. Nor was New York City unique in this regard. Other knowledge economy hubs had similar scenes playing out. And the same drama that was playing out in Columbia was unfolding at colleges and universities across the country. This is precisely what I found so troubling, so difficult to shake off: It wasn’t about my own school. It was about this broader disjuncture between knowledge-economy elites, their narratives about the world, and the realities on the ground.”