Chronicle inauguration commentary: Croton-on-Hudson in the Age of Trump.

How will Trump's presidency affect our village and its citizens? Probably less than his supporters might hope, but more than his enemies might wish.

Lenny Amicola’s sign on Grand Street in Croton has become a tourist attraction.

The sign on Lenny Amicola’s property on Grand Street, just down from Croton’s famous Dummy Light and across from Holy Name of Mary Church, will be out of date by early afternoon tomorrow. Instead of “my president,” Donald Trump will be our president, even here in heavily Democratic Croton. We don’t know if Lenny will put up a new sign to reflect that fact; but if he did, he would clearly be within his First Amendment rights, just as he was when he tried to fly a flag in support of Donald Trump early in the Biden administration. Alleged efforts by the mayor and the Board of Trustees to stop him from doing that ended up failing badly.

Soon after the November 5 election, visitors to Croton, and even some residents, could be seen taking selfies in front of the sign, often with big smiles on their faces. Of course, the majority of villagers in this famously liberal community are not smiling. There has been a fair bit of hugging and crying at the Black Cow, at Franki’s Sandwich and Grill across the street, and other venues where Democratic Party stalwarts gather. Presumably the grief and shock is even deeper in private homes, where those convinced that Trump is the antithesis of all they hold dear are fully free to mourn what some feel is our lost democracy.

And yet there is no question that Trump was democratically elected, fair and square. Those on the left who think the election was stolen, as Trump falsely claimed about his 2020 loss to Biden, are very few, hardly visible, and obviously totally irrelevant (no one is even seriously claiming this time around that Russia was behind Trump’s victory.) And so Democrats and others who oppose Trump are going to have to accept his win, and figure out what they are going to do about it.

Meanwhile, among the minority of Crotonites who supported Trump, there is lots of glee and gloating. Some of this schadenfreude is visible on village Facebook pages like “Croton Issues” and “Croton Uncensored.”

(MAGA supporters are generally not allowed to post on other, larger village Facebook pages like “The Croton Point” and “Croton Community.”)

For example, one of our well-known local conservatives has been posting non-stop on the Uncensored page about all the “ch-ch-changes” Trump’s victory will bring about (referencing a David Bowie song), even giving credit to Trump for some things that happened weeks before his inauguration.

But here in Croton, and across the nation, it remains to be seen just how much of a “mandate” Trump will really have to carry out his agenda. Although he clearly won—including the popular vote—and Republicans will now control both the House and Senate, those victories were far from the “landslide” some of his supporters have claimed. Thus his maneuvering room while in office may prove to be more limited than MAGA supporters hope. Columnist Ezra Klein burst that bubble just today in the New York Times, pointing out:

In 2024, Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points. Trump and Democrats alike treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a broad mandate for the MAGA movement. But by any historical measure, it was a squeaker.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points; in 2016, Hillary Clinton won it by 2.1 points; in 2012, Barack Obama won it by 3.9 points; in 2008, Obama won it by 7.2 points; and in 2004, George W. Bush won it by 2.4 points. You have to go back to the 2000 election to find a margin smaller than Trump’s.

Down-ballot, Republicans’ 2024 performance was, if anything, less impressive. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression; in the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won; among the 11 governor’s races, not a single one led to a change in partisan control. If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift.

Despite the narrow victories, there is little in these results to cheer Democrats in the short term. Indeed, political analysts have been working overtime since the election to figure out how the Dems managed to lose to a man they consider a demagogue, a racist, a misogynist, and a bully, a politician out for himself and his fellow billionaires—despite his dubious claims to be a man of the working class.

The tenor of many of these analyses is, how badly did Democrats have to mess up to land us with this guy again? Let’s start off by looking at that question. Like it or not, we think Croton’s political culture is part of the problem.

Are Democrats blaming everyone but themselves for Trump’s win?

Kamala Harris giving her concession speech

While we have seen a lot of mourning here in Croton over Kamala Harris’s loss, so far we have seen few or no signs here of serious public discussion about the reasons for it. Perhaps that will come in time, but it is not entirely surprising. While we do have some serious political activists in the village, the majority of Democratic voters here are liberals, not leftists or radicals, and their affiliations and voting patterns appear to be as much a reflection of tribal and cultural behavior as serious and committed conviction.

In that way, Croton politics fits hand and glove with national Democratic Party politics. While there are as many shades of opinion about why Trump won as there are pundits and analysts discussing it—and the commenters cannot agree about whether Democrats tacked too far left or too far right—there is nevertheless wide agreement about two major factors that greatly influenced the outcome: The failure of Democrats to convince key segments of the working class to vote for them, and the Biden administration’s full blown support of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Indeed, the main argument of Harris’s campaign was that the Biden administration had done all kinds of things for the working class, and the chief task was to convince those voters that was true (a tack that some voters obviously interpreted as meaning that they were too stupid and ignorant to realize that the economic struggles they were engaged in were really some kind of figment of their imagination.)

Indeed, in a remarkable opinion piece in the January 17 Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria acknowledged that Democrats had failed to win the working class, and then went on to argue that they should stop trying and concentrate on the college-educated elite! (Which, many analysts have argued, is exactly what they actually did do.)

As for Gaza, the evidence was clear long before the November 5 election that Harris’s refusal to distance herself from the Biden administration’s support for what most human rights experts and organizations have now designated a genocide—or at the very least, a clear pattern of war crimes—was going to hurt her changes of being the first woman president. Indeed, that evidence has only strengthened since her loss.

So what does this have to do with Croton?

While in one sense this strongly Democratic village cannot be faulted for having done its democratic duty and voted by a large majority for Harris, when it comes to these two major factors in her loss, most villagers have failed to distance themselves from the basic social and political attitudes that led to it.

We have currently, right here in Croton, a working class struggle that has been going on since last summer: The fight of about 60 low-paid school workers for a better contract, and the stiff resistance by a Democratic Party dominated district administration and Board of Education. The Chronicle has written about this and editorialized in support of these aides many times.

We are not aware of any leading Democratic Party or liberal official or figure in Croton who has taken a public stand in support of these workers. (If we are wrong about that we will immediately issue a correction.)

To put it simply, this struggle comes down to one between the working class and the liberal, Democratic Party elite. It’s the worst possible scenario, with few nuances or ambiguities that we can see—especially since the school district steadfastly refuses to give even a basic explanation for its stance. The main public support for these workers we have seen, mostly on village Facebook pages and at a few Board of Education meetings, comes from conservatives who, if one wants to be cynical, see a political opportunity and have seized it (to know for sure, ask conservatives who are championing the school aides what their stand is on increasing the minimum wage.)

Legacies of the Biden administration.

As for the war in Gaza, a subject the Chronicle has tried to delve into from time to time, the overwhelming majority of villagers have been silent, including our political leaders, even as the evidence for war crimes has mounted over the last 15 months. (A couple of brave and rare exceptions are recorded here and especially here.)

If anyone thought that refraining from criticizing the Biden-Harris administration would help Kamala Harris to win the election, they were dead wrong. If anything, just the opposite, as we now know. Even worse, the failure of most Democrats everywhere to make stopping the slaughter a central issue in the campaign—something Harris could have done by saying, as Trump did to Netanyahu, that she wanted to put an end to it before she was inaugurated—has led to their party being associated with a genocide, or at the very least, with war crimes that have led to the deaths of at least 45,000 people in Gaza, including 15,000 or more children.

Democrats will have plenty to think about over the next four years, or even between now and the mid-term elections. Let’s hope that their thinking includes engaging in some serious self-reflection, and not just doing the easy thing of branding all Trump voters as “deplorables” and absolving themselves of all responsibility. We feel confident that, in time, when the crying and mourning is over, many Democrats in Croton will be ready to do that.

In the meantime, what does a Trump administration mean for our village? No man is an island, and no village either. Let’s take a quick look at some key areas where his victory may affect us here in Croton, possibly in major ways.

Immigration and threatened mass deportations: Are we ready for them?

“On Day 1, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history. We’re going to get the criminals out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.” Donald Trump, Oct. 28, 2024 / New York

This quote is cited in a very long list of actions Donald Trump has promised to take as president, compiled in yesterday’s New York Times. We will leave it to readers to take advantage of this refresher course in what our new president has pledged to do. But immigration was obviously a major issue in Trump’s campaign, and probably a major factor in his victory.

A lot has been written about the misleading nature of the statements Trump and his minions have made about the role that undocumented workers play in American life and in our economy, and about how easy it is to blame the most vulnerable in our society for our ills (including highly mediatized but inaccurate claims that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate share of crime in the United States.)

We will not repeat it here, nor go into detail about the reasons that immigrants sacrifice so much—sometimes everything—to seek refuge and new lives in the United States. Those who want to be accurately informed about this have ample opportunity to do so (although, given the large Ecuadorian community in our region, we do recommend this recent piece in The New Yorker.)

However, the threat of mass deportation, which seems very serious (a threatened blitz on Chicago right after the inauguration appears to have been postponed after news of it leaked) could affect Croton in a number of ways. The Chronicle has already published two recent Guest Editorials on this subject, one by our local clergy, and the other by a long-time resident; the latter piece called upon the Croton Board of Trustees to restate and recommit to a position adopted back in 2017 of limited cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Although this policy is currently followed by the Croton Police Department, the village has taken pro-active measures to make our village more welcoming to the immigrant community, including hiring four Spanish speaking officers and a Spanish speaking staff member in the village clerk’s office. As for recommitting to the 2017 policy, the trustees and relevant village committees, such as the IDEA Advisory Committee, are currently discussing that, or plan to soon.

Meanwhile, local and state officials are discussing ways to protect immigrant students from aggressive actions by federal agents, and New York officials (the Attorney General, the Commissioner of Education, and the Governor) have this month issued a statewide guidance to school districts on safeguarding the rights of immigrant students.

These efforts to create new “safe havens” for undocumented children, whose rights to go to school are guaranteed under both state and federal law, could end up being a real test for opponents of Trump’s threatened policies should immigration authorities try to come into Westchester County and even into small communities like ours. We would like to think that those conservative villagers who are now cheering on mass deportations in large cities like Chicago or New York will pause before supporting mass raids into Croton, or even attempts to pick off members of our community who work and live, here but do not have official documentation to do so.

DEI and the Parents Defending Education lawsuit against the Croton-Harmon district.

Nicole Neily, president of PDE

When the conservative group Parents Defending Education (PDE) sued the Croton-Harmon school district last June, asking on behalf of three local parents that all of the district’s anti-harassment, anti-bullying, and DEI policies be declared invalid and unconstitutional, a member of the school board was heard to loudly declare in the Black Cow, “Bring it on!”

Nevertheless, we warned that the pro-Trump billionaires behind this group had to be taken seriously, especially given the current heavy conservative bias of the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus while the case was quickly dismissed by a federal judge—an immediate outcome PDE had actually sought so they could get it up to higher courts—an appeal of that dismissal is currently pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. We also pointed out at the time that PDE and its allied organizations were basically shopping for a case that might get SCOTUS interested in taking up the basic issues of whether DEI and anti-harassment policies—for example, those that would protect transgender students from bullying—were violations of the First Amendment rights of students and parents who do not fully support LGBTQ+ rights.

Evidence of this strategy was already clear in PDE’s lawsuit against a school district in Ohio, involving the use of pronouns, in which the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the organization and parents but PDE pledged to appeal; and now, just two days ago, the strategy has succeeded in getting similar issues before the Supremes in a Maryland case, where parents want to be able to opt their children out of lessons involving gender and sexuality.

In other words, in a fairly short time, PDE and like-minded organizations have achieved their original goal, which was to get these issues before the highest court in the land, stuffed with justices who are likely to be sympathetic with their arguments.

It should be obvious what this might mean for the Croton-Harmon school district and many others across the nation. If the U.S. Supreme Court issues a broad enough ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in the Maryland case or others that it might agree to accept, our local district policies—or at least some of them—could end up being struck down.

Of course, such a result would largely be the fruit of the first Trump administration, during which he appointed three conservative justices to the Court; but Trump will no doubt have the opportunity to appoint even more district and appeals court judges who will be responsible for interpreting SCOTUS decisions.

So far the Croton-Harmon district does not seem to have wavered in its support for new DEI policies which must still be formally approved, although the Board of Education has delayed adopting them for many months for reasons that are not entirely clear. If the Second Circuit reinstates the PDE lawsuit, the district may have a big legal fight on its hands, if it has the stomach for it.

Bird flu: Is a new pandemic on the way?

As we know, the Covid-19 pandemic was probably the most traumatic event to ever hit Croton, not only as an immediate danger to health and life but as a political episode with many ramifications. In some ways, the village may never fully recover from the sharp divisions the pandemic created in our community. The very unfortunate nationwide politicization of this major threat (including politicization of its origins) in some cases led to minimizing the fact that more than a million Americans died from the disease. In the process, many came to distrust both the government response and the scientific experts, sometimes justifiably so.

The experts can be wrong, of course, although we would suggest giving greater value to their judgments than to those who are simply uninformed, even if the latter are sometimes quite vocal. But right now the experts are telling us that while the risks of a new pandemic from bird flu are currently “low,” they are also saying that the current version of the H5N1 virus circulating in birds and mammals—and in humans, who have been the subjects of dozens of cases in the U.S.—are only one or two mutations away from evolving into a form that could be deadly to people. (The last epidemic of bird flu, although small in numbers, led to a human mortality rate of nearly 50%.)

In early 2020, for largely political reasons, Trump downplayed the risk from the Covid-19 virus. His ambivalence about how seriously to take it not only permeated the remainder of his term and probably contributed to his November 2020 loss to Joe Biden, but also has profoundly influenced the attitudes of Trump’s supporters to the present day.

Let’s hope that bird flu does not turn into a new, and possibly more deadly pandemic. But if it does, how the second Trump administration handles it would affect all of us, and our very lives, including here in Croton.

The Chronicle will continue to follow all of these issues, and many others that are likely to come up during Donald Trump’s presidency. Please support local journalism either by subscribing, or by taking out a paid sub if you have not already. See the buttons below.

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