For Americans, 2026 started with two starkly different visions for the country | Moira Donegan

Zohran Mamdani's optimistic inauguration contrasted in every single way with Trump's brazen invasion of Venezuela

The new year opened with a pair of scenes that illustrated the great divide within the US and the stakes of the ongoing contest over its future. On 1 January, in a star-studded inauguration ceremony of uncommon pomp and optimism, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, was sworn in as the new mayor of New York and delivered a speech that declared the era of small government and centrist inhibition to be over, and a new dawn of ambitious social welfare programs to begin.

The new mayor's inauguration is the culmination of a decade of growth from the Democratic party's insurgent left wing, and results from a feat of organizing within the country's largest city that relied upon mass mobilization from downwardly mobile and economically disenfranchised millennial and gen Z voters. It was hailed as a generational shift in US politics, inaugurating a new, 21st-century vision for the party.