Ask A Genius 1562: Post-Election Reality: Trump Backlash, Shutdown Fallout, AI Boom
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/05
So, elections, who won?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks about winners. Rick Rosner argues everyone won, reading a repudiation of Trump and Biden’s communications failure. He notes the record shutdown, strained SNAP benefits, and economic risk. AI spending could hit $1.5 trillion in 2025, with possible bubble correction. On Mamdani, Rosner expects pushes for free subways and buses and some rent control, doubts childcare feasibility, and shrugs at billionaire scare talk. He rejects claims Curtis Sliwa cost Andrew Cuomo victory. For the right’s reaction, he predicts recycled “rigged” narratives, stressing voter fraud is indeed vanishingly rare, often confusion, citing one-in-a-million estimates and punitive, deterring sentences.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, elections, who won?
Rick Rosner: Everybody won. It feels like a bit of a repudiation of Trump—certainly a reaction to the shutdown and the chaos in the weeks before the elections. It might support the argument that, during the four years Trump wasn’t president, people forgot what a dick he is. Plus, this time around, he’s even more of a dick.
Of course, it was Biden’s huge failure to talk to Americans—to explain himself and what was going on. Things weren’t that terrible under Biden, but his staying in the White House and letting Republicans dominate the conversation about what America was like let them characterize everything as terrible and his fault. Meanwhile, Trump was out in front of everyone several times a week, if not more.
So, it’s a year until the actually important elections—the midterms. We can’t keep momentum for a year, but Trump can keep on screwing up for a year.
The shutdown continues and has now set a record as the longest in U.S. history. Roughly 42 million Americans rely on SNAP, and in November they’re slated to receive about half their usual benefits during the shutdown, with delays in some states. Inflation could tick up and unemployment could rise if the stoppage drags on.
The world is on pace to spend nearly $1.5 trillion on AI in 2025—not subscriptions, actual building and deployment. That’s roughly a 50% jump from 2024 levels.
There’s no guarantee those investments pay off quickly. Fifty million high school students using AI to write papers on The Scarlet Letter doesn’t generate returns. What matters is whether businesses buy and integrate AI services at scale—something investors are still nervous about. Even Motley Fool writers have been cheek-asking ChatGPT when an “AI bubble” might pop; the bot punted, then offered a jokey date in September 2026 after being pressed.
If a bubble does pop, the market could correct fifteen, twenty, maybe twenty-five percent. Then we rebuild—but it probably won’t make people thrilled with the current political leadership.
Jacobsen: What do you think Mamdani will do in his first week, month, or year?
Rosner: I don’t even know when he takes over. I don’t know if they’ve got a January start date like they do for national offices. He might try, but I’m not sure how much power he actually has to get the things he wants done.
He wants to make buses and subways free. They currently cost $2.90 per trip, which is already a huge bargain. But if you do two round trips a day, that’s about twelve dollars daily—roughly four thousand dollars a year just on public transit. That’s equivalent to a month’s rent in New York.
I would think that would be one of the first things he tries, since it affects the most people. I don’t think it would lead to chaos on public transit. He’s also going to try to put in some rent control. Of course, landlords will hate that, but New York already has some pretty good rent control in place.
I don’t know how he plans to offer free childcare—I don’t see how you do that. So I think he’ll have to start with the things that are feasible. Of the ideas he’s mentioned, making subways and buses free seems the most doable.
Jacobsen: Anything revolutionary?
Rosner: Not that he can pull off. The mayor doesn’t really run New York—money runs New York.
Over on Fox News, they were talking about how, if whatever he does chases billionaires out of the city, he’d lose tax revenue, making it harder to fund his plans. But I don’t think he’ll chase billionaires away. That’s just Fox trying to scare people.
The billionaires don’t care if poorer people ride the buses for free.
I don’t think he’s an idiot who’ll do things that damage the city. He’s a thirty-four-year-old charismatic guy who ran against an old sex creep and Curtis Sliwa—whose wife you interviewed. Sliwa’s been running for office for what feels like forever.
Jacobsen: Do you think Curtis Sliwa split the vote enough that, if he hadn’t run, Cuomo might have had a chance?
Rosner: No, I don’t think so. Mumdani won by eight or nine percent. Sliwa got about six percent, I think. Even if Sliwa had dropped out and told his supporters to vote for Cuomo—which assumes every single one of them would have listened, and they’re already odd enough to vote for Sliwa—it still wouldn’t have been enough to change the outcome.
Jacobsen: What do you think will happen with the radicalized base on the right in response to this?
Rosner: What about the radicalized base?
Jacobsen: If people talk about the radicalized “woke” left, what happens to the radicalized “based” right after these election results? Both camps exist and have their distastefulness manifest in different ways.
Rosner: I’ve already seen what they’ll do. They’ll do what they always do—what they’ve done throughout the Trump era—which is claim the vote was rigged.
Proposition 50 is winning in California by nearly 65 to 35, not far from two to one, and there are still people saying the vote was rigged. They’re idiots.
They claim that millions of undocumented immigrants were brought to California to vote illegally. It’s complete nonsense. The Heritage Foundation runs the Voting Integrity Project, which collects statistics on incidents of fraudulent voting. Even though they’re major proponents of voter suppression—disguised as “voter security”—their own data show that only about one vote in a million is cast fraudulently.
It’s a stupid crime with a tiny upside—you get to cast one extra vote—and a huge downside: you can go to prison for three, four, even five years in states like Texas that want to make examples of people. It’s not something people do unless they’re complete idiots, which often means they’re MAGA types. Not often, since it doesn’t happen often, but among the few cases that exist, a fair percentage are MAGA supporters.
Sometimes it happens because people are confused or misinformed. There was one woman in Texas who went to prison for five years. She was out on parole, asked officials if she could vote, was told yes, and voted. It turned out she couldn’t. They sent her back to prison. She wasn’t trying to break the law—she genuinely thought she was exercising her right to vote.
It’s possible that undocumented immigrants here and there might misunderstand the process and register, but it’s extremely rare. There are dumb people of every political stripe, but it’s not a common crime.
People like Kelly Ward and—what’s her name—Carrie Lake, that’s it, the former Arizona candidate—those types will always claim elections are fixed or rigged. But no, not in a million years.
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