BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Framing Effect, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 10.9% saturation with 280 hits. Analysis detected 1,861 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,576 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 47.9% and a BS Rank of 45% (10,688 of 19,133 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 55.90% of the article peer group.
Since returning to office, U.S.
President Donald Trump has set out on a warpath against American cities.
His administration has dispatched thousands of masked and armed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to descend on urban centers across the country and deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Portland.
It has clawed back billions of dollars already allocated for municipal infrastructure, throwing long-planned energy and transportation projects into disarray.
And it has withheld and threatened to eliminate federal funding for local housing, homelessness, food, energy, and health programs.
Attacks on national hubs of population, innovation, productivity, and creativity have little precedent in the United States.
But they are hardly novel.
Illiberal leaders worldwide target cities because they often act as strongholds of democracy: fertile ground for popular opposition figures and movements, alternative centers of political power, and examples of the cosmopolitan pluralism against which authoritarians inveigh.
As Trump consolidates executive power and seeks to bend opposition forces to his will, American cities are becoming both the locus of federal pressure and a powerful force of resistance.
By 2050, the United Nations projects that nearly seven out of every ten people will live in cities; some 80 percent of Americans already do.
Urban areas are not only the backdrop of crucial political battles.
They are also increasingly part of the contestations themselves.
Mayors around the globe have found themselves in the cross hairs of illiberal leaders and elected autocrats in their countries.
Pushback from local leaders has protected individual rights and the norms and systems of democracy within their jurisdictions and prevented elected autocrats from fully consolidating their rule.
Leaders of American cities should know that they, too, have the power to alter the course of illiberal consolidation.
ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL
In fully consolidated autocracies such as China and Russia, cities are assets to national leaders.
Led by regime-aligned mayors, they account for a large percentage of economic growth and tax revenue and house the ruling party’s coterie of oligarchs.
The elected illiberal autocrats on the rise today, however, cannot count on cities to share their values or priorities.
Mayors can present a political threat to those leaders as they attempt to consolidate their rule.
Mayors’ intimate connection with their constituents is one reason why.
Surveys consistently find that people around the world trust local leaders more than national ones, regardless of the health of the democracies in which they live.
Gallup polls dating back to the 1970s have repeatedly found that nearly 70 percent of Americans trust their local officials, even as trust in the federal government has steadily fallen to a five-decade low, from 70 percent in 1972 to 38 percent today.
Data from the research agency Eurofound similarly show that the local governments of EU countries are substantially more popular than the national governments.
The dynamic appears to be global: a 2024 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development survey of 30 countries found higher levels of trust in local governments than in national governments.
It is no surprise, then, that mayors often challenge illiberal leaders and candidates in national elections.
Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul popular for his programs that serve low-income women and children, was nominated by the Turkish opposition Republican People’s Party to run against strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the 2028 elections.
In Poland, Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski ran for president in 2020 and 2025 against candidates backed by the Law and Justice party, which had been systematically dismantling Poland’s checks and balances, including its independent media and judiciary, since rising to power in 2015.
Cities birthed democracy, and they still protect it.
National governments often mobilize their machinery to thwart these challenges.
Days before Imamoglu’s nomination, Istanbul University revoked the mayor’s diploma, making him ineligible by Turkish law to contest the presidency.
Then prosecutors charged Imamoglu with 142 offenses, including criminal organization, espionage, and extortion, which carry a total jail term of over 2,000 years.
According to reports from Turkish news outlets, Erdogan’s government has detained 20 other mayors on similarly spurious charges.
Poland’s state media smeared Trzaskowski during his first presidential run in 2020 as representing a “powerful foreign lobby” linked to George Soros; a Polish media monitoring organization later found that 87 percent of state broadcasts about Trzaskowski were negative, compared with the nearly 100 percent positive broadcasts about Trzaskowski’s opponent, Polish President Andrzej Duda.
And in President Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Leopoldo López, a mayor from a municipality within Caracas, was barred from running for higher office.
Mayors often draw the ire of elected authoritarian leaders even when they are not vying for national office.
During local elections in 2023, Mozambique’s ruling Frelimo party had Manuel de Araujo, the opposition mayor of the port city of Quelimane, arrested and detained on evidence-free charges that he was disturbing the vote-counting process.
In Bulgaria, mass demonstrations protesting the arrest of Varna Mayor Blagomir Kotsev in July 2025 did little to dissuade Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov from targeting the country’s cities.
The central government continues to punish Vassil Terziev, the popular pro-European mayor of Sofia, by defunding the municipal budget and auditing the city’s finances at an unprecedented rate.
It can be dangerous to be an opposition mayor under an illiberal government.
In 2019, amid a media campaign attacking him as “immoral” for his support of gay rights, Pawel Adamowicz, the mayor of Gdansk, Poland (the birthplace of the Solidarity movement), was fatally stabbed at a Christmas celebration by a man analysts suggested was influenced by the Law and Justice government’s hateful rhetoric.
During Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s six years in power, police officers and masked gunmen killed some 28 mayors.
Duterte would know the power of mayors: he served as mayor of Davao City for two decades prior to his entry into national politics.
LABORATORIES OF DEMOCRACY
Trusted, popular mayors enable cities to act as democratic strongholds that can prevent an elected autocrat from fully consolidating power.
Cities birthed democracy, and they still protect it.
The Athenian statesman Cleisthenes pioneered a democratic system around 500 BC by introducing sweeping reforms to give adult men direct political power.
Independent city-states such as Corinth and Sparta adopted the Athenian formula, laying the foundations for popular civic engagement.
Most mayors who operate in elected authoritarian systems, irrespective of their political leanings, protect basic democratic functions as part of their daily work: they issue permits for protests, protect houses of worship, cooperate with civil society, respond to the essential needs of their constituents, and often oversee elections.
Some, at great personal risk, create civic spaces that bridge differences and give the public a platform to defy authoritarian tactics of division.
After national legislation outlawed Budapest’s annual Pride parade in 2025, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government filed charges against Mayor Gergely Karacsony for organizing the event in defiance of the mandate.In response to the Spanish government’s 2015 Ley Mordaza, which human rights groups dubbed the “Gag Law” for its extensive restrictions on public protest and freedom of speech, Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau turned city-owned buildings into legal sanctuaries for activists protesting the law.
At their best, cities show citizens that government can deliver on making their lives safer and better, in part by creating new ways to involve people in governing.
The city government of Gdansk funds high schools to run student contests around future improvements.
Bologna, Italy, has established collaboration pacts that allow residents to co-manage public parks and abandoned buildings and created labs where citizens co-design urban projects and directly allocate municipal funds toward the initiatives.
And cities across the world have run “participatory budgeting” programs in which residents directly decide how to allocate a portion of the municipal budget.
As Americans and others grow more alienated from increasingly complex and logjammed national bureaucracies, cities allow them to see democracy at work up close.
A city government’s progress—or the lack thereof—is often clearly visible.
As the public response to messaging-savvy mayors such as New York City’s Zohran Mamdani has demonstrated, even small improvements can be powerful antidotes to the cynicism, apathy, and submission that elected authoritarians seek.
BACKSLIDING BACKSTOPS
When hostile central governments threaten cities directly, municipal leaders can contest the worst overreaches.
Mayors can use municipal resources to restrict or defy the predatory actions of a central government.
In 2019, mayors and city councils across the United Kingdom removed central government Home Office immigration officers who had been embedded within their local offices and had used access to municipal databases to build deportation lists.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attempted to outlaw social-distancing measures, large municipalities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo developed their own guidance instead.
Often, mayors work hand in hand with the very civil society groups that illiberal leaders hope to co-opt or destroy.
Warsaw and other cities in Poland have created permanent centers for these groups to gather, sometimes alongside city staff.
Cities can also support peaceful protests that spark the mass public support needed to overcome ruling parties’ built-in advantages in free but not fair national elections.
Despite Hungary’s national ban, the turnout for the 2025 Budapest Pride Parade was ten times the size it had been typically.
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets, accompanied by European mayors and delegations invited by the city in part as a measure to protect protesters against possible violence from regime-aligned law enforcement.
Analysts noted that the open defiance helped shatter what the scholar Lorinc Redei has called Orban’s “aura of invincibility” and drive the voter turnout—close to 80 percent, the highest since Hungary’s transition to democracy in 1989—that defeated Orban in 2026.
In Warsaw, Trzaskowski used digital signs at bus stations and walked with marchers in support of a women’s strike protesting the passage of a draconian national abortion law.
The largest public protests against the Polish government since the fall of communism in 1989, they played a major role in the Law and Justice government’s loss in the 2023 elections.
Protests in Varna against Kotsev’s arrest helped trigger even larger nationwide protests that collapsed Bulgaria’s governing coalition in December 2025.
Even when mayor-led protests do not lead to the ouster of national governments, they can leave a lasting impression on the authoritarians who lead them.
Denis Obando, the popular mayor of Nueva Guinea and a member of Nicaragua’s opposition Liberal Party, explicitly organized his municipality against strongman President Daniel Ortega’s electoral machine during local elections in 2012.
When Ortega artificially flipped the vote tallies to hand the town to the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front, Obando and his supporters took to the streets, using physical ballot counts as proof of fraud to challenge the regime’s control.
When López was banned by the Chávez regime from running for public office in 2008, he brought the government to the human rights court of the Organization of American States and called on Venezuelans to protest the election of President Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor.
The Maduro regime, which imprisoned López for seven years in solitary confinement for a speech he gave criticizing the Venezuelan strongman, was all too aware of the power of a charismatic local leader: prosecutors accused López of having the ability to send subliminal messages to Venezuelans, impelling them to protest.
MUNICIPAL MULTILATERALISM
In a hyperconnected world, collaboration among cities across borders is now essential for local leaders.
Foreign direct investment and trade promotion create jobs, and cities everywhere face similar imperatives to lower energy prices, deliver cleaner air, respond to pandemics, and plan for extreme weather events.
This new municipal multilateralism usually involves exchanging best practices for addressing these challenges.
With authoritarianism on the rise, cities are now also sharing strategies and participating in collective action against democratic backsliding.
In 2019, the mayors of Bratislava, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw came together to form the Pact of Free Cities to protect and promote the “common values of freedom, human dignity, democracy, equality, rule of law, social justice, tolerance and cultural diversity.”
These Visegrad cities have since expanded the network to include dozens of additional cities, including 11 from the United States.
Pact cities coordinated assistance when Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, sending supplies and welcoming refugees.
Warsaw’s mayor recently sent Kyiv electricity generators after continued Russian bombing of the city’s energy grid.
When Imamoglu was arrested last year, the pact issued a statement of solidarity signed by 24 prominent mayors, some of whom traveled to Istanbul.
The show of municipal solidarity helped pierce the Erdogan government’s narrative that the mayor was a corrupt spy.
The urban-national struggle will be a feature of global politics as long as illiberalism remains on the rise.
U.S. mayors are new to this fight, but they, too, are marshaling their power to push back.
Los Angeles and many other cities have channeled funds and resources to groups organizing protection campaigns for residents at risk of deportation.
Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia have taken the Trump administration to court dozens of times, successfully challenging its defunding of local programs, its immigration enforcement tactics, and more.
They are finding their voices, as well.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s testimony before Congress, in March 2025, was one of the earliest examples of official public resistance to the Trump administration’s second-term agenda.
The U.S.
Conference of Mayors has since issued statements about the administration’s indiscriminate tariff regime and ICE deployments.
“As American mayors representing cities large and small—Republican, Democratic and Independent—we state today with a united voice that this turmoil must come to an end,” the organization announced in January, after the deaths of two protesters in Minneapolis.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has warned his colleagues that if they don’t speak out, their city will be next.
Bass, Wu, Frey, and their peers have had no choice but to learn quickly under fire.
But they can take lessons from their international counterparts on what has worked in the past and what federal pressure might yet come.
To withstand the next two and a half years, American cities need to band together.
Mayors can begin by petitioning a new Congress in January 2027 to restrain ICE enforcement and to restore funding for vital programs.
And when Trump eventually leaves office, groups such as the U.S.
Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities should take a page from the Association of Hungarian Local Governments, which was ready to begin conversations with the new government about the restoration of their authority and funding as soon as Orban’s successor, Peter Magyar, declared victory.
Ultimately, the funding cities need for essential services should not be held captive by the federal government.
Again taking cues from abroad, U.S. cities should advocate for creative changes to the tax code that allow them to keep more of the money they generate in federal income tax, alongside local levies.
Warsaw, for example, keeps near 50 percent, and Brazilian cities are guaranteed 22.5 percent share of federal taxes collected.
Insulating municipal budgets, which are often already insufficient, will protect essential services to city residents from the future authoritarians who might target municipalities.
With more and more people coming to live in cities across the world, the urban-national struggle will remain a feature of global politics as long as illiberalism remains on the rise.
In the near future, mayors in countries led by illiberal elected autocrats should expect more suppression.
But when those autocrats are finally deposed, cities, which have kept the flame of liberty lit, will help rebuild democracy again.
Analysis
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