As the far right has gained ascendancy, and the 2024 election is historicized as a blowout victory for Donald Trump rather than the relatively close contest that it actually was, members of the Democratic establishment and party leadership seem to be settling on the lesson that they will take into the second decade of the Trump era: if you can’t beat him, imitate him.

That is one way to characterize the Democratic leadership’s near-lockstep support of Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York state whom many polls favor to win the Democratic nomination for the New York City mayoral race on Tuesday. Cuomo has racked up endorsements from a generation of centrist Democratic heavyweights: from the former president Bill Clinton, to the South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, to the aggressively pro-Israel New York congressman Richie Torres, to the New York Times, which had pledged not to endorse in local races less than a year ago – only to publish an op-ed praising Cuomo and casting aspersions on his major challenger for the mayoral nomination, the charismatic millennial state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

Cuomo, in many ways, is a Democratic Trump: he is loud, vulgar, ill-informed, resentful, vengeful, contemptuous of his constituents, and accused of being abusive toward women. He is apparently indifferent to corruption and willing to tell lies; he is reportedly obsessed, as Trump is, with getting revenge on his perceived enemies. He is ageing, rich, out of touch and hated by the left, having left the governor’s mansion with a long record of stymieing progressive agenda items in one of the nation’s largest blue states. This is evidently just the kind of candidate the Democratic leadership is looking for.