“It’s an awkward moment to be an American billionaire,” says The Times. Zohran Mamdani, who has just won the Democratic candidacy to become the next mayor of New York City, is calling for their extinction. “I don’t think we should have billionaires,” he told NBC News. Even the merely wealthy are in his crosshairs. Mamdani, 33, plans to partly fund a radical raft of pledges – including a rent freeze and a scheme for government-run grocery stores – by raising income taxes on New York’s millionaires by two percentage points.

As a progressive Muslim immigrant, the young firebrand bills himself as “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare”. Yet, just a few months ago, few people outside the district of Queens he represents had even heard of Mamdani, says The Economist. His unexpected victory over former state governor Andrew Cuomo has “delighted” fellow travellers, but “scared the living daylights out of many well-heeled New Yorkers”. Although unabashedly left-wing (he belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, an activist group that believes “working people” should run things), the former rapper’s most effective calling card is his likeability. His success isn’t “primarily about his ideology. It’s about his talent as a new media-savvy politician,” says Jesse Arm of the Manhattan Institute think tank. Some compare Mamdani’s approachability to that of Ed Koch, a charismatic mayor in the 1970s and 1980s. “New Yorkers deserve a mayor who they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at,” he says.