The Wannabe Trump Running for Congress in N.Y. Is Everything Wrong with Our Politics

By Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben

A crucial question — maybe the crucial question — for America is just how successful Donald Trump has been in poisoning our collective brains. Are we past the point of no return, or is there a chance of meandering back to something even remotely normal? One place that will provide a clue, come November, is New York’s 21st Congressional District. 

It’s the biggest district in New York state, sprawling across the Adirondacks and the St. Lawrence Valley, and stretching down the Hudson as far as Saratoga Springs. It’s not prominent on the list of possible seats Democrats might flip in November because it’s heavily rural, overwhelmingly white, and has long voted Republican. Its current congressperson is Elise Stefanik, who decided against reelection in order to make an (unsuccessful) bid for governor, and who has crushed a series of Democrats in recent campaigns, winning last time by 25 percentage points. Ordinarily, it would be a shoo-in win for the GOP. 

What makes this year less ordinary is that the Republicans, at the instruction of President Trump, bypassed a standard-issue Republican state legislator for the seat and elected Anthony Constantino in a contentious primary. Constantino may be the closest thing to a Trump mini-me that our political system has yet produced. He is a millionaire sticker magnate (you read that right), and he is a name-caller. He refers to his opponents, publicly, as “corrupt pieces of shit.” He calls reporters “dipshits” and “scumbags.” His primary opponent, a Marine veteran, was a “fucking coward.”  

But much as he despises anyone who disagrees with him, he loves one person. His 10-song rap video tribute to President Trump opens with a number called “Thank You Donald Trump” that begins, “Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump” and continues with AI slop depicting Trump in Italy, Mexico, Africa, and other locales where they “love Donald Donald Trump.” This isn’t true, by the way. New polling data released in June shows that around the world respect for America has fallen sharply during Trump’s second term. In Italy, to use Constantino’s example, 73 percent of Italians thought the U.S. was a reliable partner in 2022, and 34 percent of them think so now.  

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It’s the kind of erosion you’d think Constantino might understand, since his district shares a long border with the country — Canada — where that reversal in opinion has been the sharpest, and where the president’s tariffs have done at least as much damage to small-town New York businesses as to the nation Trump would have you believe is our enemy up north. But Constantino is all in. He promises to “work with President Trump to stop drugs, crime, terrorism, and low-wage labor from crossing our northern border,” which is almost as silly as the president’s complaints about wildfire smoke infiltrating the lower 48. Nothing can shake his faith in President Trump, who he gifted a giant bronze statue of, of course, President Trump. He likes Rudy Giuliani too, and the affection is returned. Constantino, the disbarred attorney announced in a video on his campaign website, is “exactly the kind of person we need involved in politics.” 

The only thing standing between Constantino and further glory is the general election in November, when he takes on a dairy farmer from the northwestern corner of the district, Blake Gendebien. I talked to Gendebien the other day, because Third Act — the coalition of older Americans working to defend democracy that I helped found five years ago — had endorsed him. He seemed to me…utterly and entirely normal. Here, for example, is the bio on his campaign website, which you should read to remind yourself of how Americans might have described themselves back in the olden times, i.e. BT: 

I grew up working on the farm, earned a degree in agriculture, and later worked for a farm equipment manufacturer. For the past 22 years, I have owned and operated Twin Mill Farms along with my family – my wife, Carmen, and my three boys, Miles, Truman, and Noah. We’ve come a long way, and Twin Mill Farms currently has over 1,000 acres of land, 500 dairy cows, and 12 full-time employees who work on the farm. 

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I’ve always loved farming, and it is hard work. We don’t get to take days off if we want, or sleep in when it snows. Years at a time, I was out the door at 3:30 a.m., 7 days a week, to milk our cows or feed our herd. That work ethic isn’t uncommon in the North Country. Working hard to make ends meet is expected of us. It was the honor of my life to have that work recognized by my fellow farmers and to be elected as their representative and Vice Chair of the Cooperative Board of Agri-Mark.  

Third Act supports him because we think Gendebien’s policy plans are better for the country and the North Country. He wants to lower costs for Americans by staying out of silly tariff wars with Canada, and to keep rural hospitals open across the district. But truth be told, we also just like the idea that he’s a regular adult. He produces a product that the world needs (milk from his dairy farm), he treats other people like people, and he makes judgments on his own.  

Constantino, obviously, disagrees. To him, Gendebien is a “far left puppet,” which makes about as much sense as his other charge — that he’s“effeminate.” That, of course, is the same tactic Trump and Stephen Miller have been trying against James Talarico in Texas, or at least they were until pictures of his beautiful girlfriend emerged. Against a dairy farmer with three sons it seems even more unlikely to stick. 

But who knows. Maybe Trump has really succeeded in scrambling our brains sufficiently that this stuff will work. I sure hope not — I spent much of my life living in this district, and love its forests and mountains more than any place on Earth. I’ve known its people my whole life, and at least in daily life most of them are nothing like the raving Constantino. Still, I can show you houses now with Confederate flags flying from the porch, here in the district where abolitionist John Brown is buried. There’s one just down the street from my old house, not a mile from a church that was an important stop on the Underground Railroad.  

Before Stefanik, it was a district of very moderate Republicans. She was one too when she was elected, the youngest woman ever to serve in the House (until Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). But Stefanik saw Trump as a ticket to greater things, and groveled much like Constantino, and it very nearly worked out for her — until Trump cancelled her appointment as UN ambassador, and refused to endorse her in the governor’s race. 

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