As Zohran Mamdani tries to make his opposition to President Trump a central message in his campaign for mayor of New York, he will spend this week highlighting the ways he believes the president’s agenda is hurting the city.
What Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, is calling a Five Boroughs Against Trump tour will start on Monday in Manhattan with endorsements from three Democrats: Ruth Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president; Keith Powers, a City Council member; and Harvey Epstein, a state assemblyman.
He will visit Brooklyn on Tuesday, Staten Island on Wednesday, the Bronx on Thursday and Queens on Friday, drawing attention at each stop to parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda, including cuts to food stamps and Medicaid and immigration raids, his campaign said.
As he heads into the general election in November, Mr. Mamdani is trying to position himself as the strongest candidate to stand up to Mr. Trump. He faces a crowded field of challengers, including former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams, who are running as independents.
Mr. Trump has called Mr. Mamdani a “Communist Lunatic.” (Mr. Mamdani is a democratic socialist.)
The tour comes as Mr. Mamdani has criticized Mr. Cuomo over his relationship with Mr. Trump. He has argued that Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Adams and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, all have ties to the president.
“The fact is that the president has three candidates in this race — one that he’s directly been in touch with, another that he bailed out of legal trouble and now functionally controls, and the final one literally being a member of the same Republican Party,” Mr. Mamdani said in a recent radio interview.
The New York Times reported last week that Mr. Trump and Mr. Cuomo spoke directly about the mayor’s race on a recent phone call, according to three people briefed on the conversation. Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Trump have denied doing so.
In a closed-door meeting on Wednesday with business leaders, Mr. Cuomo said he was not “personally” looking for a fight with the president and jokingly compared their yearslong relationship to a “dysfunctional marriage.”
Mr. Cuomo, who lost the Democratic primary to Mr. Mamdani in June, said in an interview on Sunday that he agreed with Mr. Mamdani that Mr. Adams was a “wholly owned subsidiary” of Mr. Trump. But the former governor said that he and Mr. Sliwa did not get along with Mr. Trump.
“Nobody has fought with Trump more than I have,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Mr. Adams has tried to work with Mr. Trump on some issues while opposing him on others. The mayor received a wave of criticism in New York after the Trump administration dropped federal corruption charges against him.
Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, said in a statement that a mayor was “supposed to work with presidents — not wage war against them.”
“Turning the mayor’s office into a partisan battlefield might score headlines, but it costs New Yorkers opportunities, resources and progress,” he said.
Mr. Sliwa has encouraged Mr. Trump not to get involved in the mayoral election and has argued that doing so would help Mr. Mamdani to be viewed as the anti-Trump candidate in a city where the president is unpopular.
“Every day it’s Trump versus Zohran Mamdani, it’s a good day for Zohran Mamdani,” Mr. Sliwa said last week.
Mr. Mamdani’s event in Manhattan on Monday will be held at the headquarters for Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed him, and will include Representative Jerrold Nadler, who endorsed him after he triumphed in the primary.
Many prominent New York Democrats have embraced Mr. Mamdani since the contentious primary. Some have not, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader.
Laura LoBianco Sword, the chairwoman of the Staten Island Democratic Party, said last week that she now supported Mr. Mamdani after backing Mr. Cuomo in the primary.
Ms. Messinger, who was the Democratic candidate for mayor in 1997, supported Brad Lander, the city comptroller, in the primary. During that contest, Mr. Lander made a cross-endorsement with Mr. Mamdani, providing key support from a Jewish leader after Mr. Mamdani faced attacks over his criticism of Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Ms. Messinger is Jewish and once served as president of the American Jewish World Service, an antipoverty nonprofit.
Mr. Cuomo has focused on attacking Mr. Mamdani, including for living in a rent-stabilized apartment in Queens while making $142,000 a year as a state assemblyman. Mr. Cuomo said on Sunday that he would propose “Zohran’s Law” to “keep the rich out of New York’s affordable housing.”
New York has close to a million rent-stabilized apartments, for which annual increases are determined by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which is controlled by the mayor. Mr. Mamdani has said he will freeze the rents on those units as mayor.
Mr. Cuomo said on Sunday that the law he plans to propose, either at the state or city level, would require that when a rent-stabilized apartment became vacant, there would be an income cap for the next renter. He said that an apartment that costs $2,500 per month might have an income cap of $82,000.
“If this is your affordable housing stock, make sure it goes to the people who need it,” he said.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration.
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