It’s rare to have star power so potent that you can turn even a municipal budget process into a hero’s journey.
Yet, when Mayor Zohran Mamdani presented New York City’s executive budget last week — typically a dry and routine municipal process — denizens of the internet seemed to determine that New York City’s mayor walked on water.
Kareem Elrefai, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s national political committee, watched bemused as his group chats with friends in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Los Angeles filled with memes about the budget.
“My phone feels like it never ends with buzzing about Zohran,” Mr. Elrefai, 29, said.
There was a dramatic portrait of Mr. Mamdani in a suit, over the words: “Are you enjoying the show? Refill your popcorn.” There was a video of the parenting influencer Ms. Rachel sitting next to to Mr. Mamdani, both pretending to cry — acting out the universal “boo hoo” gesture — which was posted in response to people complaining about the pied-à-terre tax on multimillion-dollar second homes. There was a photo of Mr. Mamdani staring ahead over the caption: “That deficit is now zero.”
“The stereotype that I think is incorrectly placed on the left, particularly the more progressive side of the left, is that there’s ideas and people power and momentum, but then they cannot govern,” said Annie Wu Henry, 30, a social media guru for Democratic candidates. “Mamdani has really shown that stereotype to be wrong.”
But for those deeper in the trenches of New York City’s budget making process, there was something a little head-spinning about how a nitty-gritty, wonky city policymaking issue was becoming a national spectacle. To some, the viral version felt like it had a fairy tale gloss, warping some of the complex and challenging realities of the city’s financial crisis.
“For budget monitors, it’s never surprising when the budget is balanced,” said Ana Champeny, the vice president for research of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission. “That is what has to happen.”
Ms. Champeny noted that for Mr. Mamdani, balancing the $125 billion budget required relying on a series of suboptimal tools to address what the mayor called a crisis of generational proportions. For example, $2.3 billion will come from delaying some pension payments, which still requires buy-in from unions and state approval.
“This is a Band-Aid budget that solves the problem for today, but it will hurt when the city pulls that Band-Aid off,” Ms. Champeny said. “The city’s budget is complicated, and there is a lot of nuance and history. Sometimes when these things get simplified or spread in channels like social media, you lose some of those details.”
In harnessing the power of memes and narrative, Mr. Mamdani is relying on a well-worn playbook — one used by the MAGA world in its over-the-top portrayals of President Trump and by the left in how it uses Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in its messaging.
But for some of Mr. Mamdani’s skeptics, the meme-ification of the city budget distilled a bigger frustration with the mayor’s persistent attempts to both govern the city and constantly broadcast his governing. Shoveling snow, filling potholes and signing executive orders have all become fodder for vertical videos.
This combination of broadcasting and governing means that the mayor’s version of reality goes viral, even when others — especially members of the City Council — have their quibbles with it.
“I’m happy that there’s transparency,” said Kevin Riley, a city councilman from Brooklyn. “But when the right information doesn’t get out there, it doesn’t help us negotiate in good faith.”
Take the mayor’s sparring with the City Council speaker, Julie Menin, over the Council’s proposed budget.
On April 1, Ms. Menin released a video highlighting the Council’s version of the budget, which got just shy of 100,000 views. Then Mr. Mamdani rebutted her, and criticized the speaker by name, in a video that got nearly three million views on X. Members of the City Council took notice and mounted their own social media attack. One city official expressed skepticism that the mayor had found the time to read the Council’s 64-page report before posting his video response.
“I know math is hard,” wrote Virginia Maloney, a member of the council, on X, adding that the Council’s finance team “did the work — digging into the details to find real solutions.”
The online budget wars turned so contentious that those critical of the mayor’s approach to closing the fiscal gap — including by looking to Albany and reversing campaign promises — have their own growing arsenal of memes.
There’s a viral cartoon of Mr. Mamdani saying “I balanced the budget!” while Gov. Kathy Hochul is behind him holding a money sack that reads “billions.” There’s the actor Robert Pattinson in a suit looking smug with the caption: “How socialists feel after spending everyone else’s money (they ran out).”
“It feels as if what’s happening is a little bit of hiding the ball on what the trade-offs are,” said Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of the urban policy think tank Vital City. “What happens when governance becomes a political campaign? What happens is that you have a narrative that sings but may hide the trade-offs.”
Chi Ossé, another highly online figure in city politics, said he had mixed feelings about the increasingly celebrity-driven nature of New York City’s municipal politics, including even something as ill-suited for Instagram as budget making.
On the one hand, he said he was delighted to get calls from friends who live across the country who wanted to learn more about deed theft after the mayor created a new office dedicated to the issue. On the other hand, he realizes that lionizing local politicians can obscure the need for real criticism and accountability.
“We’re not kings or idols and I don’t think any of us should be put on the highest pedestal,” Mr. Ossé said.
Some strategists who worked for former President Barack Obama — another politician who took on icon status, with all the attendant baggage — say they’ve experienced post-traumatic stress disorder thinking back on the clash between celebrity politics and the actual grueling work of policymaking.
Sarada Peri, who worked as a Democratic Senate staffer and then as a speechwriter for Mr. Obama, recalled the split-screen reality of working on passing the Affordable Care Act, while hearing national conversations about it that lacked nuance.
“The actual process of going through the year of Obamacare was painful and difficult and involved all kinds of trade-offs in the sausage making process,” Ms. Peri said. “There was so much caricaturing of the experience, with whatever the equivalent of memes was back then, that bore no relation to reality.”
“The meme might feel fun,” Ms. Peri added. “But is it actually helpful in the long run? I don’t know.”
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about New York City and the Mamdani administration.
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