He has already upended the federal government and roiled global affairs. But in the opening weeks of his second term, President Trump is moving no less decisively to assert his vision over a far more familiar venue: New York City.
In just the last few days, Mr. Trump has threatened to “kill” his hometown’s ambitious congestion pricing program. He said he was prepared to sue to challenge its sanctuary city laws. The president even took time to muse to The New York Post about the eradication of bike lanes.
The most dramatic intervention yet came on Monday, though, when the Justice Department moved to dismiss federal corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams. The action quickly set off a wave of anxiety among Democrats that City Hall, once a locus of resistance to the Trump administration, had essentially been co-opted by the president.
Mr. Trump had said repeatedly that Mr. Adams, a Democrat, was treated unfairly. But the Justice Department gave a more telling rationale. A memo explained that Mr. Adams deserved a reprieve so he could dedicate himself to Mr. Trump’s “immigration objectives.”
Like much of Mr. Trump’s dizzying flurry of orders and dictums, it remains to be seen what larger imprimatur the president will leave on the city where he built his name and career.
Yet decades after he put up his first skyscraper in Manhattan, even his critics now concede that Mr. Trump has emerged as a full-fledged political force reshaping some of New York City’s most significant policy debates.
“I think he sees opportunities today in a way that he didn’t eight years ago,” said Howard Wolfson, a Democratic operative and former deputy mayor under Michael R. Bloomberg.
“There’s not a lot of effective resistance at the moment,” Mr. Wolfson added, saying that an “unprecedentedly weak mayor and governor” had left an “enormous power vacuum.”
Mr. Trump is far from the first president to take an interest in American cities. His predecessors set national policies that determined the course for urban housing, transportation and policing, from Boston to Los Angeles.
He himself began his first term promising to launch a renaissance in New York, only to leave for Florida and let his interest lapse.
But Mr. Trump’s second term represents an unmistakable — and to some, alarming — shift for the leader of a party that long prided itself on yielding authority to state and local governments. He has shown himself uncommonly willing to personally wade into what was once local policy, including water management in arid California, municipal immigration practices in Illinois and athletic programs in school districts across the country.
And nowhere is Mr. Trump poised to play a greater role than New York City.
A Queens native who made his reputation on the Manhattan skyline and in the city’s tabloids, Mr. Trump spent decades hawking a vision of New York, retains a financial interest in its success and imported its clubhouse-style politics to Washington. Now, he has the power to impose that vision — or at least try.
“When I left, New York was the place you wanted to be, and now people just don’t speak well of it,” Mr. Trump said during one of his final campaign rallies, held at Madison Square Garden. “But we’re going to bring it back, and we’re going to bring it back strong.”
The city’s Republican minority has enthusiastically welcomed the presidential interest. After years of unfettered Democratic rule, they view Mr. Trump, who still speaks regularly to old New York friends, as among the only forces capable of curbing liberal excesses on immigration, transportation policy and policing.
They also expect him to act on a bipartisan priority near to New Yorkers’ hearts: raising the federal cap on the state and local income tax deduction that Mr. Trump himself signed into law in 2017.
“New York has fallen into a cesspool,” one of those friends, John Catsimatidis, said in an interview.
A billionaire grocery and oil refining magnate, Mr. Catsimatidis has known Mr. Trump for almost half a century since they met on the board of the city’s Police Athletic League. He said he urged the president to reconsider Mr. Adams’s legal case, and hopes he does not stop there.
“Trump, don’t forget, he built the ice rink. He is New York,” said Mr. Catsimatidis, who was dining with Mr. Adams Monday night when news of the dismissal came down. “The only thing that is going to bring back New York is Donald Trump.”
Many New Yorkers reject such a bleak assessment of the city, and official statistics on crime and the economy suggest a more nuanced picture.
But if Mr. Trump’s message largely fell flat with a more liberal majority of New Yorkers in 2016 and 2020, there are signs that some residents of a city beleaguered by pandemic-era disruption are newly listening.
New York City still rejected Mr. Trump overwhelmingly in the 2024 election, but he won 95,000 more votes than he did in 2020, making noticeable gains in working-class Latino and Asian neighborhoods. A recent Siena College survey found that Mr. Trump was more popular than he had ever been in the state, though his image was still underwater.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has moved with greater brazenness to advance his cause, whether for the Middle East or Midtown. During his first term, the president mostly threatened to withhold a gusher of federal funds as leverage; this time, he has actually begun doing so and a Republican-controlled Congress seems unwilling to intervene.
New York is particularly vulnerable. City and state leaders rely on billions of dollars in federal grants to maintain public housing and the subways and to balance public budgets. Mr. Trump has indicated that he is ready to hold much of that back if New York leaders do not agree to assist his migrant deportation plans or curtail congestion pricing.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, appears to be taking Mr. Trump’s threat seriously, especially on congestion pricing.
The tolling plan only took effect in January, after decades of preparations. Early data suggest it has helped reduce traffic and generate needed revenue to upgrade New York’s aging subway system and commuter trains. But Mr. Trump has said he might revoke federal approval.
The two leaders have spoken at least twice about a path forward by phone, and the talks have begun to effect other policy proposals. In one notable example, Ms. Hochul called off a vote on Monday on legislation in Albany that would have effectively narrowed Republicans’ House majority for months, endangering Mr. Trump’s agenda. She told fellow Democrats she was doing it in an attempt to gain leverage with Mr. Trump on congestion pricing.
Mr. Adams has been more compliant. Though he has long shared some of Mr. Trump’s political instincts, the mayor refashioned himself into an outright ally in recent months as he angled for Mr. Trump to intervene to help resolve five federal counts of bribery conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.
The benefits for Mr. Trump are clear. Even before the Justice Department moved to drop the charges, Mr. Adams had signaled that he would try to work with the president’s border czar and iron out any difference he had with Mr. Trump privately. On Monday, the mayor warned senior city officials that publicly commenting on the Trump administration’s immigration policies could jeopardize federal funds for public housing, schools and infrastructure.
In televised remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Adams acknowledged that he had work to do “to regain your trust” and insisted he had always acted in the city’s best interest. But he neither mentioned Mr. Trump nor offered any words to directly reassure allies about his intentions.
Mr. Adams’s closeness to Mr. Trump may yet cause an electoral backlash among Democratic primary voters this year, when the mayor faces re-election. For now, though, fellow Democrats fear it will allow the president to run roughshod over the city.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat who helped impeach Mr. Trump twice during his first term, said he was particularly worried that the Justice Department had moved to withdraw charges “without prejudice,” allowing them to re-evaluate the case at a later date.
“The president’s got the mayor on a short leash,” he said. “If the mayor doesn’t behave exactly as the president wants, he can have the Justice Department reinstate the charges.”
One of Mr. Adams’s primary rivals, Zellnor Myrie, managed to put Mr. Trump’s posture in still more vivid terms in a letter to the judge overseeing the mayor’s case: “The direction to dismiss without prejudice is not a reprieve for Mr. Adams,” he wrote, “it is a gun to the head of the legitimate democratic governance of the City of New York.”
The post An Emboldened Trump Seeks to Bend New York City to His Will appeared first on New York Times.
