Zohran Mamdani will be the unlikeliest mayor in New York City history. A 34-year-old backbench state assemblyman and self-proclaimed democratic socialist, Mamdani ran on the promise of affordability and was declared the winner not long after polls closed tonight. On his path to victory, he thrilled young voters in a way that few Democrats have in years. But perhaps no one was more delighted by his election than President Donald Trump.
Mamdani’s victory was his second decisive win over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom he defeated in the Democratic primary in June. (The current mayor, Eric Adams, skipped the primary, choosing instead to run as an independent, but dropped out of the race in September.) Cuomo’s father, Mario, another former governor, famously said, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose,” and Mamdani will soon have to trade his lofty rhetoric for the gritty municipal work of ensuring public safety, digging out from snowstorms, and grappling with ever-widening income inequality. Previous New York mayors, of course, have had to take on those tasks, but Mamdani will also face a challenge unique to him: a brewing war with the president of the United States, himself a New Yorker.
Trump can no longer vote in the city that he called home for more than seven decades, but he got involved in the race anyway. He erroneously declared Mamdani a Communist and gave the younger Cuomo an eleventh-hour endorsement that the candidate, running as an independent, didn’t really want. But Trump will offer more than antagonistic rhetoric; he’s promising dramatic action, too. He warned in a social-media post last night that he would slash federal funding to the nation’s largest city because he had a “strong conviction that New York City will be a Total Economic and Social Disaster should Mamdani win.” And, his aides tell me, making good on that threat would be just the beginning.
New York City—a Democratic stronghold that soundly spurned Trump—has so far largely been spared the president’s wrath. That’s because Trump has been waiting. So far this year, he has defied mayors’ wishes—and court orders—to send National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. He has offered various defenses for the deployments—protecting ICE agents and fighting crime being the top ones—but has deliberately held back on doing so in New York. He wanted to see who won the mayor’s race, his advisers have told me. Trump privately made clear to them that, were Mamdani to triumph, he would use that outcome as justification to deploy troops in a city that, he said, would be left inherently unsafe under socialist rule.
Trump’s budget director, as part of the ongoing federal-government shutdown, already froze money to a pair of key New York infrastructure projects—a much-needed train tunnel under the Hudson River to New Jersey and an extension of the long-awaited Second Avenue Subway. The president has asked his aides to explore cutting federal funding to other city ventures. He’s also declared that the federal government may step in to undercut the city’s popular congestion-pricing toll program for no other reason than to inflict political pain. An ICE raid on Canal Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown last month was considered a sign of things to come, as administration officials prepare to make New York a high-profile epicenter of immigration enforcement. Trump is desperate to preserve his party’s control of Congress next year; he sees New York—and Mamdani—as an effective foil.
Mamdani told me today that he is prepared. “These are threats, many of which go far beyond the power of the presidency, and this is money that New Yorkers are owed,” he told me. “We’re going to use the courts; we’re going to use the bully pulpit; we’re going to use every tool at our disposal to stand up for our city.”
This isn’t the first time a president has turned on New York. Fifty years ago last week, one of New York’s most venerable institutions put forth its most famous headline. On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News declared “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” after President Gerald Ford opted against bailing out the Big Apple during its fiscal crisis. Ford’s edict was met with fury in the five boroughs and may have helped cost him the election the following year, but it was at least based on some principle; he thought that New York’s spending was out of control and that it would set a bad precedent for Washington to bail out any one city. (He also never said the words “drop dead.”) And Ford eventually gave in; he later signed off on $2.3 billion in federal loans to help New York steady itself.
Trump’s attacks appear to be based far more on political opportunism and personal pique. He has always had a love-hate relationship with his native city. He was born in Queens—the same borough in which Mamdani lives, but about 10 miles away—and carried with him the insecurities of an outer-borough real-estate developer who longed to cross the East River and work and live in the glamour of Manhattan. But even after he achieved success, he was still never truly accepted by the city’s blue bloods, who found him too vulgar and too gauche. Trump’s resentment helped fuel his eventual foray into politics. But even as he captured the presidency in 2016, he received just 10 percent of the vote in Manhattan. In his first term, he abandoned plans to frequently come back to Trump Tower, and his rare journeys home were met with protest. He criticized then-Mayor Bill de Blasio but largely ignored the city. In late 2020, he became a Florida resident.
But the Trump Organization is still based in Manhattan. The president has stocked his administration with New Yorkers, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Lee Zeldin, who leads the EPA. He keeps tabs on his old city, often through a variety of friends who remain there. And, those close to him tell me, he was as surprised by Mamdani’s rise as the rest of the political world.
A few days after Trump won last November, Mamdani went to the Bronx to try to talk to shell-shocked New Yorkers about the election. Few people recognized him, even though he had launched his campaign several weeks earlier, and barely anyone stopped to talk to him. He returned to that same street this week and was thronged by hundreds of voters after he spent a year running an invigorated, social-media-friendly campaign. Mamdani had energy and charm, and no shortage of ideas that were quickly turned into easy-to-digest slogans such as “Free buses” and “Freeze the rent.” He relentlessly focused on affordability and economic issues, a welcome message in a city with an extraordinarily high cost of living and stark income stratification.
He had faced real detractors, including some within his own party. Some of his ideas were considered outlandish and impractical, and observers pointed to the struggles of some progressive mayors in other cities. Even some who admired Mamdani’s campaign were fearful that he would be elevated by Republicans as the face of the left, proof that Democrats were far too liberal for average Americans. He took criticism for his previous support of the “Defund the police” movement and for defending the pro-Palestinian slogan “Globalize the intifada.” (He has since stepped back from both sentiments, though a segment of the city’s Jewish population views him with suspicion.)
After the primary, Mamdani moved a little toward the center and began to quietly consult with experts and moderate technocrats, including some who worked for former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Late in the campaign, the race took a dark turn into Islamophobia as some on the right evoked the September 11 terror attacks to decry the possibility of the city’s first Muslim mayor. Mamdani was also slow to pick up national endorsements, even from party leaders from his own city. (House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries backed Mamdani less than two weeks ago; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer never did.) But Mamdani was widely admired for how he ran his campaign, a social-media-savvy, say-yes-to-every-interview approach that feels like a model for other ambitious Democrats. Young voters came out in huge numbers, early-voting totals exploded, and the overall turnout was the highest for a mayor’s race in more than 50 years.
Mamdani benefited, of course, from the implosions of two more prominent figures. As hard as it is to recall now, Adams was considered a rising star after his 2021 win, a moderate Democrat who would be tough on crime in a city reeling from the pandemic. But he came to office with few big ideas. His poll numbers were already slipping before he was indicted on bribery and campaign-finance violations for allegedly receiving illegal gifts and campaign contributions from foreign sources and using his office to provide favors. Far worse for his political future was what came next: the perception that he was beholden to Trump after the Department of Justice dropped the charges earlier this year. Adams bowed out of the race in late September and reluctantly endorsed Cuomo.
Cuomo, of course, brought his own baggage. When he made his entry into the race, many expected that his name recognition and wealthy backers would allow him to coast to victory. But he continued to face questions about the series of sexual-harassment allegations that led to his 2021 resignation as governor (he has denied wrongdoing), and during the primary, he ran a listless, desultory campaign. Before a late push in the general election, it was difficult to believe that he even really wanted the job. The Republican in the race, the public-safety activist and longtime gadfly Curtis Sliwa, absolutely wanted the job and refused repeated entreaties from both Cuomo and Trump to quit the race. Had he done so, perhaps Cuomo would have had a shot.
But instead it was a Mamdani coronation. He will take the oath of office on the steps of City Hall on January 1, and start leading a city of nearly 8.5 million people. The five boroughs’ residents-–some excited, some uncertain-–will be watching. And so will one ex–New Yorker about 200 miles south.
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