Zohran Mamdani Explains How He’ll Handle the ‘Assault’ from Trump As NYC Mayor
New York City mayoral favorite Zohran Mamdani broke down how he planned to withstand attacks from President Donald Trump in the even that he wins the election.
Since Mamdani stunned the political world with his upset win over Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic Party’s primary, the White House has taken a keen interest in the outcome of November’s election. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has run on promises of rent stabilization and city-owned grocery stores in an effort to make the city more affordable. Trump, along with countless other prominent critics, have labeled Mamdani a communist and endorsed Cuomo — now running as an independent.
Last week, the Trump administration froze $18 billion in infrastructure projects in New York to ensure the money wasn’t going toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Similar practices are expected from the White House should Mamdani win, as Trump has repeatedly threatened he’ll be less than cooperative with New York if the city elects him.
On Friday’s episode of The New Yorker Interview, host David Remnick asked Mamdani what he’d do to combat an “assault” from Washington. The assemblyman said:
I think that will be an inevitability. We have to treat it as such, as opposed to something that’s simply just possible. This is an administration that looks at the flourishing of city life, wherever it may be across this country, as a threat to their entire political agenda; and part of that is because it is an illustration of everything that they claim to be fighting against, and the ways in which this city should and could be the model of an alternative to a Trump-style politics. But part of the issue is that, for too long, we’ve been the answer as to how we got Donald Trump as the president.
Remnick pressed further, asking what specifically Mamdani would do in his power as mayor. According to Mamdani, the answer is to simply “fight back”:
Too often, we treat Donald Trump’s pronouncements as if they are law simply by virtue of the fact that they come from his mouth when, in fact, what we are often discussing are the most obvious overreaches and illegalities that we’ve seen in modern politics. But part of the ways in which that you actually stop that is that you’re willing to fight that. And I think we’ve seen in his first term and his second term that what Donald Trump most often respects is strength. It is not cowardice. It’s not collaboration like we saw from [Mayor Eric Adams], or coordination like we’re seeing from Cuomo. It’s someone who’s willing to stand up and fight back.
And the last point I’ll just say is that we cannot allow this to become a contest between two individuals. Donald Trump suspending these kind of infrastructure grants, Donald Trump speaking about deploying the National Guard — it’s not about Donald Trump versus myself. It’s about Donald Trump versus the city. And that’s why you need someone leading the city that can build a front of New Yorkers who have a wide variety of politics, but are united on the question of this city, and the importance of it, and the fact that the federal government shouldn’t be attacking the very existence of it.
Watch the full clip above.
