Trump Wildly Claims All Federal Funding ‘Comes Through the White House’ — Threatens to Cut Off NYC

President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday that he can unilaterally take away Congressionally appropriated funding for New York City whenever he wants, after and if Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor.

Trump raged against Mamdani, the Democratic Party’s nominee for mayor, during a Q&A with members of his cabinet and the president of Argentina – who he is both endorsing and giving a $20 billion bailout.

“We have a communist who’s 33 years old, doesn’t know a damn thing. Practically, he’s never worked a day in his life, and he’s sort of caught on, right? And I’m not going to send a lot of money to New York—I don’t have to. You know, the money comes all through the White House, and if they’re going to be sending us stupid policies—I mean, communist policies, which have been proven for thousands of years don’t work—we’re not going to ruin one of our great cities, because we’ll make that great,” Trump said, adding:

We will clean up the crime in about 30 days. It took 12 days to do Washington, D.C., so New York is bigger. And Chicago—we’ve already made a lot of progress despite fighting from the government—but Chicago is doing great. Memphis is doing really great. We have great support there from the political leaders.

They said, “Please come in and clean up crime,” and we love it. In one week, Memphis is so good, it’s so much better. Within a month, we’ll have that into a safe city again, and all of these cities we want to clean them up. We don’t like that opposition, but if somebody is going to be a communist mayor of New York, it is a fluke if he gets in. There are a lot of failed people that he’s running against. I mean, we have failed—you have inferior candidates or something—because it’s impossible to think that New York City can have a communist mayor.

“He’s a communist. He’s not a socialist, by the way. There’s a big difference. He’s a communist. He’s down and dirty. He’s a communist. He hates police. He wants to get rid of all police. I mean, how can a policeman– He hates Jewish people, and yet he’s got Jewish people supporting him. He hates the Jewish people. So it comes through the White House. The funding for New York and for every place comes through to the White House,” Trump continued, launching his wild attack on Mamdani.

“And I’m very generous, and I was always very generous with New York, even when you had opposition there, but I was also very generous. But I wouldn’t be generous to a communist, a guy that’s going to take the money and throw it out the window, because you’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. And we’re not going to let somebody get into office and squander the taxpayer money from this country,” Trump concluded.

During the government shutdown, the Trump administration has cut off federal funding to Democrat-controlled cities – totaling $28 billion as of last Friday. Trump restored some funding for police and counter terrorism to New York City last week after Republicans cried foul. Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress is meant to appropriate federal funds, although federal agencies have taken a larger role in dispersing those funds in recent years.

Watch the clip above via CNN.