Supreme court announces funding will run out this weekend – as it happened

Hours after Donald Trump hosted Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House today, where he appeared reluctant on supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles, Trump urged Ukraine and Russia to “stop the war immediately” and implied that Moscow keep territory it’s taken from Kyiv.

He made these remarks soon after arriving in Florida, where he’s spending the weekend.

“You go by the battle line wherever it is – otherwise it’s too complicated,” Trump told reporters.

Zelenskyy was hopeful on Friday even though he did not seal an agreement with Trump on the delivery of long-range Tomahawk missiles.

“It’s good that President Trump didn’t say ‘no’, but for today, didn’t say ‘yes’,” Zelenskyy told NBC News’ Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker in an exclusive interview, which will air on Sunday.

Zelenskyy told NBC News that a Ukrainian military equipped with Tomahawk missiles is a real concern for Putin.

Russia is “afraid that United States can deliver Ukraine – I think that Putin [is] afraid that United States will deliver us Tomahawks. And I think that he [is] really afraid that we will use [them]”, he said.

A federal judge has lifted travel restrictions within the US for Mahmoud Khalil, allowing the Palestinian activist to speak at rallies and other events across the country while he fights the Trump administration’s efforts to deport him.

Khalil, who was freed from a Louisiana immigration jail in June after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) amid student and activist roundups, had asked a federal magistrate judge to lift the restrictions that had limited his travel to New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, Louisiana and Michigan.

At a virtual hearing on Thursday, Alina Das, a lawyer for the former Columbia University graduate student who was ordered deported from the US last month, said her client “wants to travel for the very significant first amendment reasons that are at the bottom of this case”.

“He wants to speak to issues of public concern,” Das added, citing the constitutional right to free speech.

But Aniello DeSimone, a lawyer for the government, which opposes the move, said that Khalil “has not provided enough of a reason why he couldn’t attend these and other events telephonically”.

Magistrate judge Michael Hammer agreed to allow Khalil to travel, saying that he was not considered a flight risk and had not violated any of his release conditions.

Read the full story here:

US lawmakers are reacting to Donald Trump commuting the sentence of disgraced former Republican representative George Santos.

“If there’s one, single thing that could sink Trump’s popularity on Long Island, it’s commuting the universally reviled George Santos,” James Skoufis, New York state senator, said in a post on X.

Meanwhile, representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had urged the White House to commute Santos’ sentence, thanked the president on Friday.

“He was unfairly treated and put in solitary confinement, which is torture!!,” she wrote in a post on Friday.

Donald Trump endorsed Ed Gallrein to replace representative Thomas Massie for Kentucky’s fourth congressional district, even though Gallrein has not yet entered the race.

In a Truth Social post Friday evening, Trump praised the former navy Seal for his service and said Gallrein “will fight tirelessly” on issues such as border security and crime.

“I hope Ed gets into the Race against Massie,” Trump wrote. “Unlike ‘lightweight’ Massie, a totally ineffective LOSER who has failed us so badly, CAPTAIN ED GALLREIN IS A WINNER WHO WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN. Should he decide to challenge Massie, Captain Ed Gallrein has my Complete and Total Endorsement. RUN, ED, RUN.”

Massie told Politico that Gallrein is a “failed candidate and establishment hack”.

“After having been rejected by every elected official in the 4th District, Trump’s consultants clearly pushed the panic button with their choice of failed candidate and establishment hack Ed Gallrein,” Massie said. “Ed’s been begging them to pick him for over three months now.”

After Donald Trump announced he had commuted George Santos’s sentence, the former representative’s lawyer told the Associated Press that he was “very, very happy with the decision”.

“The defense team applauds President Trump for doing the right thing,” Andrew Mancilla told the AP. “The sentence was far too long.” He added that it is unclear at this point when Santos will be released.

On Monday, Santos published what he called a “passionate plea to President Trump”, praising him and pleading for “the opportunity to return to my family, my friends, and my community”.

In an open letter published by the South Shore Press on Long Island, Santos said he had been in isolation in prison since late August while the FBI investigated a death threat against him and that the experience left him “in limbo, caught between uncertainty and silence”.

“Mr President, I am not asking for sympathy. I am asking for fairness – for the chance to rebuild,” Santos wrote.

He acknowledged making mistakes in his past and said he has faced his share of consequences and takes full responsibility, but that nobody “deserves to be lost in the system, forgotten and unseen, enduring punishment far beyond what justice requires.

“I want nothing more than to begin again — to contribute, to serve, and to rebuild my life from the ashes of my past.”

The University of Virginia turned down an invitation from Donald Trump to sign onto his administration’s 10-page college compact that would overhaul university policies in return for preferential access to federal funding.

“We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals. The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship,” Mahoney wrote in a message to the Department of Education released Friday afternoon. “A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.”

Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is a proposed agreement that would impose restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and limit international student enrollment.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the first to decline the deal last week, saying it would limit free speech and campus independence. Similar concerns were cited in rejections from Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. Those that have not yet announced a decision are Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas and Vanderbilt University.

The Catholic bishops who chair key committees for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) denounced the Trump administration’s new initiatives expanding access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) measures, warning that IVF is immoral.

“Though we are grateful that aspects of the Administration’s policies announced Thursday intend to include comprehensive and holistic restorative reproductive medicine, which can help ethically to address infertility and its underlying causes, we strongly reject the promotion of procedures like IVF that instead freeze or destroy precious human beings and treat them like property,” bishops Robert Barron, Kevin Rhoades and Daniel Thomas said in a joint statement on Friday.

“Without diminishing the dignity of people born through IVF,” they continued, “we must recognize that children have a right to be born of a natural and exclusive act of married love, rather than a business’s technological intervention. And harmful government action to expand access to IVF must not also push people of faith to be complicit in its evils.”

The comments come after the Trump administration announced on Thursday that it is urging US employers to create new fertility benefit options to cover IVF and other infertility treatments, cutting a deal with the drug manufacturer EMD Serono to lower the cost of one of its fertility drugs and list the drug on the government website TrumpRx.

Following a meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump called on Kyiv and Moscow to “stop where they are” and end the war.

“Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts,” Trump said in a Truth Social post after he met with Zelenskyy. “They should stop where they are. Let both claim Victory, let History decide.”

US cities to resist Trump’s crackdown on dissent with No Kings protests: ‘We will not be bullied’

Donald Trump has promised to crack down on dissent and sent troops into US cities. His allies are claiming antifa, the decentralized antifascist movement, is behind plans to protest. He is looking for any pretext to go after his opponents.

Still, this Saturday, even in cities with troops on the ground, millions of people are expected to march against the president as part of a second “No Kings” protest. The last No Kings protest in June drew several million people across more than 2,000 locations. This time, more than 2,500 cities and towns nationwide are hosting protests.

Organizers expect this Saturday’s protests to draw more people than the June events as the American public sees the excesses of the Trump administration more clearly.

“Their goal is to dissuade you from participating,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US that is a main organizer of No Kings. “That doesn’t mean that everybody has the same threat level. It doesn’t mean that people should ignore what the threats are, but it does mean we’re going to need to see a lot of courage out there on Saturday.”

Read more details about tomorrow’s protests here:

The agency that maintains the US nuclear arsenal will be sending home 80% of its workforce as the government shutdown drags through its 17th day and into the weekend, now the longest full funding lapse in US history.

House armed services committee chair Mike Rogers said in a Friday press conference that the National Nuclear Security Administration had now exhausted its carryover reserves.

“We were just informed last night that the National Nuclear Security Administration, the group that manages our nuclear stockpile, that the carryover funding they’ve been using is about to run out,” said Rogers, a Republican from Alabama. “These are not employees that you want to go home. They’re managing and handling a very important strategic asset for us.”

The NNSA, which operates as part of the Department of Energy, does not directly control operational nuclear weapons – a Pentagon responsibility – but plays a strategic role in keeping warheads secure and functional without conducting explosive tests. The agency also runs non-proliferation programs aimed at preventing nuclear materials from reaching hostile nations or terrorist organizations.

Read the full story here:

Per my last post, it’s worth noting that of all the cities that Vought mentioned in his announcement on social media, they are all Democratic-run cities, in states with Democratic governors.

A reminder of the context surrounding the ongoing hostility over trade.

In recent weeks, China announced that it will tighten exports of rare earth minerals – needed for several every day products like batteries, smartphones and hospital equipment. It’s a move that the White House called “hostile” and “unprovoked”. Trump has since announced a tariff hike of 100% in response, scheduled for 1 November.

This could mean the levies against Beijing total 157%.

When addressing questions about the upcoming meeting with Vladimir Putin, the president said that “these two leaders do not like each other”, adding that “we want to make it comfortable” for everybody. He noted that “one way or the other will be involved in threes, but it may be separated”.

Former President Barack Obama has endorsed the Democratic candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, as voters prepare to go to the polls in less than three weeks.

In a new ad released on Thursday by the campaign of Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate for governor of New Jersey, Obama describes Sherrill as a “mom, who will drive down costs for New Jersey families” adding that “as a federal prosecutor and former Navy helicopter pilot, she worked to keep our communities safe”.

“Mikie’s integrity, grit, and commitment to service are what we need right now in our leaders,” Obama says. “Mikie Sherrill is the right choice for your next governor.”

On Thursday, Obama also endorsed Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia in a new ad.

“Virginia’s elections are some of the most important in the country this year,” Obama says in the video. “We know Republicans will keep attacking abortion rights and the rights of women, that’s why having the right governor, matters, and I’m proud to endorse Abigail Spanberger.”

According to an internal email reviewed and reported by CNN, Senate staffers were informed today that they will no longer receive their 20 October paychecks and will not be paid for the remainder of the shutdown.

“Due to the lapse in appropriations, the October 20, 2025, payday will be delayed until after funding is enacted,” the notice obtained by CNN reads.

John Bolton was seen leaving the courthouse, and did not address the press outside.

Overall, he was at the courthouse for several hours this morning. The hearing itself only lasted around 15 minutes, according to CNN.

According to CNN, Bolton is scheduled to be back in court next on 21 November.

A group of Republican senators accused former special counsel Jack Smith of “serious prosecutorial misconduct” and urged attorney general Pam Bondi to refer him to the justice department office to investigate misconduct amid ongoing anger over Smith’s decision to obtain their phone records as part of his investigation into January 6.

Earlier this month, Senate Republicans released information from the FBI showing Smith’s team had obtained cellphone information from nine congressional Republicans. The information collected didn’t include the content of the calls, but rather whom the Republicans had dialed and for how long (Senator Josh Hawley, one of those whose information was obtained, falsely said at a hearing last week that the phones were “tapped”.)

“Without any sufficient rationale or cause, Jack Smith’s team used a federal grand jury subpoena to obtain the phone records of sitting United States Senators and a Member of the House of Representatives,” Senators Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham, Tommy Tuberville, Dan Sullivan and representative Mike Kelly wrote. All five were among the lawmakers whose phone information was tracked.

“It is blatantly clear that, by seeking these phone records without our knowledge and consent and without any known legal predicate, the Special Counsel has violated this provision of the Rules of Professional Conduct that is intended to prevent precisely the type of conduct that occurred in this matter,” they added, urging the justice department to also refer Smith for investigation to the Tennessee and New York state legal bars as well.

The other senators whose phone records were pulled were Hawley, Cynthia Lummis, Ron Johnson and Bill Hagerty.

It had long been known that Smith obtained the records of some lawmakers, according to Politico. Smith’s report also noted that his team had consulted the justice department manual and consulted with the public integrity section.

“The Office consulted the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section (PIN), which oversees the investigation and prosecution of federal crimes affecting government integrity, pursuant to Justice Manual requirements pertaining to the service of subpoenas and other process on Members of Congress, the use of election fraud charges, and the Department’s Election Year Sensitivities Policy, a longstanding Department policy regarding the conduct of sensitive investigations during an election year,” Smith wrote in his final report.

The request from Republicans comes as Trump has deployed the justice department to target political enemies and has secured indictments against former FBI director Jim Comey, New York attorney general Letitia James, and former national security adviserJohn Bolton. Lawyers and FBI agents who worked on Smith’s investigation have also been fired.

The US federal court system will begin scaling back non-essential operations and furloughing some employees on Monday, after exhausting the funds it had left to sustain operations during the federal government shutdown, according to reports.

The announcement was in an internal memo obtained and reviewed by Reuters and reported on Friday.

Reuters reports that the announcement means the federal judiciary will, for the first time in nearly three decades, be forced to send some of its more than 33,000 employees home, while others will be required to work without pay.

Both chambers of Congress are not in session today, as the government shutdown enters day 17.

The US military is reportedly holding two survivors onboard a navy ship after rescuing them following a US strike on Thursday on a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean that killed two others, three sources told Reuters on Friday.

Thursday’s strike is believed to be the first of such strikes in which there were survivors, a US official told Reuters.

Before Thursday’s operation, US military strikes against suspected drug boats had killed at least 27 people. The strikes have raised alarms among some legal experts and Democratic lawmakers, who have questioned the legality of the attacks.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has informed Congress that the strikes are part of a US war on narcoterrorism. Administration officials have said that the US is now in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

According to the New York Times, the judge who presided over Bolton’s court appearance set two conditions to Bolton’s release: he must hand over his passport to his lawyer, and his travel is limited to the continental United States.

Two more schools have turned down an offer by President Trump to join a “compact” that would give them preferential access to federal funds in exchange for agreeing to a series of demands aligned with the administration’s ideological priorities.

On Thursday, the University of Southern California and University of Pennsylvania both declined to join the compact.

“We are concerned that even though the Compact would be voluntary, tying research benefits to it would, over time, undermine the same values of free inquiry and academic excellence that the Compact seeks to promote,” USC’s interim President Beong-Soo Kim said in a statement.

Penn’s president J. Larry Jameson said: “At Penn, we are committed to merit-based achievement and accountability.”

The universities joined Brown University, which declined the president’s offer on Wednesday, and MIT, the first to turn it down last week. Since then, the administration has extended the proposal beyond the nine schools it had originally offered it to, to all universities in the country. So far, there have been no takers, and protests have mounted on campuses across the country calling on universities’ leaders to reject it.

“The Trump compact is not just wrong — like many of the Trump administration’s attacks, it is unconstitutional,” American Association of University Professors’ president Todd Wolfson said in a statement. “It violates the First Amendment by forcing universities to surrender their rights of free speech and academic freedom in exchange for federal funds.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board has weighed in on John Bolton’s indictment.

“Opposing Donald Trump is a perilous business, but working for him can be equally as dangerous,” the board wrote. “That’s one lesson from Thursday’s indictment of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton for mishandling classified documents.”

The editorial states that “there’s little doubt that the underlying motivation for this prosecution is retribution,” noting that “the President has targeted Mr. Bolton at least since 2020 when Mr. Trump called for his prosecution after Mr. Bolton wrote his book.”

“Mr Bolton will get his day in court, and we look forward to his defense” the board added.

“If Mr. Bolton had praised Mr. Trump in his book, it’s safe to say he wouldn’t have been indicted,” they said.

John Bolton’s court proceeding is scheduled to take place at the federal courthouse in Maryland 11am ET, according to CNN.

At the hearing, CNN reports that Bolton will be read the charges he is facing and informed of his rights.

The judge may also decide whether he will be detained or set conditions of his release while awaiting his next court date, the outlet notes.

At the news conference with Republican House leaders, Representative Mike Rogers, who chairs the House armed services committee, said that they were just informed on Thursday night that the group that handles and manages “our nuclear stockpile, that the carryover funding they’ve been using is about to run out” as a result of the federal shutdown.

“They will have to lay off 80% of their employees, these are not employees that you want to go home,” Rogers said. “They’re managing and handling a very important strategic asset for us, they need to be at work and being paid.”

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is hosting a news conference with other GOP leaders as the federal government shutdown enters its 17th day.

Johnson blamed Democrats for the impasse and condemned the upcoming No Kings protests, referring to them as the “hate America rally”.

“Tomorrow, this rally is not about freedom, it’s about the opposite” Johnson said, before accusing Democrats of using the moment to create a “spectacle”.

Earlier this morning, House minority leader Democrat Hakeem Jeffries sharply rejected Republican claims that the protests across the country planned for this weekend are expressing hate and anti-American.

“Showing up to express dissent against an out-of-control administration” is as “American as motherhood, baseball and apple pie,” Jeffries said.

“What’s hateful is what happened on January 6. That was a hate America rally sponsored by Donald Trump and his sycophants.”

The US Senate failed on Thursday to re-open the government and to vote to fund the military during the federal government shutdown, ensuring that the standoff will stretch into next week.

The Senate vote on a short-term Republican funding bill failed for the 10th time with just 51 votes. A second vote on Pentagon funding in the afternoon similarly failed in a floor vote, meaning the process to begin fully funding military operations also becomes a non-starter. After the votes, senators are expected to leave Washington for the weekend, almost guaranteeing the shutdown lasts until at least Monday.

Thursday’s vote on defense spending exposed how deep the divisions go in the Senate, with only three Democratic senators – Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada – breaking ranks to support the measure. The $852bn bill had sailed through subcommittee in July, led by appropriations committee leaders Chris Coons, a Delaware senator, and Mitch McConnell, a senator from Kentucky, with broad Democratic backing. But the politics on it have fallen apart since then.

“I won’t vote just for the defense appropriations bill, even though that’s my bill,” Coons, the top Democrat on the appropriations panel overseeing military spending, told reporters.

The Senate majority leader, John Thune, made his clearest offer yet to Democrats on Thursday morning, telling MSNBC he would guarantee them a vote on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies – the most crucial ask from the Democratic side – by a fixed date if they agree to reopen the government. “At some point, Democrats have to take yes for an answer,” Thune said.

President Donald Trump said he expected an expansion of the Abraham Accords soon and hopes Saudi Arabia will join the pact that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states.

“I hope to see Saudi Arabia go in, and I hope to see others go in. I think when Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in,” Trump said in an interview broadcast Friday on Fox Business Network.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will head to the White House on Friday for a crucial meeting with Donald Trump, hours after the US president said he had agreed to another summit with Vladimir Putin in Budapest after a “very productive” call.

The possible supply of US Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine is expected to top the agenda during the Ukrainian president’s visit. Trump has repeatedly hinted in recent weeks that he may deliver Tomahawks, which would give Kyiv its longest-range weapon yet that would be capable of striking Moscow with accurate, destructive munitions.

However, Trump’s conciliatory tone after the call with Putin left in question the likelihood of immediate assistance to Ukraine and reignited European fears of US capitulation to Moscow.

Trump said Putin “didn’t like it” when he raised the possibility during their call of giving Ukraine Tomahawks – which have a range of up to 1,500 miles (2,415km) – but then appeared to cast doubt on whether Zelenskyy would actually get the American-made arm, saying the US could not “deplete” its own supply.

“We need them too, so I don’t know what we can do about that,” Trump said.

Donald Trump has promised to crack down on dissent and sent troops into US cities. His allies are claiming antifa, the decentralized antifascist movement, is behind plans to protest. He’s looking for any pretext to go after his opponents.

Still, this Saturday, even in cities with troops on the ground, millions of people are expected to march against the president as part of a second “No Kings” protest. The last No Kings protest in June drew several million people across more than 2,000 locations. This time, more than 2,500 cities and towns nationwide are hosting protests.

Organizers expect this Saturday’s protests to draw more people than the June events as the American public sees the excesses of the Trump administration more clearly.

“Their goal is to dissuade you from participating,” said Ezra Levin, a cofounder of Indivisible, the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US that is a main organizer of No Kings.

“That doesn’t mean that everybody has the same threat level. It doesn’t mean that people should ignore what the threats are, but it does mean we’re going to need to see a lot of courage out there on Saturday.”

More than 200 organizations are signed on as partners for the 18 October protests; none have dropped off for fear of a Trump backlash, Levin said. The American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights group, is a partner, as is advocacy group Public Citizen. Unions including the American Federation of Teachers and SEIU are in the coalition.

The new protest movement 50501, which began earlier this year as a call for protests in all 50 states on a single day, is also a partner. Other partners include the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn, United We Dream, the League of Conservation Voters, Common Defense and more.

When Donald Trump named leftwing billionaire George Soros as the next on his growing list of targets for retribution, he was also targeting the long list of progressive causes that Soros funds.

Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) network, now run by his son Alex, is a major funder of non-profits large and small, across sectors including democracy, voting rights, climate justice, racial justice, Palestinian rights and higher education.

Public documentation of the group’s grant-making shows thousands of worldwide recipients receiving anywhere from small amounts to multimillion-dollar grants, and include major non-profit organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union.

The US justice department has reportedly instructed US attorneys to come up with plans to investigate OSF as efforts to attack the left accelerate following the killing of rightwing commentator Charlie Kirk.

In a presidential memo, Trump said the government needed to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence”, adding a comment that Soros was at “the top of everything”.

“We have always and will continue to adhere to our rigorous compliance practices and operate within the bounds of the law while also refusing to surrender our legal and constitutional rights to free speech, association, due process, and the rule of law without challenge,” an OSF spokesperson said.

After a federal judge tossed Donald Trump’s $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, book publisher Penguin Random House and two Times reporters last month, the US president filed a 40-page amended complaint on Thursday.

US district court judge Steven Merryday in Florida gave Trump 28 days to refile and amend the action he threw out on 19 September.

The initial lawsuit named investigative reporters Suzanne Craig, Russ Buettner and Michael S Schmidt as well as the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker. All but Schmidt are still named in the amended complaint.

The amended complaint includes an itemized list of dozens of allegations tied to specific publications and statements. Like the first lawsuit, Trump is asking for $15bn in compensatory damages. He’s also asking for “punitive damages in an amount to be determined upon trial of this action.”

In his initial disqualifying, Merryday cited rule 8(a) of the federal rules of civil procedure requiring a complaint to include a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.

“Alleging only two simple counts of defamation, the complaint consumes 85 pages,” Merryday wrote. “Count one appears on page 80, and count two appears on page 83 … Even under the most generous and lenient application of rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible.”

A phone call between US president Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin shows that the Russian president reacts to pressure for serious peace talks, a German government spokesperson said on Friday.

“The pressure on Vladimir Putin for serious peace talks must be increased as a matter of urgency,” the spokesperson said.

“He reacts to pressure ... this telephone call yesterday also showed that it is also a consequence of decisions based on announcements by the US side.”

New York City’s three mayoral candidates faced off on Thursday night in the first of two televised debates, less than three weeks before voters head to the polls.

On stage were Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, former governor Andrew Cuomo – now running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani in June – and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the race several weeks ago, did not participate.

During the two-hour-long debate, the candidates clashed over a variety of local and national issues, including crime, policing, affordability, housing and transportation, as well as how they would handle the Trump administration and the recent Gaza ceasefire deal.

Mamdani and Cuomo, the race frontrunners, wasted no time and began sparring – with Sliwa between them – almost immediately.

Cuomo is notably attempting a political comeback after resigning as governor of New York in 2021 in the wake of multiple allegations of sexual harassment. He started the night echoing his performance in the primary debates, painting Mamdani as too unqualified and inexperienced to lead the city.

“This is no job for on-the-job training,” Cuomo said. “If you look at the failed mayors, they’re ones that have no management experience.”

Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman from Queens and self-described democratic socialist, pushed back on Cuomo by citing his five years in the New York state assembly and his lived experience in New York City. He touted himself as “someone who has actually paid rent in the city” and “who has had to wait for a bus that never came, someone who actually buys his groceries in this city”.

Cuomo shot back: “What the assemblyman said is he has no experience.”

Mamdani fired back: “What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity, and what you don’t have in integrity, you could never make up for in experience.”