As he heads into November’s general election for New York City mayor, Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani has a warning: If he loses, the next mayor could be in Donald Trump’s pocket.
Mamdani has launched a “five boroughs against Trump” tour to draw attention to the president’s agenda and how the administration’s impact has already been felt throughout the city — from threats to food stamps and healthcare to immigration raids and courthouse arrests.
“There is no borough that will be free from Donald Trump’s cruelty,” Mamdani told supporters in Manhattan Monday.
But he’s also using the tour to tie his opponents — former Governor Andrew Cuomo, current mayor Eric Adams, and Republican challenger Curtis Sliwa — to the president.
The race for the Democratic primary saw Mamdani relentlessly focus his campaign around affordability, including no-cost childcare, freezing rent in tens of thousands of rent-controlled apartment units, boosting taxes on corporations and the wealthiest residents to fund free buses, and creating city-owned grocery stores in one of the country’s most expensive places to live.
That platform remains at the center of his campaign, but Mamdani is ringing alarm bells about the future of the city under the Trump administration with an ill-equipped mayor at the helm — or, worse, one that works in concert with the president.
“We see far too many parallels between Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo, far too many stories that make clear that both administrations have been characterized by corruption, by a sense of impunity,” Mamdani told reporters Monday at the offices of the 1199SEIU labor union, which had endorsed Cuomo in the primary but is now backing Mamdani.
“We know a fraud when we see one,” he said.
Cuomo, who resigned from the governor’s office under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, conceded to Mamdani in the Democratic primary after losing by nearly 13 points. Then, he entered the general election as an independent, arguing that he faced off against Trump as governor and can do it again as New York City mayor.
“Trump will flatten him like a pancake,” Cuomo recently wrote on X. “There’s only one person in this race who can stand up to Trump: the one who already has, successfully and effectively.”
Trump and Cuomo spoke directly about the mayor’s race on a recent phone call, according to The New York Times. Both Trump and Cuomo have denied speaking to one another, though the president has been briefed by allies about how best to keep Mamdani out of the race.
Mamdani said the call is “disqualifying” and a “betrayal of New Yorkers.”
“While housing experts are ringing the alarm, Andrew Cuomo is ringing Donald Trump’s cell,” Mamdani told supporters in Brooklyn Tuesday.
In a recent meeting with New York business leaders, Cuomo also said he was not “personally” looking for a fight with the president and said their relationship was more like a “dysfunctional marriage.”
Adams, meanwhile, has avoided speaking out against the president after the Department of Justice dropped federal corruption charges against him in an apparent effort to win his support for the president’s anti-immigration agenda.
The current mayor has said he is not beholden to anyone, including the president, while insisting he can develop a working relationship with Trump for the city’s benefit.
Sliwa, the longshot Republican candidate taking another stab at the mayor’s race after losing in 2021, has even urged the president to stay out of the race. “Every day it’s Trump versus Zohran Mamdani, it’s a good day for Zohran Mamdani,” Sliwa said in a recent radio interview.
“Every day that Cuomo and Adams talks about you, ‘you drop out, you job out,’ it’s a good day for Zohran Mamdani,” he said.
“The fact is that the president has three candidates in this race,” Mamdani recently told WNYC. “One that he’s directly been in touch with, another that he bailed out of legal trouble and now functionally controls, and the final one literally being a member of the same Republican Party.”
Mamdani, a 33-year-old Ugandan-born Democratic socialist, would be the city’s first-ever Muslim and Indian American mayor, if elected.
He has faced a wave of racist and Islamophobic attacks since securing the Democratic primary, including from Republican members of Congress and the White House. Trump has repeatedly questioned Mamdani’s citizenship, falsely branded him a communist, threatened to arrest and deport him, and suggested his administration would “run” New York City should he win in November.
“I’m not getting involved,” Trump told reporters during a Cabinet meeting last month.
“But I can tell you this. I used to say we will not ever be a socialist country. Well, I’ll say it again. We’re not gonna have it,” he continued. “If a communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same. But we have tremendous power at the White House to run places where we have to.”
While Mamdani touts endorsements from former Cuomo backers and other prominent New York Democrats on his latest tour, the latest Siena Research Institute poll shows the Democratic nominee in the lead with 44 percent of the vote, followed by Cuomo at 25 percent.
Sliwa is at 12 percent and Adams is in single digits with 7 percent, the poll found.
Mamdani has picked up key endorsements from progressive powerhouses Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, as well as prominent New York Democratic officials like state Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler — all of whom are targets of the president and his party.
But he has not received any full-throated endorsements from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, as national Democrats fear Mamdani’s democratic socialist agenda could be a liability for moderates in a high-stakes race to take back control of Congress in 2026.
“Every seat matters, every race matters, and who is mayor of New York is crucial,” Nadler said. “New York City needs a leader who won’t give Trump an inch, who won’t flinch or bargain away our rights.”
If elected, Mamdani’s fight with the White House would “be delivered forcefully, rhetorically, through conversations, both public and private,” including staffing up the city’s legal departments with dozens of attorneys to push back against Trump threats to send in federal troops, he said.
He also argues that his election would also serve as its own signal that the city is fighting back against Trump with “a governance that is actually characterized by competence and by compassion.”
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