President Donald Trump said he would be reluctant to send federal funds to his home city of New York if left-wing frontrunner Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of America’s largest city this week.
“It would be difficult for me as president to give a lot of money to New York,” Trump said in a TV interview, “because if you have communists running New York, you’re just wasting the money you’re sending there.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to cut federal grants and funding for projects located primarily in Democratic-run areas.
Polls showed Mamdani ahead of his main rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on the eve of Tuesday’s vote.
Trump did not elaborate on his comments about funding Mamdani if she wins. New York City received $7.4 billion (£5.7 billion) in federal funding this fiscal year.
In an interview with the CBS program ’60 Minutes’ that day, President Trump said that Mayor Mamdani would make left-leaning former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “look good.”
“I see how bad Mayor de Blasio is,” the president said of Mamdani, adding, “This guy is going to do worse than de Blasio has ever done.”
Trump, who grew up in the New York borough of Queens, also virtually supported Democratic lawmaker Cuomo in the interview.
“I’m not a fan of Cuomo by any means, but if it’s between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’ll be honest, I’ll always pick the bad Democrat,” the Republican president said.
Mamdani, who will run the global financial hub, is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. Although he dismissed accusations that he was a communist, he joked in a TV interview that he was “similar to a Scandinavian politician.”
getty imagesMamdani won the Democratic primary, with Cuomo coming in second. The 34-year-old state representative called the former New York governor a Trump puppet and parrot.
“The answer to the Donald Trump presidency is not to create a mirror image here at City Hall,” Mamdani said Monday.
“This is about creating an alternative that allows New Yorkers to say what they want to see in their city and what they see in themselves and their neighbors every day: a city that believes in the dignity of all who call it home.”
Cuomo has tried to head off this line of attack by presenting himself as the only candidate experienced enough to take on the Trump administration.
He was New York’s governor during the COVID-19 pandemic when many states clashed with the Trump administration, but Cuomo himself came under scrutiny after state investigators found that nursing home deaths were significantly underestimated during the outbreak.
“I fought Donald Trump,” Cuomo said during the debate. “I will not stop fighting for New York.”
Trump is seeking to deploy the National Guard to Democratic-led cities as part of a crime crackdown while stripping funding from jurisdictions that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
