The Worst in Everyone

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Any discussion of politicians behaving boorishly naturally begins with the president. In endorsing Cuomo on Monday, Trump remained true to form: Rather than lobby New Yorkers to deliver the result he wants, he threatened and extorted them instead.

“If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival!” he wrote on Truth Social. “It can only get worse with a Communist at the helm, and I don’t want to send, as President, good money after bad.”

The president doesn’t, or shouldn’t, get to decide whether NYC receives federal funding. Congress should. And it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, disqualifying that Mamdani is a “communist” (which he isn’t), a meaningless term coming from a guy who called Kamala Harris and Tim Walz communists on the trail last year—and who, by the way, is himself doing far more to mainstream socialism in America than Zohran Mamdani ever will. Our government is run by fascists now, yet we still have to pay taxes; why should Trump get to withhold money from authorities whose policies he finds disgusting?

Imagine being a New Yorker, forced to kick into the federal kitty every April 15 but subsequently deprived of federally funded services because the White House disapproves of your choice of municipal leadership. (Again, Mamdani might not even win a majority.) Imagine further how that precedent might be abused in the future by Democratic presidents to, for example, discourage red states or cities from electing deficit-hawk Republicans by withholding federal funding if they do. If you choose a mayor who wants a leaner government, a leaner government is just what you’ll get.

But lay all of that aside and focus on the tactics here. In my entire life, I can’t recall another case of a president threatening to punish a U.S. jurisdiction for electing a candidate he opposes. It must be the most overtly anti-democratic ploy Trump has attempted since January 6.

It’s quintessentially him. Lurking in his threat to New Yorkers is the idea that sometimes democracy will produce outcomes so terrible and dangerous that the president must intervene in extraordinary ways to protect America from the people’s folly. You can imagine how that authoritarian logic will be abused in 2026 or 2028.

If Mamdani overperforms at the polls today, I wonder how many late deciders will end up tilting his way for the sheer satisfaction of spiting an imperious mafioso who thinks they can be intimidated into doing his bidding.

For once, though, Trump isn’t the ugliest actor in this episode.

That distinction goes to Cuomo, whose desperation at the likely end of his political career has led him to kitchen-sink it against Mamdani in the campaign’s final weeks.

To my amazement, not only hasn’t he repudiated Trump’s attempt to blackmail New Yorkers, he’s abetted it. “If Mamdani wins, you are going to see Trump come in here and take over New York City,” he warned last week, anticipating the president’s argument on Monday. “First he’ll send the National Guard, but the federal government controls everything. They can close your airports. They control your health money, your housing money. You’re basically bankrupt if the federal government turns off the faucet.”

Who would want to be led by a politician whose response to blatant White House extortion of his constituents is, in so many words, “You had better do what the president says, or else”? Unmistakably, by echoing Trump’s threats, Cuomo is preemptively validating future abuses of power in New York City by the president. He told you not to elect Zohran, Cuomo is poised to say, but you did it anyway. New Yorkers have only themselves to blame, not Trump.

But that’s Andrew Cuomo for you. It would never occur to him to forfeit an electoral advantage, no matter how sleazy its nature. That also explains why he’s been reluctant to denounce the various jabs about terrorism being thrown by his allies at the frontrunner. A pro-Cuomo PAC recently ran an ad with the words “Jihad On NYC” overlaid on Mamdani’s face, for example, and numerous people have wondered in Cuomo’s presence whether a Zohran mayoralty might lead to Islamist violence in New York City, with no pushback from the candidate.

Cuomo himself surprised an interviewer on MSNBC recently when he said “our diversity is our strength—but it can also be a weakness.” Asked to clarify, he added, “Diversity can be a weakness if you have antipathy among groups … If you have racism or antisemitism, etc.”

Certainly, the case for worrying about antisemitism under a Mamdani administration rests on more than just the candidate’s faith. Remember that he initially shrugged off the disgusting phrase “globalize the intifada” as an anodyne statement of support for Palestinian rights before being browbeaten into retreating. And if you’re inclined to wade through his rhetoric about Israel prior to entering the mayor’s race, be sure to put your hazmat suit on.

But not trusting Mamdani because he’s anti-Israel and not trusting him because he’s “too foreign” is a fine line, and Cuomo isn’t particularly careful in walking it. Per ABC News, his campaign recently posted (and then deleted) “an AI-generated video depicting Mamdani eating rice with his hands, something critics have used to mock his South Asian heritage.” 

Andrew Cuomo doesn’t care why he wins this race as long as he wins it. If he ekes out a victory thanks to voters who feel it’s just not right for a Muslim to govern America’s greatest city, he’ll sleep no less soundly than he would have had he led the race wire to wire. That’s who he is.

Congressional Republicans have begun offering their own Cuomo-esque takes on a Mamdani mayoralty as the likelihood of one grows, although the degree of subtlety varies among them.

For instance, Texas Rep. Brandon Gill leaned hard into the “too foreign” critique when he complained about one of Team Zohran’s ads: “Just a couple decades after 9/11, the leading candidate for NYC mayor is campaigning in Arabic. The humiliation is the point.” Sen. Ted Cruz was craftier, though, when he reimagined the choice on the ballot in today’s election as one between “Just a Democrat” and “An Actual Communist Jihadist.” As inflammatory as the latter is, Cruz would doubtless point to Mamdani’s tolerance of sloganeering about intifadas to justify the term: I’m not not saying Zohran is a terrorist himself, the senator would presumably explain, only that he supports forms of terrorism.

He knows what he’s doing, though. Cruz understands how identitarian his party has become, going as far as to call rising antisemitism on the right “an existential crisis in our party and our country” at an event last week. Calling the Muslim soon-to-be mayor of New York a “jihadist” will earn him some cheap tribal cred with the GOP’s populist base, which might be useful in boosting their tolerance of him and other anti-antisemitic elements of the party’s traditionally conservative wing.

The surest way to heal internal rifts is to find a common enemy. Mamdani, for reasons of ideology, ethnicity, and faith, is potentially that enemy.

The most noteworthy part of Cruz’s tweet, though, was his tacit induction of Andrew Cuomo—a.k.a. “Just a Democrat”—into the right’s political tribe, a shocking twist given that dogmatic Republicans normally don’t distinguish between the center left and far left. There are no true moderates in “the party of hate, evil, and Satan,” per standard GOP cant; Democrats who aren’t obviously radical are either hiding their true colors for the sake of getting elected or will be bullied into governing as radicals by the progressive base once they’re in office.

Now here comes Cruz to echo Trump’s point that the former governor of New York is “just a Democrat,” not very scary at all despite his enormous body count during the COVID pandemic and somehow meaningfully distinct from the communist Marxist nihilist terrorist jihadist who’s opposing him. If Andrew Cuomo is now the bar for Democratic leadership that’s grudgingly acceptable to Republicans, how many Democratic candidates across the entire United States realistically fail to clear that bar? Three? Four?

Cruz at least seems content to see Mamdani seated as mayor if he wins the election. Some congressional Republicans literally want him denaturalized as a citizen and deported to Uganda, where he was born.

The pretext is that he lied, supposedly, on his citizenship application by denying that he’s a communist or that he supports terrorist groups, but really the deportation ploy is just a more extreme manifestation of Trump’s impulse to veto New Yorkers’ choice of mayor. After all, electing Mamdani is starkly incompatible with the ascendant postliberal right’s vision of America: The country cannot be made “great again,” by definition, by allowing woke young ethnic leftists to exert meaningful authority over its power centers.

The fact that Mayor Zohran is a Muslim and would be governing the city victimized by 9/11 makes it that much more of a cultural affront, rocket fuel for tribalism. We can’t let “them” win, the “deport Mamdani” Republicans suggest, even if New Yorkers feel differently. He must go, excised like a tumor from the body politic.

As for Democrats, the fact that they really are poised to elect a comically inexperienced socialist who wants to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu to lead New York City suggests that unseriousness in governing is on its way to becoming a fully bipartisan trend.

If you want to be charitable, you might explain Mamdani’s popularity by speculating that residents are simply eager to try something fresh after 12 dismal years of Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams in charge. Or you might adopt the logic of last year’s presidential election: If it was okay for Americans to roll the dice on a postliberal cretin in hopes that he’d reduce the cost of living, why isn’t it okay for New Yorkers to do the same? At least the mayor-in-waiting seems personally likable, at least when he isn’t blaming the Israeli military for police brutality in Brooklyn.

Still, it’s depressing and alarming that Mamdani and the Democrats’ repulsive nominee for attorney general in Virginia, Jay Jones, stand a real chance of winning tonight. If Zohran holds on and Jones gets dragged over the finish line by gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger, who’s en route to an easy victory, the irresistible conclusion will be that the left is warming up to the logic of Trumpism by deciding that character no longer matters. They may not have reached the point yet of treating bad character as an affirmative virtue like Republicans have, but stay tuned.

I expect their support for Mayor Zohran to intensify too over time, not because of his policies but because Republican efforts to interfere with the city’s new government will polarize Democrats to rally around him and will discourage normie liberals from criticizing him as forthrightly as they otherwise might. The same is true if he ends up as groyper-bait, regularly taking flak from the right’s white supremacist faction in ugly terms—although, given Mamdani’s hostility to Israel, one can’t rule out that the groypers will take a reluctant, opportunistic shine to him.

What a fun strange-bedfellows coalition that will be. Say what you will about the guy, but he’s where most of his party and a lot of young Americans on both sides are with respect to the Jewish state, another way in which he reflects the worst of modern politics.

My guess is that his time in office will be a study in frustration, repeatedly impeded by Republicans and Democrats who, for their own reasons, refuse to give him a free hand to govern. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and congressional leaders like Chuck Schumer will live in fear of Mamdani creating a leftist fiasco in NYC and handing Republicans an irresistible campaign message for 2026, so they’ll do what they can to handcuff him and try to save him—and themselves—from his worst impulses.

Trump, meanwhile, will quickly grow obsessed with what a young leftist Muslim usurper might do to his city if given the chance. It would be better politically for him and his party to let Mamdani ruin New York, but the president lacks the personal discipline to let that happen, and not just because he loves his hometown. It’s because Mayor Zohran will be a living, breathing rebuke to the Trumpist fantasy that the culture war ended in a decisive right-wing victory when the president was reelected. His victory will feel like an insurgency, an intimation that the younger generation might yet hand America to the left in time.

But you know what? In the same way I was “glad” that the president won last year’s election, I’m “glad” that Zohran is about to win in New York City.

Democracy means that voters get to try things, to suffer through their mistakes, to learn from them and ultimately to correct them. It’s insane that we need to rerun experiments periodically on why Peronism and socialism don’t work when we could just consult the historical record, but that’s the human condition for you. Idiots and ignoramuses learn only through hard experience, and that’s what our idiotic country has been enduring since January 20. But if that’s what it takes for the next generation or two to understand that postliberalism is a path to ruin, let’s get on with it.

The same goes for Zohran Mamdani, who could have and likely would have been beaten easily if Democrats in New York had mustered the will to find a challenger more formidable than a disgraced sex-harassing gargoyle whose biggest political claim to fame is letting COVID run wild in nursing homes. But they didn’t, and now they’re going to reap the whirlwind. Maybe they’ll learn something from what comes next. Let’s get on with it.