**Trump and the Boorish Behavior of Politicians**
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”—an AI-generated video depicting Mamdani eating rice with his hands, something critics have used to mock his South Asian heritage, only underscores the baseless nature of such attacks.
**Andrew Cuomo’s Approach**
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.
**Republicans React**
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, reimagining the choice on the ballot as one between “Just a Democrat” and “An Actual Communist Jihadist.” As inflammatory as the latter is, Cruz would likely point to Mamdani’s tolerance of sloganeering about intifadas to justify the term.
“I’m not saying Zohran is a terrorist himself,” the senator would presumably explain, “only that he supports forms of terrorism.”
Cruz knows what he’s doing. He understands how identitarian his party has become, even calling 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. This might help boost the 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.
**A Surprising Twist: Andrew Cuomo Joins the Right’s Political Tribe**
The most noteworthy part of Cruz’s tweet was his tacit induction of Andrew Cuomo—aka “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 Cruz echoes Trump’s point that the former governor of New York is “just a Democrat,” not very scary despite his enormous body count during the COVID pandemic, and somehow meaningfully distinct from the communist Marxist nihilist terrorist jihadist opposing him.
If Andrew Cuomo is now the bar for Democratic leadership grudgingly acceptable to Republicans, how many Democratic candidates across the 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, however, want him denaturalized as a citizen and deported to Uganda, where he was born. The pretext is that he lied on his citizenship application by denying that he’s a communist or supports terrorist groups. But really, the deportation ploy is just a more extreme version 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 who would govern 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.
**Democrats and Democracy**
As for Democrats: the fact that they are really 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 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 an opportunistic shine to him.
What a 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 reflection of the worst of modern politics.
**Looking Ahead**
My guess is that Mamdani’s 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 Governor 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. 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—not just because he loves his hometown, but because Mayor Zohran will be a living 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.
**The Case for Democracy**
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.
If that’s what it takes for the next generation or two to understand that postliberalism is a path to ruin, then 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.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/zohran-mamdani-andrew-cuomo-new-york-city-donald-trump/
