On the precipice of winning next week’s New York mayoral contest, Zohran Mamdani cast himself in an interview with NBC News as the city’s bulwark against President Donald Trump, even as Trump has threatened his hometown over the prospect of a Mamdani victory.
In the interview, Mamdani, a state assemblyman, laid out his strategy for handling Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in New York City and projected confidence about running the city at age 34.
Asked what scares him most about the job now that he is on the verge of leading the nation’s biggest city, Mamdani — who was once seen as a long-shot candidate — instead took aim at his chief rival, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running against him as a third-party candidate.
“I think what scares me in this moment is the prospect of Donald Trump’s puppet becoming the one who would hold it,” Mamdani said. “And that’s what we find in Andrew Cuomo, a man who knows he has a narrow path to City Hall and has taken that to mean that he should fund it and pave it with the money from Donald Trump’s billionaire donors.”
“I am very excited at the prospect of winning this race, but I will never let our confidence become complacency,” he continued. “And so every single day, I remind myself, I remind our supporters, I remind our team of the fact that this is an election to be won. It’s not one that will ever be given to us.”
Mamdani has sought to position himself throughout the campaign as the candidate who would take the hardest line against Trump, to which rivals like Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa have argued that he is either too inexperienced to be an effective counterweight or that fighting Trump would be a risky move for the New Yorkers he represents.
But Mamdani’s candidacy also represents a challenge to parts of the Democratic Party. He declined to express confidence in fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer’s leadership of the Senate Democratic Caucus. And he did express openness to hiring members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the left-wing group that incubated him during his political rise, to serve in his administration.
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NBC News asked Mamdani about how he would handle a major ICE raid in the city, similar to enforcement actions the Trump administration has undertaken in Chicago and Los Angeles.
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“What I would be doing is reminding New Yorkers of their rights, making it clear that this is not something that we stand for, being proud of our sanctuary city policies and utilizing the courts,” Mamdani said. “Because so many of the threats that Donald Trump makes are not law, even though he seems to believe that just by saying it, they become so.”
He added that Democratic leaders have won legal victories against the president’s actions at the state level and said he would seek to pursue a similarly aggressive legal strategy on behalf of New Yorkers.
“It’s time to bring that kind of cooperation and conviction right here to New York, and I’m proud to have the endorsements of Gov. [Kathy] Hochul, Attorney General Tish James — that is the coalition that would be on the front lines of fighting Donald Trump.”
Mamdani, who has previously said he would be open to working with Trump on affordability and cost-of-living issues, said he “will continue to be open to speaking with Donald Trump, to meeting with Donald Trump, all of it on the premise of actually supporting New Yorkers.”
