Mamdani, Hochul prep for possibility of troops, funding cuts if Trump moves on NYC
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Governor Hochul met Thursday to prepare for the possibility of President Trump taking punitive action against New York City after Mamdani is sworn in seven weeks.
For months, Trump has threatened to cut federal funding for New York and increase ICE’s presence or deploy the National Guard to the city in the event Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is elected mayor. Trump has regularly called Mamdani a “communist” whose left-wing agenda would endanger New York.
“I’m not going to send a lot of money to New York,” Trump said in mid-October, speaking at the White House according to NBC News. “We’re not going to ruin one of our great cities, because we’ll make it great. We’ll eliminate crime in about 30 days.”
“It took 12 days to do Washington, DC, so New York is bigger, and Chicago, we’ve already made a lot of progress despite the government’s fights. All these cities, we want to clean them up,” he added.
Since Mamdani’s November 4 election victory, the Queens-born president has been a little more circumspect, even saying last week that he hoped “it would work for New York” and that it would “help it a little bit, maybe.”
Hochul nonetheless invited Mamdani to his Midtown Manhattan office Thursday afternoon to discuss a range of topics, including what Trump might do after Mamdani’s Jan. 1 inauguration as the youngest mayor in the city’s history in more than a century.
“The governor and mayor-elect discussed the possibility of the federal government sending ICE and/or the National Guard to New York,” says an account of the meeting provided by Mamdani’s transition team.
“Both agreed that New York is safe and that a federal increase would not improve public safety, especially given the governor’s continued decline in crime and investments in subway security. State officials provided an update on ongoing preparedness efforts should the federal government target New York, and the mayor-elect’s team would officially join these coordinated efforts.”
While ICE has been seizing and detaining men and women across New York for months as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation program, the city has not seen the same level of confrontation and conflict in other places, including Chicago.
The minutes of the Mamdani-Hochul meeting indicate that it lasted about an hour. No details were provided on the exact nature of the preparation efforts.
But Politico reported earlier this month that Hochul had been convening various New York business leaders and law enforcement officials for weeks to determine how New York would respond in the event of various Trump-induced scenarios.
One goal of the meetings was to get business leaders to signal to Trump that it would be a waste of federal resources to deploy U.S. troops to New York.
According to meeting minutes, Mamdani and Hochul also discussed various other key issues for New York City, such as child care and budgeting.
Mamdani, who was wrongly called a “communist” by Trump, said earlier this week that he planned to speak to Trump before he takes office on January 1.
Unlike outgoing Mayor Adams, Mamdani has pledged to fight Trump, particularly against his “mass deportation” efforts targeting undocumented New Yorkers.
