Trump says it would be ‘hard for me’ to fund New York City if Mamdani becomes mayor
US President Donald Trump said he would be reluctant to send federal funds to his hometown of New York if left-wing leader Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of the US’s largest city this week.
“It’s going to be difficult for me as president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump said in a television interview.
The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to cut federal grants and funding for projects primarily located in Democratic-led areas.
Opinion polls show Mamdani ahead of his main rival, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
Trump did not elaborate on his remark on funding in the event of Mamdani’s victory. New York City received $7.4 billion (£5.7 billion) in federal funding this fiscal year.
In a wide-ranging interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, Trump said a Mayor Mamdani would make left-wing former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio look “good.”
“I got to see de Blasio, what a bad mayor he was, and that man will do a worse job than de Blasio by far,” the president said of Mamdani.
Trump, who grew up in the New York borough of Queens, also effectively endorsed Cuomo, a Democrat, in the interview.
“I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if it’s between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’ll pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you,” the Republican president said.
Mamdani, who would like to run a global financial center, describes himself as a democratic socialist, although he has rejected accusations that he is a communist, joking in a television interview that he is “a bit like a Scandinavian politician”, only darker.
Mamdani won the Democratic primary, while Cuomo came in second. Mamdani called the former New York governor a Trump puppet and parrot.
“The answer to a Donald Trump presidency is not to create his mirror image here at City Hall,” Mamdani said Monday.
“It’s about creating an alternative that can speak to what New Yorkers so desperately want to see in their own city and what they find at home and in their neighbors every day – a city that believes in the dignity of everyone who lives here.”
Cuomo has sought to ward off this line of attack by presenting himself as the only candidate experienced enough to deal with the Trump administration.
He was governor of New York during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many states clashed with the Trump administration, although Cuomo himself faced scrutiny after state investigators found that nursing home deaths had been significantly undercounted during the outbreak.
“I fought Donald Trump,” Cuomo said during a debate. “When I’m fighting for New York, I’m not going to stop.”
Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities as part of the fight against crime, while seeking to strip funding from jurisdictions that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
