Loading summary
Transcript121 lines
- [00:02]
A
Hey everyone, it's Tyler. I'd like to ask for your help with something. We're currently conducting a survey of our audience and we want to hear from you. As a Political Scene listener, this is one of the best ways for us to learn about what you value as a listener and a chance for you to help shape the future of our podcast. Whether it's a dream guest for the show or thoughts on your favorite episodes, we really want to hear from you. As a token of our appreciation, you'll be eligible to enter a prize drawing of up to $1,000 after you complete the surve. You can find links to the survey in our episode and show notes. Thanks so much for listening to the Political Scene from the New Yorker. Hey, Eric.
- [00:52]
B
Hello.
- [00:52]
A
Thanks so much for being here today.
- [00:54]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [00:55]
A
So you've been covering New York City politics for a long time now, and I obviously we're here today to talk about Zahran Mamdani. He's the big story. He began this race as a total long shot candidate. He drove unusually high turnout, and he won at a moment when much of his own party's leadership was reluctant to support or to endorse him. Does this moment remind you of anything we've witnessed in city politics before, or are we looking at something genuinely new here?
- [01:23]
B
I think it's hard to. To overstate how much this is something that just hasn't happened in city politics before.
- [01:31]
A
Nice. I was hoping for that answer.
- [01:33]
B
Yeah, I mean, there are parallels and I love thinking about New York City history and there are, I think that there are lessons and there are comps back there to think about and talk about. But the idea of young, out of nowhere, strident candidate just storming into power without the backing of any of the powers that be in the city and you know, six months ago nobody knew his name and now he's gonna be the mayor. The velocity, you know, like the speed of this story is kind of what's unprecedented.
- [02:10]
A
That's Eric Latch, a staff writer at the New Yorker who covers New York City politics. We're now a week removed from Zoran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral race, a result that upended the city's political establishment and, and drew the highest turnout in decades. Since then, we've started to see what a Mamdani administration might actually look like. He's begun assembling a transition team, naming figures like former FTC chair Lina Khan as co chair and signaling plans to keep Eric Adams, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch in place. But even before taking office, Mamdani is also facing pressure from the White House, as president. Trump has already threatened to withhold federal funds from New York City. And there's also been speculation that Trump might send federal troops into the city as well. I wanted to talk with Eric about how Mamdani is approaching this transition to power, what his early choices might reveal about how he plans to govern, and how he's preparing for conflict not just in Albany, but with Washington, D.C. this is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt, and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. So how definitive was Mamdani's win? I mean, now that we're, you know, significantly past Election Day, and we can see the numbers in terms of turnout and results.
- [03:21]
B
Yeah, I think a million votes, which is what he got in the general, is a big deal. And in some ways. So he won the primary in June, which I think he got about 450,000 votes in June and surprised everyone and beat former Governor Cuomo. And then Cuomo mounted this kind of scorch earth revenge campaign in the general election. And it was a nasty, nasty race. And it kind of sort of a sad race, I think, for the city. How just negative and horrible it was. But in a kind of ironic way. I think that Cuomo went down kicking and screaming quite as violently as he did. Only ended up, I think, increasing Momdani's power. Cause he basically demonstrated the ability not just to beat Cuomo, but to just attract so many votes in the process.
- [04:09]
A
Yeah, no, it was crazy to see the numbers. And, yeah, it was either people turning out in order to cast their vote for Mamdani, or turning out to make sure that Cuomo was not the mayor. It was like a turnout driver, and then a turnout driver in the other direction, which was kind of funny, I think.
- [04:26]
B
Yes. But just to get the city so engaged and involved and then to have him win with over 50%, I think that is a big deal.
- [04:35]
A
So I want to ask the question which is on everyone's minds, which is basically just, will Mamdani be able to do anything good or bad? I think that part of the criticism of his campaign was just that he was promising a lot of things that the mayor doesn't actually have kind of final say on. And so just given that freezing the rent, that that's something that involves, I think, what is the rent Guidelines board, although he can appoint the members of that board. You know, free buses, you know, raising the state's corporate tax rate. Like, how many of Those things are kind of contingent upon people like Governor Kathy Hochul playing ball, city council playing ball. And kind of what is your sense of his ability to be able to, you know, follow through?
- [05:18]
B
I mean, as you know as well as anybody, my prognosticative abilities are limited.
- [05:25]
A
You were coming on this podcast just a few days before the racing that Sliwa had it in the bag.
- [05:30]
B
Totally.
- [05:30]
A
And you're lucky that we're even willing to have you back on after.
- [05:33]
B
Thank you.
- [05:34]
A
This is so you can redeem yourself.
- [05:35]
B
Thank you. I appreciate that. But it's like, I did not think going into the primary and even when Mamdani started to sort of gain some traction and momentum, it's like the idea that he was gonna win. It's not like, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I called this and, you know, so there's a degree of difficulty to these kinds of predictions. On the one hand, like, I think the discourse around the race was a little too caught up in kind of like the kind of what's realistic in the sense that, like, I don't think that a lot of Mamnani's voters really cared about that. I think what they were voting for was, you know, they were throwing a guy a vote because they appreciated that he was calling for it, that he. They appreciated the asking, you know, and so like the follow through. I think, I think most many of his voters, I think know how hard this is and that there's a sort of strong possibility of failure, as there is for all New York City mayors since time immemorial. I mean, I think that like the top three sort of campaign promises that he made. Freezing the rent, making the buses in the city free, and universal childcare. I take those very quickly, sort of one at a time, starting from the last one. Universal childcare. The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has already come out and sort of said that she supports the premise, the sort of goal of that. So there seems to be some sort of political room to move. And so the question of, like, how you get it done, how you pay for it, how you recruit the teachers, and how you sort of stand up a program of this kind, you know, it seems like there's space there.
- [07:07]
A
And what does universal childcare actually mean? Like how young children.
- [07:10]
B
Yeah, so they're starting from six weeks of age. And what that means is not every baby in the city is gonna be forced into a city run program. But what it means is it's universally.
- [07:22]
A
Available for parents who can't get Leave or.
- [07:25]
B
Yeah, but sort of ironically, before he won the primary, that one was in some ways the campaign proposal that City hall veterans who I talked to suggested was gonna be the toughest one. Cause it involves there's all sorts of regulations around childcare for kids that young. You have to staff it up, like, where are these teachers gonna come from?
- [07:46]
A
It's harder to imagine that one than free buses even, for some reason. Maybe just like the idea of, like, who are these people who will be rocking the babies?
- [07:54]
B
Yeah, well. Cause logistically, free buses is not a technically difficult policy to enact. You just stop collecting the fares. Lots of people get on the bus today without paying a fare. But Hochul, at the same time that she's sort of expressed support for the childcare idea, really seems a lot colder towards the free bus idea. And that gets to, I think, this dynamic, that's the classic dynamic in New York City, which is the way that power kind of ping pongs back and forth between the city and the state government often. So it's like the buses are run by a state entity called the mta. And so a mayor is an important kind of partner and stakeholder in the MTA and what it does, but he doesn't control it. So can that happen? I think that this is just politics. It's about the politicking of it. It's about building energy and momentum and buy in and then executing it. But there's all kinds of arguments about why the mTake wants to keep collecting the fares. And so that one is, we're waiting to see kind of how that starts to play out after Mohamdani takes office in January. And the last one is the rent freeze, which in some ways is the most straightforward in the sense that the mayor, like you said, the mayor basically appoints the members of this board called the Rent Guidelines Board. And that's the city sort of bureaucratic body that every year determines how much landlords in. This gets wonky a little bit. Bear with me. But basically, the city has a pretty unique set of rent control laws. And within those laws, there's about a million housing units, apartments that what are called rent stabilized, which means that this board determines every year how much the landlords, the owners of these apartments get to raise the rent.
- [09:53]
A
And Mamdani could ostensibly just appoint a bunch of people who support his idea of freezing the rent, and then they would freeze the rent increases for these rent stabilized apartments in the same way that de Blasio did multiple times.
- [10:05]
B
Yeah. So de Blasio, in His eight years did it three times where he basically telegraphed what he wanted. And even, I mean, Adams didn't freeze the rent. Although Mamdani and his supporters criticize Adams for overseeing basically, cumulatively, 12% increase in rents in these apartments over the last four years. These have been 3% or so a year increases. And earlier this year when the board approved some higher increases in an election year, this was before Adams dropped out. It was so politically uncomfortable that Adams just basically ordered them back in the room to get them a smaller number. So it's clear that the mayor sort of exerts control, direct control in this process, which is the thing that Mamdani keyed into so successfully in this race.
- [10:54]
A
I see. I mean, you were saying that the focus on whether or not these policy proposals are actually that realistic, that that was something that kind of the pundit class maybe focused on too much in this campaign, given that Mamdani's voters were in some ways going off of vibes, energy also, just like this general promise and focus on affordability. You know, just him kind of taking that stance in a way that, you know, we haven't seen anyone really take it with such charisma and, like, genuine interest. But I do think that now that he's elected, I guess I'm just curious, like, what we actually think we're gonna see happen. And also I feel like part of this is there are all these people who are, like, freaking out before he was elected. I mean, I even did this piece on, you know, therapists in New York City dealing with the, you know, so called political anxiety, election anxiety. And sometimes it was just, you know, kind of your classic, like, I'm worried about this socialist coming in. But then sometimes it was like a landlord who was really worried about, you know, what would happen if the rents are frozen. Or you have business leaders who are worried about Mamdani saying that he wants to raise the state's corporate tax rate to meet that of New Jersey's. And so in the wake of all those people freaking out and then Mamdani actually winning, what kind of behavior have you seen from financial leaders and key players in the city, all of these people who were making pretty big statements about how they were going to flee if he won?
- [12:15]
B
Yeah, in this way, it was a frustrating end to the election because the hyperbole was insane. You know, the idea that New York was just gonna empty out of wealthy people because Mamdani won, I think is ludicrous.
- [12:33]
A
It's like saying people are gonna leave the US because of Trump.
- [12:35]
B
I mean, it's like. It's sort of the classic, you know, response. Yeah, exactly. I'm moving to Canada or whatever, you know, and how many people actually do that? But the bigger question is, like, what is the relationship going to be between, you know, this young socialist mayor who's got this ambitious agenda for change and very explicitly wants to, like, change the city, and then all these very powerful and entrenched forces that, like, are going to oppose that, you know, and is that just going to be, like, hopelessly, you know, for the rest of us, a kind of, like, conflict that, like, results in frustration and pain on all sides, you know, or is that going to resolve or open up political possibilities in ways that benefit the city? That's the big question. So I wrote this profile of Mumdani that came out a couple of weeks ago, and one of the people I talked to for that story was Kathy Wild, who was the head of a business group in the city, longtime head of a business group in the city, sort of ambassador of the business community in the city, who had brokered over the summer a series of meetings between Mamdani and members of the business community and real estate community.
- [13:41]
A
And.
- [13:42]
B
And the line that she was using after these meetings, when people were asking her, well, what was the reaction in the room? She was like, somebody asked me, what was the reaction in the room on a scale of 1 to 10? And she was like, 1 to 10. The business community, like all other communities in New York City, as we say, is not a monolith. And so there are certain very loud participants in this conversation, as all conversations, Bill Ackman on X, et cetera, that are making it. But not every Wall street type that Mamdani met over the summer hated him. And a lot are seeing possibilities in him. And Cathy Wilde, who very famously fought, feuded with Bill de Blasio, Mamdani's predecessor as mayor, seemed honestly quite chipper when I talked to her about Mamdani as an individual to deal with beyond setting aside the kind of ideological differences.
- [14:42]
A
Yeah, no, that makes sense. We're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, I want to get into sort of the early developments we've been seeing from mom Donnie as he prepares to take office in January. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.
- [15:05]
B
It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes.
- [15:08]
C
The killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm.
- [15:12]
A
But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.
- [15:18]
B
I know there's going to Be a twist one day. A massive twist.
- [15:21]
A
At every level of the criminal justice system. There's been a cover up in this case. I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from in the Dark and the New Yorker.
- [15:31]
C
Find it now in the in the Dark podcast feed.
- [15:42]
A
So I want to talk about what we're seeing as Mamdani's transition to power begins to take shape. It's actually really funny. I feel like there's so much interest in, like, his transition team. And it's like this like, sexy thing. And you see people online, like, applying to be. It's like everyone kind of thinks that they could be in it. Whereas, like, care about Eric Adams transition team. I mean, I guess we knew that it was gonna be like all of his old cronies from when he was, like, brooklynborough president. And that's maybe part of the difference here is that mom Donnie doesn't have a team in that sense.
- [16:09]
B
And it's generational.
- [16:10]
A
Yeah. But it is funny talking about his transition team the way that we would talk about, like a president's transition team.
- [16:16]
B
Yes.
- [16:16]
A
It's just, you know, the mayor, but we're gonna talk about it. So Mamadani has been appointing this transition team, and one of the big picks was former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who is the co chair, I believe. So what can you tell us about Khan and what her appointment indicates here?
- [16:35]
B
Yeah, I mean, part of it, I think is sort of a generational sort of signaling, you know. So Khan, like, Mamdani is in her mid-30s, you know, and it's just a kind of like, new blood kind of.
- [16:47]
A
But also kind of old blood. Right.
- [16:49]
B
What do you mean?
- [16:49]
A
I mean, I guess the fact that she, you know, she was, you know, the former FTC chair. I know that, like, J.D. vance likes her. It's like she's not. It's definitely new blood in the sense that she is not the kind of person who I would normally associate with, like in New York City mayor's transition team. But also, like, people can project a lot onto her.
- [17:08]
B
Yes.
- [17:08]
A
And, like, what her participation in this team means.
- [17:11]
B
Yes. I mean, she's. And she's a public figure in this. I mean, the transition team leadership is like a half dozen people, and the other ones are sort of more anonymous functions, sort of veterans of City hall or City hall fights. And Khan is more of an outsider and kind of coming in sort of over the top. And I wondered too, whether it's part of Mamdani's arguments about what the power of the city can be is sort of also part of what Khan is signaling here is sort of just trying to find the levers and kind of engage in these big debates about power and politics in the country and the shape of them.
- [17:49]
A
You mean, like in the sense that Google and Meta and Amazon all have, like, a pretty large presence in New York City, and Khan has this history of cracking down on these big tech companies.
- [17:59]
B
I mean, one of the signal. One of the big signal moments, to me, one of the most important moments of the de Blasio years was de Blasio attempted in his first term to capture Uber's growth in the city. And Uber won, You know, and it was like this big test of sort of city power versus the platforms and, like, city versus tech and, you know, sort of the balance of power there. I'm cautious a little bit because Khan also comes in. I mean, she was in the background during the campaign, like on primary night. She was at the primary night party back in June. You know, so she's been around, but she wasn't front and center during the campaign in any way. And sort of like, this is sort of just a kind of new development that a little bit. It's like, is she gonna end up in City hall, like, or is she.
- [18:48]
A
Just helping out right now?
- [18:50]
B
Exactly.
- [18:51]
A
Is that always the question with these transition teams?
- [18:53]
B
Right.
- [18:53]
A
Yeah, I guess. I'm just thinking about, like, we were talking earlier about business leaders freaking out or not freaking out about Mamdani. And, you know, at least the Post, you know, the good old New York Post was claiming that Khan's involvement immediately raised alarms with big tech and Wall street honchos, many of whom bristled at her aggressive enforcement tactics, tough merger reviews and anti monopoly crackdowns while she headed the fgc.
- [19:19]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's just gonna be both because it's just gonna be all. Because there are gonna be a bunch of these appointments that make city powers that be go crazy or make sort of national figures sort of recoil. Even national figures in the Democratic Party recoil from Mamdani. But then there's also just a whole bunch of other moves. Just a couple hours ago, before we taped, Mamdani announced that his first deputy mayor, who's sort of the number two at City hall, is going to be this former de Blasio deputy mayor named Dean Fulhan, who's like a. He's like a.
- [19:55]
A
He's a normie.
- [19:57]
B
It's just like, this is not a revel. That's not a revolutionary pick.
- [19:59]
A
Yeah, I didn't recognize the name.
- [20:02]
B
That's a kind of reaching for experience and reaching for a sort of understanding of city powered foolhand as somebody who also has deep experience in Albany and sort of understands the dynamics between City hall and Albany and these kinds of things that Mamdani is going to be navigating in order to get these proposals that he wants to accomplish done. And it's just like that. It's just sort of like for every Lina Khan, there seems to be a Dean Fulahan so far. So it's just we're getting both.
- [20:31]
A
Yeah. So you mentioned deputy mayor. What are the other top bill positions that we should be keeping an eye on?
- [20:38]
B
Yeah. So along with Fulahan today, Mohamdani announced that Al Biscar Church, who was Mamdani's chief of staff in the State assembly and sort of was his closest advisor during the campaign, is going to be chief of staff at City Hall. And that's sort of continuity and also a kind of DSA cred, sort of a commitment to sort of movement politics that Mamdani represents. You know, that's something that Biscuit Church has talked about publicly, sort of organizing and keeping discipline from the left, you know. And then before election day, he announced that he was gonna ask Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on at the nypd, which was a big deal.
- [21:15]
A
You're anticipating my questions, Eric. No, no. Tell us more about Tish, because I think that was a really big moment. And you profiled Tish back when she was the sanitation commissioner and was kind of a. How would you put it? It's like broken windows, sanitizing.
- [21:35]
B
Yeah. Tish is a. I mean, Tish was one of a handful of sort of public facing officials in the Eric Adams administration who got credit for actually getting some stuff done. Like as all sort of. Adams ran a kind of split City hall. And one side of it was professional and kind of grinding the gears of local politics and doing stuff. And then the other side was running around handing reporters bags of potato chips filled with cash. And Tish was sort of among the more prominent and successful of the sort of people that worked under Adams. She was sanitation commissioner. She had started her career at NYPD during the Bloomberg years working on technology stuff. Technology stuff. The city's surveillance camera network, the phones that the cops have in their hands as they do their jobs now. And she became sanitation commissioner under Adams. She's a member of prominent very wealthy and very politically influential New York City family and is a favored daughter of the city's elite and powerful Class and sort of represents a kind of old strain of elite reformers and technocrats that have been with us in New York since the 19th century. And at sanitation, she spearheaded the containerization of trash in New York City, which is not a revolutionary concept maybe elsewhere.
- [23:12]
A
In the world, but here it was.
- [23:14]
B
But here it was. And then after a lot of. After several years of Eric Adams, police commissioners had to sort of resign in scandal, he tapped her to sort of stabilize the police department, which to a large degree she did. And then basically after Mamdani won the primary in June, the question of whether or not he would ask her to stay at NYPD became a real obsession of powerful and influential and wealthy New Yorkers who might not be on X all day denouncing Mamdani as a communist, but who nonetheless had questions about how he would approach the job and whether he was up for the job. And it sort of became this litmus test, I think, for a lot of people of like, will he be able to sort of manage the city in a way that they find palatable? And so asking her to stay on was a big deal in that sense.
- [24:14]
A
I mean, has he gotten any pushback from the progressive bloc of his supporters, people who I presume, hate Tish and very much associate her not only with like, kind of worst capitalist aspects of the city, just given that she's like a billionaire, but also just how associated she is with Adams's like law and order thing. And just, you know, she's like, I feel like mom Donnie spent a lot of his time kind of critiquing Adams use of the police and, you know, increased police presence on subways. And I guess I'm just wondering if the progressive voters are upset about this pick.
- [24:48]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think you're seeing a little bit of it. I mean, Tish is no one's idea of a democratic socialist. Who he was going to put in charge of PD and how he was going to oversee PD as mayor has been an obvious high stakes sort of issue that's been dangling out there even before he won the primary. It's like he has walked back and sort of renounced his past. Sort of overt criticisms of the police and policing, the defund.
- [25:20]
A
The police movement. He was, you know, he made comments supporting that back in the past. Yeah.
- [25:24]
B
And sort of. But that's been a challenge for him is sort of explaining how what, besides running for mayor, sort of changed his mind in the context of how he views policing and how he's gonna deal with like the very real and immediate sort of issues that could come up. You know, he's going to be inaugurated January 1st. And it's like, how are they going to deal with protests? How are they going to deal with homeless encampments? How are they going to deal with the mentally ill on the streets and in the subways? How will a Mayor Mamdani approach oversight of the NYPD is a huge open question. I've wrote this in pieces, like, several times. Every mayor in recent history has had their time in office defined in large part by their relationship with the police and what the debates about the NYPD are at the time that they're mayor. So the idea that Mamdani would somehow sort of be an exception to that rule seems like a long shot to me. And these are things that I think will just naturally get a ton of attention as he takes over.
- [26:24]
A
I mean, you've reported a lot on Tish and obviously a lot on Mom Donnie. And I guess I'm just curious just more for your opinion on this, if you had to predict. Do you think that what we're going to see is Tish kind of bending more toward Mom Donnie and, like, her presence, her continued presence at the NYPD lets the people on the Upper west side and in Brooklyn Heights, like, sleep a little bit easier at night. But actually, we're still going to see a lot of these, like, public safety reforms that Mamdani has talked about, like, focusing less on the police and more on mental health. Can you see a situation where she is the person spearheading all of that because she has someone who isn't Adams informing her approach to policing? Or do you think that it's gonna be more. She's in control, and there's either gonna be some combat between the two of them, or he's going to use her to enforce certain things that, like, he wouldn't necessarily be comfortable standing up and saying that he's in support of. Like, does she seem like someone who's willing to back down from the way that she's been policing during Eric Adams administration in order to stay in the Mamdani administration?
- [27:28]
B
I think it's gonna be one of the most interesting political relationships maybe in the entire country. I mean, I think these are two up and coming, ambitious and empowered people, people in big jobs with very, very explicit visions of how they see those jobs that don't totally mesh. And here they are wedded at the hip, and the opportunity or the ability for them to resolve the kinds of tensions that you're describing, it's just it's hard to think of another level of American government right now where such sort of ideologically maybe opposed people are going to be forced to work together. And that, I think, is part of what's going to make it a really interesting sort of important story.
- [28:20]
A
So I want to ask you about the elephant in the room, which is Donald Trump, as well as the response that we've seen to Mamdani's victory from both political parties. But first, we're going to take another quick break. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.
- [28:43]
C
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [28:46]
B
I'm Michael Kalore, Wired's director of consumer Tech and Culture.
- [28:50]
A
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [28:58]
C
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week, we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [29:08]
B
Right. So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
- [29:16]
A
Affecting Washington and how they affect you.
- [29:19]
C
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [29:35]
A
So I want to talk a little bit about the larger response that we've seen to Mom Donnie's win and look ahead to a potential situation where Trump tries to, I don't know, like, invade New York or something, or at the very least, try to kneecap Mom Donnie's agenda however he can. So let's start with the political response from the different parties. As you mentioned earlier, you know, we kind of had all these Democrats who maybe sort of embarrassed themselves by not endorsing Mamdani or not endorsing him soon enough when the other option was Cuomo. And what are we seeing now from the leaders who either hesitated to endorse him or who didn't endorse him at all? I mean, did Chuck Schumer ever endorse him?
- [30:15]
B
Chuck Schumer did not, and Hakeem Jeffries did at sort of the 11th hour. And the Democratic Party in New York, I mean, it just so happens that, like, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate is a New Yorker and the leader of the Democrats in the House is a New Yorker. And they both very visibly were uncomfortable with Mumdani. Like, they made clear that they were uncomfortable with not just Mamdani, but what his victory represented and just never found a way to productively kind of engage with the forces in their own backyard that have brought him about here. And there's all sorts of arguments about what that's about. And then you have overall of it, like, Trump looming. And, I mean, by the end of the campaign, you had basically Andrew Cuomo. One of the arguments that Andrew Cuomo was making was like, don't vote for Mamdani, because if you do, Trump will attack. Basically, it will be bad for the city because it'll provoke Trump, which is whether or not that's true. It's an extremely unsatisfying, I think, thing to tell somebody, don't do this because somebody else, because Dad's gonna come home.
- [31:31]
A
It's like, honestly, I can't imagine making a worse pitch to New Yorkers in particular than that. Like, that there's this guy who might come and do things. If you vote for the person you.
- [31:41]
B
Want, you'd have to basically be conceding some political power, like vote for the more moderate candidate, because if you go with the thing that you're gonna do, the force you can't control is gonna come and punish you. And Trump is. He has already threatened to withhold federal funds from the city. He has already threatened to flood the city with National Guard troops. But the idea that somehow, I mean, and yes, we haven't. New York has yet to see the kind of shows of force and highly visible and sort of concentrated operations that have been going on in Chicago or before that, in la. And yet ICE has been operating just a few blocks from City hall here, snapping people up at Immigration Court Federal Plaza for months. There was a very, very visible ICE raid on Canal Street a couple weeks ago of counterfeit handbag and other street vendors who are by and large immigrants and who cater to tourists, not least of which many American tourists, who may or may not be Trump voters themselves, who come and patronize the apparently intolerable street knockoff trade that ICE decided to raid with all shows of force. What Trump could do to Mum D.
- [33:06]
A
Well, yeah, we should talk about what Trump could do, because I think there's the whole sending in the National Guard, which I think people are concerned about. And then there's also just the idea that Trump, I think he has said that he could take control of New York by withholding federal funds. He said a few weeks ago that it would be hard to give money to New York City. City of Mamdani were elected. And so I hear that, and I'm like, what is he actually threatening to do here? Like, what funds is he Talking about, like, I get how he can withhold research funding from Harvard, but I don't really like what funding.
- [33:39]
B
Last year they clawed back. And this was sort of a story early in the mayoral campaign. The federal government clawed back. It was like tens of millions of dollars that had federal dollars that had been sent for the city and earmarked for migrant crisis response sort of operations. So there was last couple years of the Adams administration, there was a couple hundred thousand migrants had showed up in the city and they were housed in shelters and their kids were put in school. And there was all sorts of public social services that were just trying to situate and kind of reduce the amount of chaos involved in all these people showing up in the city. And the Trump administration clawed back some money that had been directed to the city under the Biden Admin. And that was a kind of extremely unusual and kind of aggressive display of kind of federal. I mean, that money triggered. They clawed that money back, I think from a Citibank account that the city operates and I think triggered an overdraft fee. Because it's like that money had been moved. That money had been moved for operations. And it was just kind of like this aggressive and trolly and uncoordinated kind of unilateral display of force that's just kind of like. It's scary, but it's also like the level of it is so petty. People who I've talked to, who have worked in city halls, who have talked to the momdani in his campaign, the fear of and the concern about how President Trump could come in and constrain and harm and undercut Mohamdani is real. The apprehension there is very real. And just on a basic day to day level, if Trump picks a fight with Mamdani and they're just bogged down in this war of words every day, you could see that derailing a kind of a city hall, just the work of responding to a kind of sustained attention and attack from the president. And sort of, you could sort of see Trump sizing up Mamdani in the past couple of months and trying to sort of decide whether to cast him as a villain and a foil in the months to come.
- [35:48]
A
I think that's what I'm kind of anticipating, that it's more just Mamdani becoming a character in this extended Trump universe, where Trump has said behind closed doors that he thinks that Mamdani's pretty charismatic and you can tell he's very interested in Mamdani. And it's like, of course there are potential actual consequences that the city could suffer in terms of pulled funding or a takeover on the streets. But I think we're just gonna be seeing Mom Don used as a talking point and as a punching bag by the administration and by Republicans in general. Just a lot. And I guess I'm wondering, like, is it weird to you that I guess on one hand, like, we open this conversation by talking about how anomalous this entire situation is. On the other hand, I have been kind of, like, weirded out by how often Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries, you know, they go on CNN and they're immediately asked if, like, they will acknowledge that, like, Mamdani is the future of the party. And, you know, just this question of, like, even the way that my own, you know, hardcore Republican family talks about Mom Donnie as like, sort of a symbol for something greater in the Democratic Party. And it's almost like people anticipating running against him and all of New York in the midterms or something.
- [37:05]
B
Yeah.
- [37:05]
A
Do you think that behavior is normal? I mean, do you think that he.
- [37:07]
B
I mean, it would be more normal? It's like, it just the fact that, like, the fact that Jeffries and Schumer are like New Yorkers, and not just New Yorkers, but like Brooklynites, that they both live in the white hot center of Mamdani support, I think makes it awkward. That's what sort of like, it's really.
- [37:23]
A
Hard to be from here and usually endorse people in these racism.
- [37:29]
B
If the leader of the Democrats in the House was from Ohio and was going on CNN and saying, well, I don't know how Mamdani is gonna play here, it would just be a little bit more coherent. But. But it's like that's been the spot that Jeffries has found himself in because it's like in his own backyard, in his own House district, Mamdani won. Off the top of my head, I can't remember the number, but Mamdani won huge in Jefferies district. So that's the thing that's, I think, been the thing that they've really struggled to square.
- [37:58]
A
I mean, one person who's been pretty aligned with Mamdani starting from fairly early on, to her credit, is Hochul, as we talked about earlier. And it seems like there's a world in which they might need to present a united front against Trump or against possible federal intervention. And if that's the case, how aligned will they have to be? Actually, yeah.
- [38:21]
B
I mean, Hochul took over as governor after Andrew Cuomo resigned, would have been.
- [38:25]
A
Crazy if she'd endorsed Cuomo.
- [38:29]
B
And her governorship has been shaped very much by a response to Cuomoism. And so one of the things that she set out to do early on was to have a functional relationship between the governor's office and City hall in a way that Cuomo very famously with Bill de Blasio did not. And so Hochul has gotten along pretty well with Eric Adams, even though they are not naturally kind of maybe like, you know, they're both more moderate than certainly like a Zoram Hamdani, but like not necessarily the natural political friends. And yet they've both been friendly to each other and have had each other's backs along the way. And it seems like Hochul is trying to do that again with Mamdani. Combined with the very real. So Hochul is up for reelection next year in 2026, and she's going to need a lot of votes in New York City, and Mamdani just won a million votes in New York City. And so that's also certainly part of the calculus is that Hochul holds a lot of power that Mohamdani needs to get what he wants to get done. Mohamdani has a lot of people behind him that Hochul is gonna need if she's gonna win reelection next year.
- [39:41]
A
Do you think she's vulnerable?
- [39:43]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think to a.
- [39:45]
A
Republican, one thing about getting primaried or something, but I guess that's the question.
- [39:50]
B
Well, we're back to the prognosticating, which I am famously bad at. But Elise Stefanik, who's a Trump supporting House member from upstate New York, is running and looks likely to become the Republican nominee for governor next year.
- [40:06]
A
And she's also the person who kind of became a national figure when she went after all of those college presidents for anti Semitism on their campuses. And so you can kind of already see the contrast that she is inevitably going to paint between herself and Mamdani and herself and Hochul, who is an ally to Mamdani.
- [40:25]
B
There's that, but then there's also the fact that Stefanik is very popular in upstate New York, which is Hochul's natural. I mean, Hochul is from Buffalo. That's her sort of natural political sort of environment. And to counter that, Hochul is clearly making a move to sort of bring herself closer to New York City and city voters.
- [40:46]
A
On a totally unrelated note, one thing that I've been thinking about just as we get ready to move on from the Adams era, is just this. You kind of mentioned it earlier, you know, this question of, like, well, do any of these voters actually assume that Mamdani is going to be able to, you know, hit every single policy that he was promising during the campaign? I guess my question is if you think that our kind of assessment of what makes a good mayor or what a mayor needs to achieve while in office, if that has maybe changed post Adams, like, if we just have someone come in and he's, like, very much not corrupt, and he's energetic and he loves the city and he tries to get a lot of things done, and maybe he can get some of these things done, like universal childcare and the rents, but, like, the free buses, maybe that doesn't happen. Maybe, like, the, you know, corporate tax rates don't go up. Maybe crime goes up a little bit, but not a lot. Maybe crime does go up a lot, but, like, then it kind of starts to go back. Maybe Trump does send in the National Guard, but it's very clear that Mamdani and Hokul are upset about it, and it's something that kind of goes beyond them. I guess I'm just trying to figure out how we will even be able to assess the Mamdani mayorship.
- [41:58]
B
Well, it's events. I mean, that's what happens to all of them. I mean, de Blasio had a very ambitious suite of proposals that he ran on in 2013, got most of them done. There were other things that happened in his time as mayor that pissed a lot of people off and soured the whole city on the project. And that's sort of part of what led to Adams being elected to begin with. And people talk about, often mayors of New York, the way that they talk about presidents, is each one being the opposite of the one that came before that. There's a kind of almost in the public psyche where kind of deciding to go sort of alternate, and how Mamdani navigates all the contingencies you just mentioned in whatever way they cut, plus, like, blizzards and power outages and large labor disputes and outbreaks of disease or any of the other, like, countless kinds of issues that can pop up at any moment, not just one by one, but all at the same time. I mean, honestly, I will always think that the migrant crisis that happened in the Adams years, New York City's response to that under Adams was actually quite amazing. We incorporated all these people into the city, and no one even talks about it now. And no one even talks about it now. And it was like the city addressed it and moved on. And Adams, in some ways did himself no favors by basically bemoaning his bad luck in having to deal with this problem when I think the opportunity was there to just embrace it and say, we're gonna do this. We're gonna show that New York has all this capacity and all this power and the city can handle this. Adams moaning about was the response that Texas Governor Greg Abbott was trying to provoke when he started sending buses full of migrants to the city to it's not just the job. Adams taught us this and de Blasio taught us this, and Bloomberg taught it's not just the job, but it's also the public performance of the job as mayor that often ends up defining whether people feel like they're succeeding or failing.
- [44:13]
A
Yeah. And just based on Mamdani's victory speech, I think he's very good at that element of it, which shouldn't mean everything, but it means a lot.
- [44:20]
B
And in some ways I think that Mamdani is a lot of his voters were de Blasio voters, but they were looking for a kind of different personality, different public performance. And I think that that's important, too.
- [44:32]
A
Thank you. So thanks so much, Eric.
- [44:33]
B
Thanks, Tyler.
- [44:36]
A
Eric Latch is a staff writer for the New Yorker. You can find his latest piece, the Mamdani era begins@newyorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggit. This episode is produced by John Lamay, with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by James Yost. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Chris Bannon is Conde Nast Head of Global Audio. Our theme music is by Allison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday.
- [45:19]
C
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.
- [45:22]
B
I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [45:25]
A
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley, is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [45:35]
C
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
- [45:44]
B
Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
- [45:55]
C
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [46:06]
A
From prx.