Zohran Mamdani will take office as the new year strikes, marking the end of the brief and scandal-ridden tenure of Eric Adams. Some of Mamdani’s early mayoralty will no doubt be defined by his relationship with President Donald Trump, and the relationship between the federal government and New York City more broadly. The two men have had just one meeting so far, one that uniformly surprised observers. The typically vindictive Trump, given to tarring opponents with schoolyard nicknames when he’s not busy trying to prosecute them, looked genuinely taken with the mayor-elect. Trump praised Mamdani, posted about being “honored” to meet him and intimated that he would be looking forward to working with him to help New York.
Surprising as that encounter was, we should keep a couple of things in mind. One, Trump is a guy that seems to lack what we would understand as basic interiority, appearing devoid of any real ideology or convictions beyond money and his own aggrandizement. The man routinely shifts his perspectives based on the last person he talked to, and his inner circle will find it very easy to break the spell and drag him back to an anti-Mamdani posture. Which relates to my second point, which is that it might not really matter all that much what Trump thinks of Mamdani anyway.
It seems clear by now that Trump is not really the person running the federal government in a nuts and bolts way, if he ever was. He has preferences, sure, and has particular fascinations such as the tariffs he’s been intent on pursuing even as all the consequences that every economist and business group warned about have manifested. On the day to day, though, the people calling the shots are folks like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget Director. They’re both more enmeshed in the machinery of the administration and far more ideological. So Mamdani may or may not have to worry about Trump directly, but certainly does have to worry about fanatics like Miller, the architect of the administration’s harsh immigration crackdown.
We in the broad political sphere tend to think of political or administrative actors as calculating, moving pieces around in some grand political game. But an ideologue like Miller doesn’t really care if he wrecks the country — or its largest and most prosperous city — in furtherance of his ethnonationalist goals, and so can’t exactly be reasoned with. I think this was demonstrated by the fact that not long after Trump and Mamdani’s warm meeting, federal agents tried to mount a massive immigration operation in downtown Manhattan, one that was stopped only by the rapid response of groups monitoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and by the community writ large.
I’ve been saying this since the early days of Trump’s second term, but I think one of, if not the defining dynamic of this era will be how states and localities respond to the aggression of the federal government under Trump. So far, it’s been mostly a mix of lots of tough talk but widespread timidity, the occasional lawsuit but mostly standing back as federal agents rampage through cities. I think there are indications of a sea change here and there, as governors like Illinois’ JB Pritzker get more aggressive, and some city leaders diagram stronger responses. There’s still peripheral but growing conversation about the potential for state and local prosecutions of federal agents who break local laws or otherwise overstep their authority.
However this all plays out, I’m pretty confident this will be resolved before the 2028 election. Exactly how, I don’t know, but I do have the feeling that things will begin coming into focus this coming year, and that local leaders like Mamdani could be at the forefront. I think this will have to be the year that the remaining institutions of society forcefully claw back some of their own power. Because if things continue as they are, by the end of next year the conversation will no longer be about whether democracy can be preserved but whether it can be reinstated.
Back here in NYC, Mamdani will be facing the tall order of carrying out his ambitious agenda, though I think there’s a strange public perception now of that being both more and less complicated than it actually is. On the less complicated side, what I mean is that the planks themselves really aren’t earth-shattering. Freezing some rents, instituting free bus service, providing public child care, building additional affordable housing and transferring some functions from the police to a new department – this isn’t exactly a revolution in the role and scope of government.
Bits and pieces of all this have been done in multiple cities around the country already, not to mention around the world. For all the talk of Mamdani being some communist or anti-establishment radical or whatever, the truth is that this is all relatively run-of-the-mill social democratic policymaking that can exist comfortably within our current municipal government. The operative word here is can, because the reason it might be more complicated than people expect is not because of the policies, but because the mayor’s powers are not as expansive as people think. Free bus service, for example, would not be that hard to make happen operationally, but that doesn’t mean it’s a simple task politically or financially.
As I’ve noted before, Mamdani will have to go to Albany to get a lot of this done, and despite having Gov. Kathy Hochul on his side, I’d imagine some of his colleagues in the legislature will view him with some level of suspicion. After all, the mayor-elect has been a member of the Assembly since 2021, where he was a relatively obscure backbencher. For him to win the mayoralty against all odds is a dream that many of his colleagues surely have had, in a New York State version of the joke that in Washington, every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Basically the only place in the state where Republicans didn’t significantly underperform in the November elections is on Long Island, where the party has steadily been making gains, and in its strongholds upstate. Republicans might put some roadblocks in the mayor’s way, though they’re ones I think he will be able to navigate with Hochul’s help, tempered as this help might be by her own reelection triangulation.
Ultimately, Mamdani will get a honeymoon period of a few months, and then he will have to start showing some results. These results will almost inevitably be disappointing to his supporters, because that’s just how things work. It’s very difficult to meet sky-high expectations. But even as someone who was originally a Mamdani skeptic, I’ve been impressed by his mix of pragmatism and conviction, and I have high hopes that he can navigate these rough waters.
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