New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani called out President Donald Trump in his victory speech Tuesday after defeating disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D).
“After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him,” Mamdani, who will be the city’s youngest mayor in over a century, told the crowd. “And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”
“This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one,” the 34-year-old continued, to applause at the Paramount theater in Brooklyn. “So Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.”
The state assemblymember went on to vow that his upcoming administration will put an end to “the Donald Trumps” of New York City and a “culture of corruption” that has allowed billionaires to take advantage of the working class and evade just taxation.
“We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed,” Mamdani said Tuesday.
He continued, “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
Mamdani was born in Uganda and will become New York City’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor. He ran a grassroots campaign centered on affordable housing, city-owned grocery stores and free public buses, enduring frequent racist attacks from his detractors.
Mamdani told the crowd Tuesday that New Yorkers “believe in standing up for those we love,” including trans people, immigrants, “the many Black women” Trump has mentioned in recent months — “or anyone else with their back against the wall.”
Mamdani certainly seemed to strike a chord with Trump, who had endorsed Cuomo the day before and argued on social media Tuesday that the many Republicans who were defeated by Democrats only lost because “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT.”
The progressive thanked his supporters Tuesday, ending on a note of confidence.
He said, “When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them. A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme — and let us build a shining city for all.”