Zohran Mamdani Says He's Ready for Donald Trump

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

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4.2 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Next month, New York City may elect as its next mayor a man who was pretty much unknown to the broader public a year ago. Zohran Mamdan, who is currently thirty-three years old and a member of the State Assembly, is a democratic socialist who won a primary upset against the current mayor, Eric Adams, and the former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was trying to stage a political comeback. Mamdani now leads the race by around twenty percentage points in most polls. His run for mayor is a remarkable story, but it has not been an easy one. His campaign message of affordability—his ads widely tout a rent freeze in the city—resonates with voters, but his call for further taxing the top one per cent of earners has concerned the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul.

In Congress, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have yet to even endorse him. “There are many people who will say housing is a human right, and yet it oftentimes seems as if it is relegated simply to the use of it as a slogan,” Mamdani tells David Remnick at his campaign headquarters, in midtown Manhattan. “It often comes back to whether you’re willing to fight for these ideals that you hold.” Donald Trump, for his part, dubs Mamdani a Communist, and has threatened to withhold federal funds from New York if he’s elected, calling such a vote “a rebellion.” An attack by the President “will be an inevitability,” Mamdani says, noting that the city’s legal department is understaffed for what may be an epic battle to come. “This is an Administration that looks at the flourishing of city life wherever it may be across this country as a threat to their entire political agenda. And New York City looms large in their imagination.”

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was chronicled by Eric Lach, a staff writer covering New York politics and life for The New Yorker.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the political scene. I'm David Remnick.
0:08.3	Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:16.1	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:22.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:27.7	It has to cross your mind. I'm 33 years old. I'm running 20 points ahead.
0:33.2	The guy that's right behind me has the likeability factor of a traffic jam.
0:39.3	It's very likely that you're going to be the next mayor of the city with a $115 billion budget,
0:46.3	a president that calls you a communist half the time, and he's threatening the city in many different ways.
0:53.3	When you go home at night and you're thinking about this emotionally, and people are questioning your experience as well, naturally, simply on the basis of age, when you're staring at the ceiling at 3 o'clock in the morning, as you must do, you know? You know, I have to be honest with you. I don't have trouble sleeping. At all. I don't. Because you're walking across the city half the day. I'm quite tired when I get to bed.
1:16.2	Zohran Mamdani is running to be mayor of New York City and the polls have him at least 15 points ahead of Andrew Cuomo.
1:23.4	Mamdani is 33. He serves in the State Assembly and he's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
1:30.5	And a year ago, almost nobody had heard his name.
1:34.7	But doubt never enters your mind.
1:36.4	A lack of, what if I let them down, never enters your mind.
1:40.4	The weight of that hope is one that I do wrestle with and the responsibility of living up to it.
1:50.0	But doubt, I wouldn't say.
1:53.0	In the Democratic primary in June, Mamdani pulled off a huge upset, not unlike Alexandria Casio-Cortez did when she ran for Congress
2:02.5	as a young Democratic socialist herself. Mamdani beat former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was trying
2:09.2	to stage a political comeback. Cuomo is still in the race as an independent, and the Republican
2:14.5	Curtis Slewa trails long in the distance. It seems on one hand like an astonishing launch for a guy
2:21.3	who would be New York's youngest mayor in generations
2:24.3	and the first Muslim to hold the office.
	...

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