President Donald Trump described part of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech on Tuesday night as “dangerous.”
Trump bashed Mamdani during an interview on Fox News that aired on Wednesday evening. The president said that the mayor-elect should be “a little bit respectful of Washington” because of the federal aid that the city receives.
“I thought it was a very angry speech, certainly angry toward me,” the president told Fox News host Bret Baier. “I think he should be very nice to me, you know? I’m the one that sort of has to approve a lot of things coming to him, so he’s off to a bad start.”
Mamdani, a self-identified democratic socialist, needled Trump throughout the campaign and continued to challenge the president in his victory speech on Tuesday night, saying that for Trump “to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”
The president said that Mamdani’s challenge was “a very dangerous statement for him to make.”
“He has to be a little bit respectful of Washington, because if he’s not, he doesn’t have a chance of succeeding,” said Trump. “I want to make the city succeed. I don’t want to make him succeed. I want to make the city succeed, and we’ll see what happens.”
The president has described Mamdani as a “communist” as Mamdani has pushed an agenda that includes rent freezes, free bus fares, and city-run grocery stores.
“I’m so torn because I would like to see the new mayor do well because I love New York. I really love New York,” Trump told Baier. “Look, for a thousand years, communism has not worked, communism or the concept of communism has not worked. I tend to doubt it’s going to work this time.”
Trump endorsed former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary, in the final days of the contest over Republican Curtis Sliwa. Polling ahead of Tuesday’s contest showed Cuomo in a distant second and Sliwa in a more distant third.
On Wednesday, Mamdani named the four members of his transition team to help aid his ascension to the office of mayor. The mayor-elect named former de Blasio senior staffer Elana Leopold, former FTC Commissioner Lina Khan, former Adams housing chief Maria Torres-Springer, and former Adams health chief Melanie Hartzog.
