The Mamdani Delusion

National Review Online

Friday, October 17, 2025

 

Viewers who tuned in to Thursday night’s NBC New York/Telemundo New York City mayoral debate could be forgiven for concluding that the biggest threat to city residents’ quality of life was Donald Trump.

 

Zohran Mamdani and his opponents, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, were peppered with questions about how they would resist Donald Trump’s initiatives, whether they would work with Trump or stonewall him, and how they would obstruct his National Guard deployments and immigration raids.

 

It wasn’t until about minute 50 of this two-hour affair that the moderators raised questions about pocketbook issues in the city. It took 90 minutes to get around to the subject of elementary education. At minute 100, we finally heard something about the city’s economy, specifically the exodus of its employers.

 

Mamdani, the front-runner to be the next mayor, didn’t impress. Voters who watched the debate with the sound off might have been taken with Mamdani’s unruffled poise and his permanent smile. Those who paid any attention to what the candidate was actually saying would conclude, though, that the likely next mayor is determined to subject the city’s residents to a variety of harmful social experiments.

 

Mamdani stuck to his promise to protect disruptive demonstrators from law enforcement’s efforts to “intimidate” them. He pledged to restore police response times to their baseline performance in 2020 — a year in which he endorsed defunding of the NYPD — by transforming social workers into first responders. He insisted on loosening mayoral control over the schools, handing them over to the teachers’ unions. He would look to Eugene, Ore., for solutions to homelessness (telephone operators can apparently figure it all out).

 

Besides this, there was the rest of the Mamdani agenda: Rent freezes that would raise the cost of housing by reducing its availability and quality. Expanding congestion zones and making buses “free,” which would be paid for through new corporate and income taxes on New Yorkers that the mayor would somehow secure from the state legislature through sheer force of will. Ten billion dollars in new spending that will be paid for by hiring more city workers to ensure the city’s wealthy residents are sufficiently harassed.

 

If it doesn’t sound like the likely next mayor knew what he was talking about, that’s because he doesn’t.

 

Mamdani flattered himself and Democratic pretensions by contending that the party’s lack of his brand of fight is why Democrats are a “permanent minority in this country” (they’re not). He described his hostility to the police as having been forged by his revulsion toward high-profile episodes of police brutality like Missouri teenager Michael Brown’s 2014 death (it wasn’t). He insisted that only spreading New York’s wealth around could help the “one in four” New Yorkers “living in poverty” (by which he means at or below 200 percent of the poverty line).

 

Even Mamdani’s critics must concede, however, that he has the courage of his deluded convictions. Mamdani accused Israel of engaging in either an “occupation” or a “siege” of Palestinian lands, which is a clever way of indicting Jerusalem for having the temerity to either defend itself inside Palestinian territories or exist alongside them. He denounced Israeli “apartheid” and assailed its Jewish identity as a “hierarchy on the basis of race and religion” — news, presumably, to Israel’s Arab citizens, some of whom are members of the Knesset who regularly protest Jerusalem’s policies. Mamdani now contends he would “discourage” the use of the slogan he once mouthed himself, “globalize the intifada.” He apparently didn’t know until he just started talking with Jewish New Yorkers that the Jewish experience with the intifada wasn’t a pleasant one.

 

As for the two other candidates, the Republican Sliwa is a New York City institution, he knows the troubles that plague Gotham at an intimate level, and his happy warrior demeanor is infectious. But he directed much of his fire at Cuomo.

 

Not that Cuomo didn’t deserve it. The debate’s first half hour reminded voters why Cuomo is an unsuitable figure for any public office: the Covid-era nursing home deaths, the sexual harassment allegations, and the various investigations hanging over his head.

 

Early in the debate, Cuomo and Mamdani sparred over who is the truest Democrat — Cuomo, who is running as an independent after New York City Democrats rejected him, or Mamdani, who opened his campaign by imploring his fellow democratic socialists to reregister Democratic so they could back his primary campaign. The truth is that both are representative of the modern Democratic Party and its tensions between a corrupt and aged managerial class and its youngish revolutionaries on the make.

 

Unfortunately for New Yorkers, the satisfaction of seeing one of them lose in November will be tempered by the trepidation that will accompany the victory of the other.