Countdown to Mamdani’s Time Amidst Trump Tempest
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Photos/Bob Hennelly
By Bob Hennelly
In less than a week Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani becomes Mayor Mamdani as the Trump administration doubles down on its lethal mass deportation strategy using masked federal agents to tear apart families and communities all in pursuit of a whiter nation.
Like the slave patrols of another era, they seek out suspect people of color where they are working productively in the community and abduct them with the goal of shipping them out of the country. In that process some die in custody.
It's that stark and brutal even as we celebrate the holidays. You can't assess the Mamdani moment out of the context of the era of Trump junta's misrule, something a lot of reporters have trouble doing because they hope to get invited to the White House Christmas Party.
Trump is relitigating the Civil War because he doesn't like the way the first one turned out while bombing Africa on Christmas and trying to provoke a shooting war with Venezuela. That Jan. 6th photo of the rioter holding the Confederate "Stars and Bars" in the U.S. Capitol was all about white supremacists capturing what they tried to capture a century-and-a-half ago.
And Trump pardoned them and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who led the vote to not certify President Biden's AFTER the riot designed to derail the Electoral vote count, still controls Congress by the thinnest of threads pursuing his white Christian nationalist agenda.
The polarity between New York City—America's biggest city and the federal government in Washington D.C.—has not been this pronounced since the Civil War in the 1860s. That's when then New York City Mayor Fernando Wood, a pro-Confederacy Democrat and corrupt real estate tycoon, called for New York City to secede from the union that President Lincoln was trying to hold together. Wood argued that having New York City secede would bolster the South and the cotton trade upon which the city's economy relied.
Flash forward to 2025.
“The direct assault on the federal civil service and careers like nursing is all about blowing up as many middle class households of color as possible in pursuit of a 21st century dystopian cyber-plantation run by AI and financed by unregulated cryptocurrency.”
Trump 2.0 is all about satisfying white supremaicst grievances here at home and around the world. There's been the restoration of General Robert E. Lee's oil portrait, with the depiction of a slave, to a place of prominence at West Point along with the elimination of programs aimed at fostering racial diversity.
Meanwhile, Trump's smash and grab plunder economics is sinking the entire economy by inducing a recession or worse, while at the same time enriching his family and his fellow oligarchs around the world. The direct assault on the federal civil service and careers like nursing is all about blowing up as many middle class households of color as possible in pursuit of a 21st century dystopian cyber-plantation run by AI and financed by unregulated cryptocurrency.
Corporate bankruptcies, home foreclosures and the number of Americans without healthcare surges while Trump ends gathering the government data that would illustrate the human cost of his wrecking of the economy like collecting the data on how many children are going hungry.
At the same time, the legacy corporate news media, increasingly under the dominion of the Trump oligarchs who benefit from his skewed tax policy, goes into overdrive promoting AI, cryptocurrency and online gambling.
This is the 21st century hellscape Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will take the oath of office in.
In order to govern New York City, the media capital of the world, mayors have always had to project competency. As a Mayor, one really bad snow storm response can generate bad press for weeks and a line in your obituary.
Blue tape outlines an area intended to kettle reporters hoping to ask Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a question during an outdoor press conference held in lower Manhattan earlier this month.
So, it was fortuitous that the implosion of Catherine Almonte Da Costa being named as Mayor-elect Mamdani's Director of Appointments was over in just a few hours after her selection following the surfacing of her "decade-old social media posts that recalled antisemitic tropes" as described by City & State.
The Mamdani transition team was quick to throw itself under the bus in a way punting to employing an “independent firm” to improve on the ongoing vetting process that has evidently failed with Da Costa.
“This unacceptable oversight in the vetting process does not meet the Mayor-elect’s standards for this transition or the incoming administration,” Dora Pekec, Mamdani press secretary said in a statement. “We’ve taken swift action to bring on an independent firm for additional support.”
As New York City's first Muslim Mayor everything Mamdani says and does, as well as every staffer, will be scrutinized through the lens of whether or not it is antisemitic especially in a media environment where being critical of the military policies of the state of Israel is regularly conflated with being antisemitic.
Judging by the tenor of the campaign, our national political crisis as well as his press coverage since the election, there won't be any honeymoon for a Mayor Mamdani. We already see Elon Musk using social media to malign Mamdani's choice of retired FDNY EMS Deputy Chief Lillian Bonsignore to lead the FDNY with Musk predicting that because Bonsignore was not a firefighter people would “die” from her lack of experience.
Of course, Mamdani countered rightly that at least 70 percent of all calls coming into the FDNY” are EMS. In fact, the EMS unions argue having the FDNY being run from the top by firefighters almost exclusively has come as its emergency medical service was consistently diminished, something that's borne out by long and unacceptable EMS response times, dozens of idle ambulances and high workforce turnover.
"The FDNY, Fire and EMS together, respond to 1.6 million medical calls a year, which is over 70 percent of all 911 calls to the FDNY," wrote DC 37 Local 2507 (EMTs) and Local 3621 (officers) representing the EMS workforce. “Despite this EMS has consistently been underpaid, under-resourced, and undervalued. These systemic challenges within the department have not only disenfranchised the diverse workforce of the EMS, but has impeded the quality of life saving services the FDNY provides to New Yorkers. We applaud the Mayor elect's decision to begin the process of ending the FDNY's history of inequity with this appointment.”
Earlier this month, the City Hall Press corps gathered at lower Manhattan’s Canal Street Park in the bitter cold awaiting the Mayor-elect for a press briefing on New York City's housing crisis that is getting worse by the day. No doubt, by being outdoors, it was assured to be brief while conveying a sense of urgency.
“Would Mayor-elect Mamdani consider lobbying Albany to end its decades-old practice of rebating back to Wall Street the state’s Stock Transfer Tax that’s just a dime per $100 stock transaction that’s handed hundreds of billions back to Wall Street since the early 1980s?”
Audra Heinrichs, the Mamdani transition team’s lead advance and another staffer, handed out hand-warmers to the camera crews and reporters as they assembled on the site overlooking a Hudson River whose surface flow was slowing amidst a polar vortex. The gaggle of Room 9 City Hall reporters that gathered were feeling that same biting deep freeze that tens of thousands of New York City's homeless feel every day.
Before the mayor-elect arrived, the Mamdani staffers attempted to get the City Hall reporters to move back and cue up behind a perimeter defined by blue painter's tape—something the reporters dismissed out of hand noting they needed closer proximity to record the mayor-elects remarks. The Mamdani staff then broke out black gaffer tape to set a new boundary closer to where the reporters had chosen to stand.
“We are gathered in lower Manhattan where the average rents have hit an old time high—a ten percent surge over last year's average—with higher prices and fewer available units,” an earnest-sounding Mamdani told reporters. “Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are one rent hike, one medical emergency away from joining the ranks of our homeless in the city—which have swelled to the greatest numbers since the Great Depression.”
Mamdani described how that day he was meeting separately with real estate developers and a group of New Yorkers who have experienced homelessness and their advocates to find a consensus on how to reduce the 252 day period it takes to get an affordable housing unit online.
"There is good news however,” he said. “There has never been more consensus across the ideological spectrum that, indeed, we are in a housing crisis and the deep necessity of building more housing across these five boroughs. So, today I am meeting with two sets of stakeholders who I believe can share key insights into how we have arrived at this point."
As a candidate, Mamdani cast himself as a reformer looking to upend the politics that serves only big donors over the public interest. That's going to be a high standard to which reporters will hold him to—just as the New York Times did on this day asking Mamdani to explain why he was soliciting large donors to fund his transition.
“We are looking to raise the money necessary to have a successful transition and to be ready to govern on day one and deliver on the needs for working New Yorkers, and unlike for the primary and the general, there are no matching funds in this period,” Mamdani explained. “Every dollar of the four million dollars we have to raise privately—and I have been proud to raise 90 percent of that money is from donations of less than $250 from more than 30,000 across the city and the country."
During the campaign, Mamdani's opponents pressed him to detail how he would pay for delivering on his promises of making the city more affordable. Now, as the national economy slows down under the weight of Trump's caprice, outgoing New York City Comptroller Brad Lander's office is predicting a $2.18 billion budget shortfall for New York City that opens up to a $10 billion canyon for the upcoming fiscal year.
Would Mayor-elect Mamdani consider lobbying Albany to end its decades-old practice of rebating back to Wall Street the state's Stock Transfer Tax that's just a dime per $100 stock transaction that's handed hundreds of billions back to Wall Street since the early 1980s?
“My focus on raising additional revenue is on raising the personal income tax on the top one percent of New Yorkers by two percent and increasing the state's top corporate tax to match that of the top tier of New Jersey's corporate tax and I think that these are critically important as we fight to fully fund our city agencies and fund our affordability agenda."
When pressed for a "yes" or "no" on continuing to rebate the billions back to Wall Street, Mamdani responded, “My focus is on the tax policy I've put forward.”