Ana Fagy And
Sakshi Venkatraman,New York
US President Donald Trump supported Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral election, urging voters not to elect leftist leader Zohran Mamdani.
“Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You should vote for him and hope he does a fantastic job,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday night. “He is capable of this, Mamdani is not!”
The muted support for the former New York governor comes ahead of a closely watched mayoral election.
On Sunday, the president said he would not want to send federal funding to his home city of New York if Mamdani is elected.
“It would be difficult for me as president to give a lot of money to New York because if New York is run by a communist, all you're doing is wasting the money you send there,” Trump said in a television interview.
Opinion polls show Mamdani, the Democratic candidate, ahead of Cuomo, who is running as an independent after Mamdani defeated him in the Democratic primary. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is trailing.
Trump, also a Republican, refused to endorse Sliwa for his job, saying that “a vote for Curtis Sliwa… is a vote for Mamdani.”
Regarding federal funding, the president added that it is “highly unlikely that I will contribute more than the bare minimum from federal funds” if Mamdani is elected.
The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to cut federal grants and funding for projects largely located in Democratic-run areas. New York has received $7.4bn (£5.7bn) in federal funding this financial year.
Getty ImagesIn a wide-ranging interview with CBS' “60 Minutes” on Sunday, Trump said Mayor Mamdani would make left-leaning former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “look great.”
“I have to see de Blasio, what a bad mayor he has been, and this man will do a much worse job than de Blasio,” the president said of Mamdani.
Trump grew up in the New York borough of Queens and still owns property in the city.
“I'm not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if there's a choice between a bad Democrat and a communist, I'll always pick the bad Democrat, to be honest with you,” the Republican president told CBS.
Mamdani, who will lead the global financial hub, is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, although he has rejected accusations that he is a communist and joked in one television interview that he is “something like a Scandinavian politician,” only browner.
Mamdani won the Democratic primary, with Cuomo coming in second. The 34-year-old state legislator called the former New York governor a Trump puppet and parrot.
“The answer to Donald Trump's presidency is not to create a mirror image of him here at City Hall,” Mamdani said Monday.
“This is about creating an alternative that can speak to what New Yorkers so desperately want to see in their own city and what they find in themselves and their neighbors every day—a city that believes in the dignity of everyone who calls this place home.”
Cuomo tried to fend off that line of attack by presenting himself as the only candidate experienced enough to deal with the Trump administration.
He served as New York's governor during the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw many states grapple with the Trump administration, although Cuomo himself came under scrutiny after state investigators found that the number of nursing home deaths during the outbreak had been significantly undercounted.
“I fought Donald Trump,” Cuomo said during the debate. “When I fight for New York, I'm not going to stop.”
Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities as part of a crackdown on crime while attempting to strip jurisdictions of funding that limits their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
