Trump Threatens New York After Kathy Hochul Endorses Zohran Mamdani

The president is threatening to withhold federal funding from a U.S. city unless its local election goes his way.

Donald Trump warned Monday that he would stop “sending good money” to New York City if it chose Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani as its next mayor—hours after the 33-year-old politico earned Governor Kathy Hochul’s critical endorsement.

“Governor Kathy Hochul of New York has Endorsed the ‘Liddle’ Communist,’ Zohran Mamdani, running for Mayor of New York,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “This is a rather shocking development, and a very bad one for New York City. How can such a thing happen?”

“Washington will be watching this situation very closely. No reason to be sending good money after bad!” he noted.

Hochul—a bonafide centrist—spelled out her support for the Democratic Socialist in a sprawling New York Times op-ed Sunday, detailing their mutual policy goals of lowering the cost of living, instating strong leadership atop the New York City Police Department, and vehemently opposing Trump’s “abhorrent and destructive policies.”

“Since taking office in January, Mr. Trump has killed jobs and dragged down our economy with tariff tax hikes that make life more expensive for working families. He’s gutted Medicaid and food assistance, slashed federal funding New York City relies on and threatened a federal takeover of New York—all while trying to put his thumb on the scale of our local elections,” Hochul wrote.

“We must never allow Mr. Trump to control our city like the king he wants to be,” the governor noted. “Anyone who accepts his tainted influence or benefits from it is compromised from the start.”

It’s not the first time that Trump has overtly threatened Mamdani. The president accused the Ugandan-born New Yorker of being in the country “illegally,” and in July said he would arrest Mamdani if the mayoral hopeful followed through on defying ICE.

Mamdani has been repeatedly accused by conservatives of being a communist, a badge that he has roundly rejected. Politifact, an independent fact-checking organization, said that the Queens lawmaker’s platform for free buses, subsidized daycare, protected rent control, and city-owned grocery stores was not akin to communism, a system in which the government seizes and retains complete and total control over private property and industry. Instead, Politifact decried the cheap smear as a “red scare tactic that has existed in U.S. politics for decades.”

But the name-calling and federal intrusions have not swayed New York voters away from the race favorite: Mamdani clinched New York City’s Democratic primary with 56 percent of the vote in June. He eclipsed former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits, beating out the establishment Democrat by 12 points.

New York City’s election day is Tuesday, November 4, though early voting begins October 25.