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US President Donald Trump has publicly endorsed Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral race, urging voters not to elect leftist candidate Zohran Mamdani. “Whether or not you personally like Andrew Cuomo, you have no choice. You should vote for him and hope he does a fantastic job,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday evening.
Trump added: "He is capable of this, Mamdani is not!"
Responding to Trump's lukewarm support in the run-up to the election, former New York Governor Cuomo said that "he doesn't support me, but he opposes Mamdani." The president had previously said he would be reluctant to send more than the minimum federal funds to his hometown of New York if Mamdani is elected.
Polls show Mamdani, the Democratic candidate, ahead of Cuomo, who is running as an independent after Mamdani won the Democratic primary. Republican candidate Curtis Sullivan is trailing. Trump, also a Republican, has refused to endorse Sullivan in his position, saying: "A vote for Curtis Sullivan is a vote for Mamdani."
Trump, in a television interview on Sunday, mistakenly called Mamdani a “communist.” “It’s going to be hard for me as president to give a lot of money to New York,” Trump said, adding, “because if you have a communist running New York, all you do is waste the money you send there.”
Responding to Trump’s comments about funding on Monday, Mamdani said he would “deal with this threat: it’s a threat, it’s not a law.” The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to cut federal grants and funding for projects that are predominantly in Democratic-run districts. New York City received $7.4 billion in federal funding this year.
Also on Monday, Mamdani said that "the MAGA movement's support for Andrew Cuomo reflects Trump's view that he would be the best mayor for him." "Not the best mayor for New York, not the best mayor for New Yorkers, but the best mayor for Donald Trump and his administration," Mamdani said.
In his lengthy interview on CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday, Trump said Mamdani's nomination would make former leftist New York City mayor Bill de Blasio "look great." "I saw de Blasio, what a bad mayor he was, and this guy is going to 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 real estate in the city. "I'm not a fan of Cuomo by any means, but if it's between a bad Democrat and a communist, I'll choose the bad Democrat every time, to be honest with you," the Republican president told CBS.
Mamdani calls himself a social democrat and has rejected accusations that he is a communist, joking in a television interview that he was "a bit like a Scandinavian politician," only darker. If he wins, he will become the city's first Muslim mayor and the youngest in more than 100 years.
The 34-year-old state congressman has called Cuomo, the former New York governor, a "puppet" and "parrot" of Trump. "The answer to a Donald Trump presidency is not to create a mirror image of him here in City Hall," Mamdani said Monday.
"Our goal is to create an alternative that can express what New Yorkers so desperately want to see in their city and what they find in themselves and their neighbors every day, a city that believes in the dignity of all who call this place home."
Cuomo has tried to deflect the onslaught by presenting himself as the only candidate with enough experience to take on the Trump administration. He was governor of New York during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many states clashed with the Trump administration, though Cuomo himself came under scrutiny after state investigators found that nursing home deaths had been significantly undercounted during the outbreak.
"I fought against Donald Trump," Cuomo said during a televised debate. "When I fight for New York, I won't stop."
Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities as part of a crackdown on crime, while also seeking to remove funding from jurisdictions that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
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