By Bo Erickson
(Reuters) -New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani wasted no time calling out President Donald Trump, formally kicking off the battle that will likely define relations between the 34-year-old mayor and the president whose celebrity is tied to the city.
“Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: turn the volume up!” Mamdani, a Democrat, said during a Tuesday night speech to a raucous crowd of supporters shortly after being declared the victor.
Democrats swept a trio of races on Tuesday in the first major elections since Trump returned to power nine months ago, elevating a new generation of leaders and injecting fresh momentum into the beleaguered party ahead of next year’s congressional elections.
Mamdani made countering the 79-year-old Republican president’s actions in the city — especially on immigration — a centerpiece of his campaign. The next three years will test his ability to go toe-to-toe with Trump, who wields the world’s biggest bully pulpit and thrives on bare-knuckle politics.
“If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him,” Mamdani told supporters. “And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one.”
Trump has repeatedly turned the massive powers of the presidency on political rivals, and already before the election had threatened to possibly withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from New York City if Mamdani, a democratic socialist, was elected. This would follow previous funding cuts by the Trump administration in political moves targeting Democratic congressional leaders also from the city.
“If you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump told CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday, previewing how Republicans will use Mamdani’s embrace of a socialist agenda as a line of attack against the Democratic Party.
Mamdani acknowledged his win poses a challenge implementing what he calls “the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis this city has seen” since the 1940s — including a proposed rental freeze, universal childcare and other government actions targeting the private sector.
But, in the meantime, Mamdani pledged to fight.
“So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us you will have to go through all of us,” Mamdani added.
(Reporting by Bo Erickson; Editing by Howard Goller)
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