WASHINGTON — President Trump threatened Tuesday to use federal power to seize control of New York City if “communist” Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor.
“If a communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same. But we have tremendous power at the White House to run places where we have to,” Trump told The Post during a Cabinet meeting.
“New York City will run properly. I’m going to bring New York back. I love New York,” the president added.
“We’re going to straighten out New York. It’s going to — maybe we’re going to have to straighten it out from Washington.”
Trump, who in his first term threatened to yank federal funds from the Big Apple for allegedly tolerating lawlessness, did not identify what authorities he might invoke to seize control of city operations.
“We’re going to do something for New York. I can’t tell you what yet, but we’re going to make New York great again. Also, we’re going to make it great again with the country,” he said.
Trump added that “I’m not getting involved” when asked if Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa should drop out of the race.
“[Andrew] Cuomo does have capability. He’s running, but he got knocked out [of the Democratic primary]. You have Eric Adams, the current mayor, you have Cuomo, and you have Curtis Silwa? And Curtis runs every, every four years. He seems to be a fixture on the running scale,” Trump said before calling Mamdani, 33, “not very capable, in my opinion.”
“He’s a disaster … He’s got the Democrat nomination because that shows you where the Democrats have gone. He actually wants to take over the grocery stores of John Catsimatidis,” Trump said, referring to the Gristedes chief.
“[Catsimatidis] actually called me the other day, he’s concerned, his stores are going to be taken from him.”
After discussing New York, Trump threatened a federal takeover of the District of Columbia, which has been self-governing since 1973.
“We could run DC. I mean, we’re, we’re looking at DC. We don’t want crime in DC. We want the city to run well,” he said.
“We’re thinking about doing it, to be honest with you. We want a capital that’s run flawlessly, and it wouldn’t be hard for us to do it, and we’ve had a good relationship with the mayor [Muriel Bowser], and we’re testing it to see if it works.”
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, surged to win the June 24 primary over Cuomo and polls show he’s leading the pack ahead of the Nov. 4 general election.
Vice President JD Vance said over the weekend that Mamdani’s victory “drives home just how much the voters in each of the respective parties have changed.”
“If President Trump’s victory in 2024 was rooted in a broad working and middle-class coalition, Mamdani’s coalition is almost the inverse of that,” Vance said in closed-door remarks Saturday in Southern California.
“This is a guy who won high-income and college-educated New Yorkers and especially both young, and highly-educated New Yorkers, but he was weakest among black voters and weakest among those without a college degree. That’s an interesting coalition. Maybe it works in the New York Democratic primary. I don’t think it works particularly well in the United States at large.”
Mamdani has the support of 35% of general election voters, followed by Cuomo at 29%,Sliwa at 16% and Adams with 14%, according to an American Pulse survey released Thursday.
Adams, elected as a Democrat in 2021 and seeking re-election as an independent, broke with the Biden administration on border enforcement after asylum seekers burdened city resources. He later faced federal corruption charges alleging freebies such as airline upgrades in exchange for greasing the wheels for a new Turkish consulate opening.
The incumbent mayor says the case was the result of political persecution from Biden’s Justice Department and the case was dropped by the Trump administraiton.
Trump has offered fond words for Adams, but he has not made an endorsement in the campaign.
