Our would-be mayors aren’t doing much to show they’re up to the challenge.
Pop quiz: Which of the following quotes comes from a member of the presidential administration attacking big, Democrat-run cities, and which was said by a Democrat who wants to run one of those cities?
One: “It’s dangerous. It’s dirty… They don’t want you to drive your car. They want you to take a train. If you want me to take a train, make the train safe, make it clean.”
Two: “Just think of the absurdity: The plan is for city taxpayers to pay for the MTA and for the migrant crisis! It’s outrageous… today, people stand with their backs against the walls, away from the tracks and away from each other, on guard — afraid they might be the next victim, afraid of New York at its worst.”
That first hater is Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, broadly threatening to pull federal funds if the trains don’t get safer and cleaner, as if less money would help improve things, ahead of his demand that Gov. Kathy Hochul kill congestion pricing by the end of this week before tweeting Thursday afternoon that New York had another 30 days but “continued noncompliance will not be taken lightly.”
That’s a big fight in its own right, with billions on the line for the subways that are the city’s circulatory system, but also a small part of the White House’s much broader pressure campaign bearing down on New York City and its institutions. It also includes, so far, withholding hundreds of millions of dollars from Columbia University, the Justice Department suing New York State for not letting the feds use our driver’s license database as a de facto deportation round-up list, and a bill of attainder punishing Paul Weiss, one of the city’s leading law firms, as explicit punishment for its lawyers representing the president’s perceived enemies.
New York and its institutions are also scrambling to respond to a series of executive orders, written in the language of an aggrieved talk radio caller, banning federal funding of any institution touching on certain ideas (“radical gender ideology” and DEI) without so much as defining them. The idea is to bash a few unlucky or especially out-of-line losers while states, cities, universities, hospital systems and so on race to police themselves by avoiding any verbiage or information associated with those ideas.
But wait, there’s more: a ridiculously overbroad definition of “terrorism” already being used as a blank check for arrests by masked federal agents, deportations and prosecutions.
Returning to the subway haters I quoted at the top, the second one is Andrew Cuomo, the leading Democratic candidate to be the city’s next mayor.
The “outrageous absurdity” bit is from a March 2024 New York Post op-ed he wrote bashing the congestion pricing plan he’d backed as governor just before Gov. Kathy Hochul, who replaced him when he resigned before lawmakers could remove him, was about to implement it. The “New York at its worst” bit is from the 17-minute video he put out to announce his mayoral run.
It’s striking that in painting a bleak picture of a city on the brink, the leading Democratic candidate to be mayor sounds nearly identical to an agent of the Trump administration.
If Cuomo or Duffy or anyone else describing the MTA as if it were the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno is really concerned with what to do (and not to do) about subway safety, they should read Vital City’s excellent new report on just that, where the data makes clear that, while there are real problems to tackle, this is fearmongering motivated by politics, not facts.
But while Cuomo has been ginning up a “city in crisis” narrative about real but manageable public safety and order problems as part of his political comeback bid, New York is staring at an actual crisis courtesy of President Trump, who’s been hammering New York City and its institutions with much more to come. And the other candidates have collectively been trying to convince New Yorkers there’s a “crisis of Cuomo” that demands voters don’t rank him at all, while saying little about how they’d deal with the much less hypothetical crisis of Trump.
Lander and the other contenders seem more interested in sniping at Cuomo and Adams for supposedly being compromised by the president than in laying out what they would do themselves as mayor about him.
The city and its mayor are facing completely unprecedented financial and legal and regulatory pressures that won’t go away with Mayor Eric Adams’ almost certain exit at the end of the year. The next mayor will need to make tough decisions about when to resist Washington’s diktats and when to comply, and painful decisions about how to spend each city dollar as federal support dries up.
That takes more than performative protests, or whistling past the graveyard, but that’s mostly what the mayoral field has offered so far.
Political coverage so far has largely focused on Adams’ efforts to suck up to Trump and his administration, which he’s vowed to work with and not publicly criticize, as the Justice Department in turn moves to drop the criminal corruption case against Hizzoner. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani got some attention for yelling questions at Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan when he was in Albany last week, but that’s cheap-seat stuff. As I write this, State Sen. Zellnor Myrie is holding a press conference saying Cuomo is compromised, sort of like Adams, by the criminal referral to the Justice Department from House Republicans related to nursing home deaths during COVID.
None of that speaks to what these candidates would themselves do as mayor to respond to Trump and protect New Yorkers. In a crowded ranked-choice election where the candidates have mostly struggled so far to build name recognition and distinguish themselves, is there one among them with the courage and integrity to speak honestly to New Yorkers about the rough years to come and how they’d lead the city through them?
Nearly $8 billion of New York City’s budget comes directly from Washington, according to a report from city Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander (who proposes adding a billion dollars to the City’s reserves as a buffer). And that’s not counting federal money that trickles down from Albany or support for NYCHA, the MTA, CUNY and NYC Health + Hospitals. But Lander and the other contenders seem more interested in sniping at Cuomo and Adams for supposedly being compromised by the president than in laying out what, exactly, they’d commit to doing as mayor about him, starting with the money but also the chaos and pressure.
If FEMA intends to do less and leave localities to handle their own emergencies, will they put new resources into the Office of Emergency Management or try to have it do more with less? If education aid dries up, what schools and services is the Department of Education committed to maintaining and what could be scrapped? And on and on and on.
The next mayor is going to have to make hard decisions not only about what they want to add to the services the city provides, but about what they’re willing to cut.
It’s easy to make big promises from the campaign trail. But the next mayor is going to have to make hard decisions not only about what they want to add to the services the city provides, but about what they’re willing to cut. And they’re going to have to do so while Trump officials are testing New York’s “sanctuary city” status, its subway system and any and every other pain and pressure point they can find.
You’d hardly know the first thing about any of that listening to the candidates talk about the new housing they’re going to create or the new cops they’re going to hire.
Of course candidates want to run on what they’re going to give, not what they may have to stop giving. And of course Democrats in a ranked-choice primary are going to start by ripping the frontrunners for what they’re not saying about Trump rather than say more themselves about what will be difficult decisions about when to resist and when to comply with an administration, if that’s even the word for it, that’s governing through grievance and extortion, that speaks loudly and carries a big stick.
But New Yorkers aren’t stupid. If one of the candidates has the courage to separate themselves from the pack and speak honestly about the crisis the city is facing and how they’d approach it, their voice would stand out. So far, none of them are.