Anti-trump Fervor Defining The New York City Mayor’s Race

NEW YORK — One candidate crushed a Tesla bearing Donald Trump’s name in his first TV ad of the New York City mayor’s race last week. Another has accused Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams of kowtowing to the Republican president to avoid prosecution. And a third has been castigating Cuomo for sharing Trump’s wealthy donors.

The Democratic candidates looking to replace Adams are signaling to voters they will stand up to Trump, who looms over his hometown’s mayoral election. And it’s no wonder why: Polls show most Democratic voters in the nation’s largest — and deep blue — city want a mayor who will fight the president as he threatens to deport migrants and slash federal funding.

Their desire for a mayor to battle the White House is why Adams is opting out of the June 24 Democratic primary and instead running as an independent in November, given his friendly posture toward Trump — with whom he confabbed Friday at the White House.

“President Trump’s name may not be on the ballot, but his presence is arguably the most important factor for Democratic primary candidates to navigate,” said New York City-based Democratic strategist Austin Shafran. “Failing to show you can stand up to him could be a major disqualifier among primary voters — especially Black and brown voters who have no love lost with President Trump.”

It’s an especially sensitive issue for Cuomo. The scandal-scarred former governor has a decades-long relationship with the president, who even made a video appearance at Cuomo’s 1990 bachelor party. Cuomo’s mayoral primary foes are trying to yoke him to Trump — highlighting shared donors and similarly autocratic styles — in a bid to quash the frontrunner’s momentum. They argue he’s pulled punches and stayed quiet as the president conducts an unprecedented incursion into New York City’s affairs.

During his first 100 days, the president moved to kill a controversial Manhattan toll program, yanked migrant support funding from a city bank account and intervened to successfully dismiss Adams’ federal corruption case before it went to trial.

Casting Cuomo as too weak to adequately fight Trump presents a crucial opportunity to his lesser-known challengers, who are struggling to break through.

The ex-governor started the race with a light touch toward Trump — calling him a fellow “Queens boy” in a campaign trail interview — before switching to tougher rhetoric more recently. He has warned in speeches that Trump is an “existential threat” to the city and “a force for danger.” But Cuomo remains uneven when talking about the president: On any given day, he will bash Trump’s budget and question his commitment to democracy while insisting he can work productively with him.

His opponents, desperate to weaken his frontrunner standing, are pouncing.

“Whenever Donald Trump wants to put New Yorkers within his crosshairs, I am going to fight him,” state legislator Zohran Mamdani said. “And that is in stark contrast to our former governor, who is too busy being funded by the same people that put Donald Trump in office.”

At least 40 Republicans gave Cuomo a max-out donation of $2,100; Bill Ackman, a hedge fund titan who’s thrown his support behind Trump, donated $250,000 to a super PAC backing Cuomo.

A moderate who’s tangled with those on his left flank over mass transit, the minimum wage and taxes, Cuomo has long faced criticism over his loyalty to the Democratic Party. During his decade-long tenure in Albany, Cuomo propped up Republican control of the state Senate by tacitly blessing a power-sharing deal with centrist Democrats — an arrangement that dissolved after Trump’s election made it politically toxic. Two of Cuomo’s lesser-known mayoral opponents — state Sens. Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos — came into office by unseating members of that breakaway faction. Cuomo resigned in 2021 after a state attorney general investigation found he sexually harassed 11 women — charges he denies.

Unlike his opponents, Cuomo can credibly claim that he has known Trump, worked with Trump and fought against Trump. His supporters view him as the perfect Trump foil — a bully, but our bully, an alpha to match the president’s own take-no-prisoners personality.

“I know Mr. Trump,” Cuomo said in an April speech at a Harlem church. “He is a bully. And you know what you do with a bully? You stand up to a bully. When they put their finger in your chest, you step forward, you don't step back.”

But Cuomo’s comments have been inconsistent.

In his unusually long March 1 launch video, Cuomo didn’t mention Trump until the 13th minute, and the message was one of cautious collaboration.

Compare that to city Comptroller Brad Lander, who is staking his campaign on attacking Cuomo and Trump — often together.

Lander, who is trailing in the polls, recently dropped more than $700,000 on a TV ad showing him in a junkyard crushing a Tesla — and declaring Cuomo corrupt in the process.

“Andrew Cuomo only cares about Andrew Cuomo,” Lander said in an interview. “He imagines Trump and he in some kind of finger-poking battle, but that's not the battle that's being fought.”

Lander invoked Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a New Jersey gubernatorial candidate who was arrested Friday protesting at an ICE detention center. Several New York City mayoral candidates, including Lander — but not Cuomo — went to Newark to rally for his release over the weekend or released statements in support.

“Students are on the line. Due process is on the line. Our budget's on the line,” Lander added in the interview. “And (Cuomo) hasn't said one word about any of those things. So this idea that anyone should care about his hypothetical idea about what he would do when he can't be found to say anything about the battles that New Yorkers are fighting right now is very telling.”

Cuomo is sympathetic to Trump on at least one — very controversial — argument: His insistence the justice system has been “weaponized” to go after politicians. Cuomo has groused the state-level sexual harassment probe that ended his gubernatorial career lacked “due process” — though he was allowed to provide testimony to the attorney general's investigators, who substantiated the sexual harassment and misconduct claims that aides leveled against him. The Albany County district attorney subsequently dismissed a forcible touching charge against him, citing insufficient evidence.

The former governor has repeatedly embraced claims that he, Trump, Hunter Biden and Adams were all subjected to a legal system built on political retribution. Trump’s version of that claim underpinned his entire 2024 presidential election, as he campaigned while battling several indictments and was convicted on 34 felony counts.

“You have the Department of Justice or a U.S. attorney or a district attorney actually getting involved and starting investigations, many of which could be seen as politically motivated,” Cuomo told Teamsters President Sean O’Brien during a recent podcast interview.

But he’s made a point of distancing himself from Trump, recently rallying against the president’s proposed federal budget and linking the coming spending fight to his previous battles with Trump over Covid.

Cuomo may find himself at odds with Trump — or at least the president’s Republican allies in Congress — if he wins the mayoralty.

House Republicans have called for Cuomo to be prosecuted after he was accused of lying to Congress during his testimony to a committee investigating his Covid response. Cuomo has denied any wrongdoing and decried the Covid probe as politically motivated.

Myrie has questioned whether the GOP’s criminal referral means Cuomo is “compromised” and would do Trump’s bidding to avoid prosecution — a scenario reminiscent of Adams’ behavior surrounding his corruption case.

“After two months pulling punches on Trump, New Yorkers are right to be concerned about whether the former governor is tiptoeing around Trump to avoid his DOJ,” Myrie said.

The Cuomo campaign has called the theory “desperate and frankly silly.”

Albany Democrats fear Cuomo will try to re-exert control over the Capitol he ruled for a decade despite the mayor’s office having far less power than his old job. In that, they see echoes between Trump’s power grabs and the ex-governor’s penchant for control.

“Andrew Cuomo is sort of like the Donald Trump of the Democratic Party,” said Democratic state Assemblymember Phil Steck. “He’s going to use the tremendous power of the mayor of the city to disrupt state government. I don’t think he’s going to be able to stop that aspect of his personality.”

Meanwhile his rivals are looking for openings to run against Trump, as the primary enters its final six-week stretch.

Lander has held weekly anti-Trump press conferences and two town halls, attracting hundreds of voters. He filmed a digital ad of himself literally throwing punches at his boxing gym, likening it to fighting Elon Musk’s move to seize city funds.

Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker and a late entry into the mayoral race, says she’s already fighting Trump in her leadership role. She fundraised off her lawsuit to block the mayor’s deal to bring federal law enforcement agents back to city jails, calling it “the Trump administration’s attempt to seize power over our city at the expense of New Yorkers.”

Most candidates have released plans for the city’s potential financial losses. Myrie raised the idea of withholding city tax payments from the federal government and hiring a new crop of lawyers to specifically respond to Trump’s legal threats.

Mamdani, a democratic socialist assemblymember running second in the polls, has focused more on affordability than on opposition to Trump. In fact, he went viral in November for a video engaging with Trump voters in the Bronx and Queens.

But in his latest TV ad, a narrator says Mamdani “stood up to Donald Trump” over footage of him protesting outside a Tesla showroom. And a video of Mamdani screaming at Trump border czar Tom Homan over the detention of pro-Palestinian activists spread across the internet.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story. But Trump has shared some thoughts about the mayor’s race.

“I’ve always gotten along with him,” the president said of Cuomo in April. Sure, Cuomo wasn’t grateful for the Trump administration setting up emergency Covid hospitals in New York City, he noted, but added, “we always had a pretty good relationship.”

Cuomo brushed it off. “He complained. So it's not really a good relationship if he complains, right?” he said. It was just the latest round for the man who paraphrased Mike Tyson when ridiculing what he considers his foes’ deficient toughness against Trump.

“I love these people who say 'I can handle Donald Trump.' Yeah,” Cuomo scoffed about his opponents at a recent forum hosted by the Brooklyn Democratic Party. “There's an old boxing expression where the person who's about to get in the ring says, 'I have a plan. I have a plan.' Yeah, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”