6 hours ago
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Last week’s debate confirmed that the Democrats running for mayor are competing almost exclusively on a near-irrelevant issue: who can fight President Donald Trump the most.
The field of nine mentioned Trump more than 80 times in two hours; the only other theme to come close was the eight candidates’ pile-on of the clear frontrunner among them, Andrew Cuomo.
And even Cuomo has joined the club-Trump club: When he first entered the race, he talked about working with the White House; now he, too, vows to resist.
Reality check: New York City depends on more than $100 billion a year in federal aid.
No, the law doesn’t give any president a free hand to mess with most of that, but a Republican president with a Republican Congress is all too able to change the law to slow that flow.
Especially when the feds face near-$2 trillion annual deficits, the city votes overwhelmingly Democratic, and New York state’s few GOP members of Congress are stretched to cover their own constituents’ needs.
The president is a son of Queens who rose to fame as an NYC developer, a lifelong Post reader still fond of the city even though the likes of state Attorney General Tish James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg have done their best to bankrupt and imprison him.
With the eager cooperation of hack judges put on the bench by the city’s Dem clubhouses.
Yes, base Democratic voters despise the president; that’s why James, Bragg & Co. waged their scorched-earth (but failed) lawfare against him, and why the mayoral candidates talk so tough.
Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani bragging he’s “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare, as a progressive Muslim immigrant”; ex-city Comptroller Scott Stringer using his first TV ad to call the prez “this schmuck” and promise to “tell Trump where to stick it.”
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie is offering a lunatic fantasy of withholding New Yorkers’ federal income taxes, pretending “that gives us the tax base so we can be independent of the White House.” Whaaat?
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams announcing her run with trash talk about “a mayor who will stand up to Trump”; Cuomo telling Politico his plan to stop Trump: “I would spend eight years in Washington.”
Gotham needs its mayor here; mayors have no power to intercept federal income taxes; Trump would like nothing more than to have a nepo baby Muslim socialist as a foil.
And the Democratic activist base that cheers this idiocy is only a fraction of the city’s registered Democrats, let alone of the whole population.
New York as a whole is a lot more in tune with Mayor Eric Adams’ approach of working with Trump where practical, and fighting him as necessary — not far off his approach to President Joe Biden, by the way, and rightly so.
Even if standing up to Biden won him a federal investigation that may well have ended his political career.
We can’t say where all this leads, only that Trump Derangement Syndrome has produced a Democratic primary where the basic needs and interests of New York City are thisclose to irrelevant.
Even candidates that we know know better are painting themselves into corners that will ill-serve the general public if they win.
Regular New Yorkers want homes they can afford, schools that teach, safe streets and subways; anti-Trump performative politics loses ground on every front.
Whoever wins the Democratic primary will certainly be the favorite to win in November, but it sure feels like this is a race to an idiotic bottom.
A race that’s setting up New York City to lose, big time.
English (US)