Democratic Mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday called new reports that Republican President Donald Trump has offered Mayor Eric Adams a job — in an apparent gambit to clear the mayoral general election field and strengthen Andrew Cuomo’s chances of defeating him — an “affront to democracy.”
The Democratic nominee, during a Wednesday afternoon Manhattan press conference, sought to tie Trump’s machinations directly to Cuomo, the former governor, who is polling in second place.
Mamdani’s “emergency” event came in response to reporting, first by The New York Times and followed by other outlets on Sept. 3, that Trump had offered Adams a job in his administration in exchange for abandoning his uphill reelection effort.
Mamdani believes Cuomo is ‘Trump’s choice’
During his event, Mamdani — who is a democratic socialist Queens Assembly member — charged that Trump’s reported actions demonstrated, in his view, that Cuomo is the president’s preferred candidate to win the mayoralty.
“Today, we have learned what New Yorkers have long suspected, that Andrew Cuomo is Donald Trump’s choice to be the next mayor of this city,” Mamdani said.
The reported position offered to Adams within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Politico reported on Wednesday afternoon. However, Adams, via his campaign spokesperson Todd Shapiro, denied that Trump offered the mayor a job in HUD, an agency which Cuomo once served as secretary under President Bill Clinton.
The Assembly member’s comments stem from reports last month that Cuomo and Trump spoke over the phone about the race and that Cuomo predicted at a Hamptons fundraiser that Adams would bow out of the race and that Trump would push his voters to support Cuomo over Sliwa.
Cuomo, for his part, has denied that he and Trump spoke about the election and has insisted his comments in the Hamptons were a response to a hypothetical question rather than being based on any knowledge of how the president may influence the race.
The former governor has also repeatedly insisted that he would be able to stand up to Trump because he did it for four years as governor during the president’s first term.
“The governor was asked what he heard to be a hypothetical about how it could become a two-person race and was speculating,” Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said late last month. “We’re not asking for or expecting help from anyone.”
Serena Roosevelt, a Cuomo spokesperson, declined to respond to Mamdani’s Wednesday remarks.
The Times reported that Trump’s team is also considering offering a job to Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. In a statement, Sliwa said he has not been in contact with the White House about a job and that he is not interested in one anyway.
Cuomo is angling to be the anti-Mamdani alternative in the race, drawing support from centrist Democrats, Republicans, and business honchos who see the democratic socialist as an “existential threat” to the city.
Mamdani charged that Cuomo is not just passively benefiting from Trump’s attempt to clear the field, but has been an active participant in the alleged plot. He said that both Cuomo and Adams are working with Trump to subvert the city’s Democratic elections.
“The issue is a former governor, a Democrat in name, calling the president of this country, having a conversation with the intent of how to stop the Democratic nominee’s success in the November election,” Mamdani said. “We’ve seen in this reporting…that our so-called leaders of the city and the state care little for the people they are supposed to serve and care more about themselves and whether or not they continue to hold onto power.”
