Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday pledged to “fight like hell” to ensure President Trump doesn’t make good on his threats to freeze more federal funding for New York City if Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor.
The governor, who endorsed the democratic socialist Mamdani last month, said that she will remind Trump — a native New Yorker born and raised in Queens — that hurting the city will have consequences for the rest of the country as well. She was responding to the president’s comments on Tuesday that he “wouldn’t be generous with a communist because it’s like throwing money out the window” — again falsely labeling Mamdani as a communist.
“New York City is the economic engine for the entire state, and just as no one should ever root against our country, you should not root against New York City,” Hochul told reporters during an unrelated Queens news conference on Tuesday afternoon, where she appeared alongside Mamdani for the first time since endorsing him.
“I’ll certainly be having those conversations and pointing out that this is detrimental to his properties, business interests, his friends in the city, and a whole way of life that I know that perhaps some day he’ll come back to,” she added, referring to Trump.
Unlike other Democratic governors of blue states, Hochul has maintained a fair working relationship with Trump. She successfully negotiated to keep the city’s congestion pricing tolling system running and to resume work on a wind farm project off the coast of Brooklyn.
Trump has made no secret of his intention to go after the city far more aggressively if Mamdani is elected on Nov. 4, threatening a federal takeover of the five boroughs in addition to withholding more vital federal funds. He also slammed Hochul’s endorsement of Mamdani as a “rather shocking development, and a very bad one for New York City.”
The prospect of Mamdani potentially putting a target on the city’s back has been a central part of his rival, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s, argument for why the lawmaker should not be mayor.
Hochul also revealed that while she and Mamdani have had conversations about implementing universal free child care in the Big Apple, it remains unclear how such an expansion would be funded. Mamdani has proposed a tax hike on millionaires and corporations as the primary funding mechanism, but Hochul — who is heading into an election year herself — has stated that this idea is a nonstarter.
“He wants to work with me on this, and we don’t have the details fleshed out,” the governor said. “I think these are conversations that will happen in earnest on many policies post-election, and there’s time to do that if this coincides at the time.”
