Last Friday, Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn and candidate for mayor, held a press conference announcing how he would take the fight to Donald Trump if he wins in November.
Four days later, Comptroller Brad Lander hosted a 300-person town hall in Brooklyn on the same topic, and the day after that Scott Stringer announced his own plan.
With a Democratic primary now just over two months away, the race to become the nominee and next likely mayor has turned into a race about one thing: Who can best take on a president determined to run roughshod over the city that launched his career?
Stringer has proposed an amendment to the city’s zoning code that would prevent the federal government from selling property in the five boroughs to private developers and has called on the city to create a $1 billion “very rainy-day fund” to cover money taken from the city in an act of Trumpian coercion.
That idea was echoed by Lander, whose plans also include creating an independent city and state authority that would manage reproductive-health-care services in order to get around a potential Trump ban on medication abortions.
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has used her government perch to propose adding new neighborhood health clinics to combat any cuts that may come from a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.–led Department of Health and Human Services.
Myrie has proposed hiring 50 lawyers from local elite law firms to build out a “Frontline Protection Force” within the city’s law department who would focus specifically on Trump-focused litigation in federal courts, as well as exploring a “nuclear option” of the city withholding remittances to Washington if Trump ignores a court order to give the city funds, as has fellow state senator and candidate Jessica Ramos.
The flurry of announcements has both a policy and a political component; the former because Trump is threatening to lay siege to much of what has helped the city thrive over the past half-century and political because Trump’s domination of the media means that the best way for mayoral candidates to get attention is to talk more, says the president.
“Donald Trump casts a shadow over everything in New York right now,” said Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University.
“I think a lot of New Yorkers are divided on what they think is the best strategy toward an erratic president who seems to want to take vengeance on New York.
Is it vinegar or honey? The carrot or the stick?”
Something like the carrot approach is currently being proposed by Andrew Cuomo, who leads most primary polls by double digits.
The former governor achieved national prominence in 2020 when his daily press briefings on COVID served as a sober antidote to Trump’s freewheeling calls for Americans to inject bleach.
But during his mayoral announcement, he took a more measured tone.
“I will work with anyone who wants to work for the benefit of New York.
I hope President Trump remembers his hometown and works with us to make it better,” he said to the camera.
“But make no mistake, I will stand up and fight for New York.
I have done it before and will do it again.”
In the weeks since, Cuomo has sharpened his rhetoric against Trump, having been accused by opponents of appeasing both Trump’s voters and his donors, some of whom have also supported Cuomo’s mayoral bid.
During a speech at First Corinthian Baptist Church on Sunday, he told the audience that the worst was yet to come from Trump.
“We have a different vision than what President Trump is talking about.
We don’t see his America.
And we’re going to stand up and fight for our America, because our America has real justice for all Americans and real opportunity and real equality,” Cuomo said.
“And that’s going to be the legacy of New York.
We’re going to stand up to the bully.
We’re going to be the first city to stand up and we’re going to stand up first and we’re going to stand up firm and we’re going to stand up strong and we’re going to stand up smart and we are going to win.”
Even before the pandemic, Cuomo as governor faced the problem of how to Trump-proof New York.
After Republicans in Congress passed a tax bill that limited the amount of tax deduction residents in high-tax states like New York could claim, Cuomo called the measure an “economic missile” and desperately sought work-arounds by proposing that the state create a state payroll tax paid by employers who could then deduct those taxes on the federal return and, in a more novel idea, proposed that New Yorkers make charitable contributions to the state that they could then deduct, a proposal that the IRS later shot down.
But if Cuomo has yet to roll out any Trump-specific policies, he is joined by the candidate who has consistently been in second place in the polls, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani.
The Queens assemblyman has been a sensation on the campaign trail and buoyed by his viral videos on social media, one of which involved Mamdani berating Tom Homan when the Trump “border czar” visited the statehouse in Albany.
Mamdani has rolled out a raft of policy proposals, including free buses and city-owned grocery stores, but none specifically about Trump as of yet.
Greer pointed out it is in keeping with much of the DSA ethos that argues that mainstream Democrats have been as much of a threat to thriving cities and communities as Republicans have.
On Wednesday, Mamdani laid out an expansive plan to raise taxes on New York’s wealthiest residents, which he framed as necessary in part to combat Trump’s cuts to the city budget.
“His base is far to the left, and so almost anything the president says he would be against, and there isn’t the same kind of need to lay it out,” said Greer.
All of this Trump talk on the campaign trail comes as the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, announced he would not seek the Democratic nomination and instead run as an independent.
The move was in part because his trial over allegations of corruption meant he has been unable to campaign, but it was also because Adams has aligned himself more and more with the Trump administration in order to make his legal troubles go away.
He has declined to criticize Trump and has claimed that he, like Trump, was prosecuted for opposing the Biden administration (something for which no evidence exists in either case).
Unlike the other candidates running for mayor in the Democratic primary, Adams has said he would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to conduct removal operations at the Rikers Island jail complex.
As for the rest of the field, many of the candidates’ ideas will be tough to implement if they become law.
A rainy-day fund sounds like a good idea but would require either higher taxes on city residents or cuts to the budget elsewhere.
City residents pay federal income taxes to the federal government, and it is hard to imagine, budget experts say, how the city could withhold that money short of convincing New Yorkers not to pay it.
The state could withhold federal taxes that state workers owe, or federal employment taxes withheld by the state on behalf of the federal government, but the federal government would be on solid grounds to sue and could easily counter by withholding more federal dollars, such as those earmarked for transportation, to the city and state.
David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on local governance, said it was worth making a distinction between those proposals that are designed to frustrate Trump’s agenda and those that are actually designed to help the city survive the next three years.
Most of what the candidates are proposing belongs to the former column while what is needed are proposals that don’t focus on Trump so much as on the damage to the city he can create.
That last one is unlikely, not least because the federal government would be unlikely to restore the funding if local governments could just step in to fill the gap, which gets to the heart of the problem in the campaign.
“It gets down to the question of opposition to Trump versus survival of the city, and sometimes opposition and survival are at cross-purposes,” Schleicher said.
“Right now, this is a mayoral campaign that is about Donald Trump and not so much about the future of the city under Donald Trump.”
For its part, the Trump administration seems nonplussed about the prospects of the next mayor of New York putting up policy roadblocks.
“Wow, Democrats are finding more ways to NOT work with the Trump administration to clean up New York’s rampant crime, skyrocketing rent, out-of-control homelessness, and the overall decay of a cherished American city,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai in an email.
“No one could’ve seen this coming!”
image source from：https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/nyc-mayoral-candidates-fight-trump.html
