By Michael Gold
Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump have more in common than we think. Both made extremely ambitious promises when they were running for office. Both said they would make life more affordable for desperate families. Both have targeted minorities.
Trump claimed, with no evidence of course, that Mexicans were bringing crime and drugs to America, when he announced his candidacy for the Presidency in 2015. His administration’s ICE goons are arresting Latinos across the country, regardless of whether they have citizenship papers or a green card.
Mamdani has been going after Israel and the Jewish people since he was a college student.
Trump said he would bring manufacturing jobs back to America. This isn’t happening. We lost approximately 33,000 factory jobs in 2025, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Trump claimed he would lower inflation. Inflation is running at about three percent. Prices for beef, chicken, coffee, cereal, yogurt and other foods have risen.
Mamdani said he would make city buses free and fast. If you have any kind of economic sense at all, you will ask, “Who is going to pay for the bus drivers, the engineers, the maintenance workers who work for the MTA Bus Company? Where is the money going to come from to pay for their salaries, health care and pensions?”
About 4,000 people work for the MTA bus lines, running 1,300 buses. It costs about $800 million a year to operate the buses.
And how’s he going to make the buses go faster? Blow up all the other vehicles fighting for a lane on the city’s over-crowded streets?
Mamdani said he would make high quality child care free. Our family paid thousands of dollars a year for day care for our child when we lived in the outer boroughs, from the time the kid was six months old until kindergarten. Would we have wanted to purchase less expensive care for our child? Of course, but who is going to pay the bill for city-dictated high-quality day care that’s somehow affordable? The mayor-elect’s free child care plan could cost about six billion a year.
The mayor-elect also wants to open city-run grocery stores, one for each of the five boroughs, selling food pegged to wholesale prices. In a city that lacks virtually any open space, where could the land and the building be located for such enterprises? Unsurprisingly, the owners of private supermarkets, delis and bodegas are not happy about this proposal. How will they be able to compete and survive against a city-run grocery that’s selling food at much lower costs?
Mamdani also said he wants a rent freeze. People may justifiably complain that the rent is too high, but freezing rents is going to almost certainly warp the rental market. Maintaining and repairing tenants’ apartments costs money. Building material prices have gone up this year, due to tariffs, energy cost increases and more demand, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
Insurance fees have increased by more than 18 percent, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board states. Utility, maintenance, energy and administrative costs are up too, the rent control board says.
Mamdani says he’ll raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to write the checks for free buses and child care.
Governor Hochul has already told Mamdani the city buses are not going to be free, so that’s one big promise that he can’t make good on already. The state has to approve the tax increases Mamdani wants. Let’s see what happens when the Governor and the over-burdened and notoriously contentious New York State Legislature work through Mamdani’s proposals and put it through their sausage machine. Even if they approve some kind of tax increase, it would be extremely unlikely Mamdani is going to get what he says he needs to pay for all the candy he wants to hand out.
The other very disturbing aspect of Mamdani’s public statements are his overtly anti-Israel positions. Mamdani belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is openly hostile to Israel. Mamdani doesn’t believe Israel has the right to exist. He’s said he doesn’t support any country that has a “hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.”
It’s curious then that Mamdani never cites Saudi Arabia or Iran for this issue. Both countries are Islamic theocratic dictatorships, where the rule of law is whatever the king or ayatollah say it is, where people are executed or thrown in jail for speaking their minds or not wearing a head scarf properly.
Also, Mamdani is mistaken if he thinks Israel was founded on the Jewish religion. Israel was created by the United Nations after World War II for a very particular reason. The Jewish people needed a safe place to live after Nazi Germany killed six million Jews. There was no future for the Jewish people in Europe. America wasn’t going to take the rest who survived the war. They really had nowhere else to go.
The overwhelming majority of the survivors wanted to live in their ancestral homeland. The United Nations partition plan in 1948 offered the Arab population that lived in Palestine their own state along with the Jewish state. The Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries rejected the plan and declared war on the new state of Israel. The Palestinians were offered their own state in negotiations with Israel in the year 2000. The Palestinian leader turned it down.
To imagine, as Mamdani does, that the Israelis could somehow peacefully co-exist within the same borders as the multitude of followers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist factions is a dangerous fantasy. Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of Israel. The Israelis have had their backs against the wall for decades. They’re not going to ever give up the only available vessel ensuring their physical safety.
When Mamdani says it’s possible to be anti-Zionist, but not anti-Semitic, he’s playing word games that are ultimately meaningless.
In 2023, he said, “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” meaning the Israel Defense Forces. This claim manages to slur both the New York City police and Israel at the same time. It implies that Israel is somehow pulling the strings on an American police force, which is a classic anti-Semitic trope. He’s also posted on social media saying the police are racist, wicked and corrupt.
The vast majority of police officers are sincere in their desire to protect the public. I imagine some are racist or corrupt. Nobody can defend police officers who brutalize young men of color. What happened to George Floyd and many others is unconscionable. But to characterize the entire New York City police department as evil or corrupt is to engage in the very stereotyping that Mamdani as a progressive is supposed to decry.
I’ve interviewed a few police officers in Westchester for stories. They often have to make split second decisions that could mean they lose their life while trying to do their job. One former officer I interviewed got bitten on the wrist during a home invasion by a burglar who was high on PCP. The burglar hit an elderly man in the head with his own oxygen tank, ultimately causing the man’s death, and sexually assaulted the man’s home health care aide.
Another year, on the Fourth of July, a kid threw some kind of incendiary device at the same officer’s head. The officer sustained severe skeletal, neurological and sensory injuries. He had to retire from the force.
The thing about social media and the Internet is that you can’t ever erase your words. Mamdani may have won the mayoral election, but he’s already stained relationships with the police department, the real estate industry, the financial industry and the beleaguered Jewish community, in a city that is famously difficult to govern.
My prediction is that Mamdani will find it extremely hard to make any meaningful headway with his goals to make the city more affordable. But his policies could actually make it harder than ever for everyday New Yorkers to survive.
Michael Gold’s work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, The Hartford Courant, and other newspapers.
