WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump branded the winner of New York City\u2019s mayoral Democratic primary a \u201cpure communist\u201d in remarks that aired Sunday, an epithet the progressive candidate dismissed as political theatrics.
\nZohran Mamdani\u2019s shock win last week against a scandal-scarred political heavyweight resonated as a thunderclap within the party, and drew the ire of Trump and his collaborators, who accused Mamdani of being a radical extremist.
\nThe Republican\u2019s aggressive criticism of the self-described democratic socialist is sure to ramp up over the coming months as Trump\u2019s party seeks to push Democrats away from the political center and frame them as too radical to win major US elections.
\n\u201cHe\u2019s pure communist\u201d and a \u201cradical leftist… lunatic,\u201d Trump fumed on Fox News talk show \u201cSunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.\u201d
\n\u201cI think it\u2019s very bad for New York,\u201d added Trump, who grew up in the city and built his sprawling real estate business there.
\n\u201cIf he does get in, I\u2019m going to be president and he is going to have to do the right thing (or) they\u2019re not getting any money\u201d from the federal government.
\nTrump\u2019s White House has repeatedly threatened to curb funding for Democratic-led US cities if they oppose his policies, including cutting off money to so-called sanctuary cities which limit their cooperation with immigration authorities.
\nMamdani also took to the talk shows Sunday, asserting he would \u201cabsolutely\u201d maintain New York\u2019s status as a sanctuary city so that \u201cNew Yorkers can get out of the shadows and into the full life of the city that they belong to.\u201d
\nAsked directly on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d whether he is a communist, Mamdani \u2014 a 33-year-old immigrant aiming to become New York\u2019s first Muslim mayor \u2014 responded \u201cNo, I am not.
\n\u201cAnd I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I\u2019m from, who I am, ultimately because he wants to distract from what I\u2019m fighting for,\u201d Mamdani said.
\n\u201cI\u2019m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower, that he has since then betrayed.\u201d
\nThe Ugandan-born state assemblyman had trailed former governor Andrew Cuomo in polls but surged on a message of lower rents, free daycare and buses, and other populist ideas in the notoriously expensive metropolis.
\nAlthough registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one in New York, victory for Mamdani in November is not assured.
\nCurrent Mayor Eric Adams is a Democrat but is campaigning for re-election as an independent, while Cuomo may also run unaffiliated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump branded the winner of New York City\u2019s mayoral Democratic primary a \u201cpure communist\u201d in remarks that aired Sunday, an epithet the progressive candidate dismissed as political theatrics. Zohran Mamdani\u2019s shock win last week against a scandal-scarred political heavyweight resonated as a thunderclap within the party, and drew the ire of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":83038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83041,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83022\/revisions\/83041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}