Trump’s Rage at Zohran Just Backfired in a Surprisingly Revealing Way

The Democrats who are capturing media and public attention right now all share something in common. They are openly and urgently leveling with the American people about a singular basic reality: President Trump is rapidly consolidating quasi-dictatorial power and using it to inflict various forms of subjugation and domination on large swaths of blue America, to the point where he’s treating it as akin to an enemy nation within our own.

The Democrats who are breaking through the noise right now are those who are treating that state of affairs as an absolutely central fact about our moment—and shaping their politics around it accordingly.

Trump’s angry new attack on New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a case in point. In a deranged Truth Social rant, Trump threatened to cut off literally all federal money to New York City, should Mamdani prevail.

“Remember, he needs the money from me, as President, in order to fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises,” Trump raged. “He won’t be getting any of it, so what’s the point of voting for him?”

Trump’s threat is open extortion. He is flatly declaring that if New York voters exercise their political aspirations as nominally free and equal citizens by selecting leaders that personally displease him, he will use the federal government to inflict suffering on them however he can. In fiscal year 2026, the city is expected to receive billions of dollars in federal money. Much of that goes to social services, so slashing it would be dramatically harmful.

But that aside, what’s noteworthy here is that Trump’s threat is backfiring. It’s giving Mamdani a convenient way not just to turn Trump into a foil but also to position himself as fighting to defend his city and its people from Trump’s effort to subjugate and extort them.

“What this city deserves is someone who will fight for it,” Mamdani told local reporters this week, excoriating Trump as someone who “looks at this city as something that is to be punished each and every day.”

Then, on CNN, Mamdani tied this response to former Governor Andrew Cuomo, his one serious opponent now that current Mayor Eric Adams suspended his campaign. With his threats, Trump appears to be trying to help Cuomo.

“Donald Trump is clearing the way for Andrew Cuomo, because Donald Trump knows that Cuomo will clear the way for Trump’s agenda,” Mamdani said.

These two lines are critical, because they position Trump as a kind of hostile would-be occupying force, Cuomo as akin to his Vichy collaborator, and Mamdani as resisting that corrupt alliance on behalf of the people of New York. By using federal money to extort New Yorkers into voting for that chosen collaborator, Trump is handing Mamdani a way to reinforce a narrative that’s favorable to him.

It’s constantly said that Mamdani is succeeding because he’s developed an innovative way to make affordability and a critique of elites and the system central to his politics. Which is true, but there is also a strange tendency in center-left discourse to treat this as the only reason Mamdani is succeeding.

For instance, historian Timothy Shenk recently hailed Mamdani’s “relentless” focus on the “cost of living” as the “top concern,” suggesting Mamdani is successfully tapping “roiling populist energies” while avoiding “cultural issues.” Shenk concluded that Democrats should avoid “reflexive” opposition to Trump, seemingly meaning that focusing on Trump’s degradations and pet topics—like immigration—distract from the few-versus-many populist politics that is the Democrats’ salvation.

Mamdani’s innovations on cost-of-living politics are indeed critical. I wrote a whole piece about them myself. But we shouldn’t overlook another key ingredient: Mamdani’s treatment of Trump’s authoritarianism as a defining, unavoidable fact about our politics today.

Again and again, Mamdani has spoken emphatically to exactly this point. He has attacked Trump by explicitly declaring that he is running as a bulwark against “authoritarianism.” Or consider what happened when the news broke in early August that Trump was privately considering intervening in the race to help Cuomo: Mamdani immediately launched a five-borough tour devoted to highlighting Trump’s threat.

During that tour, Mamdani explicitly highlighted Trump’s most autocratic moves, excoriating Trump’s suggestion that he might strip Mamdani of citizenship or even arrest him. Mamdani also slammed Trump’s threat to take “control over the city over the will of New Yorkers,” as Mamdani put it. Note, again, the depiction of Trump as a kind of imperial occupier.

A senior Mamdani adviser tells me that internal campaign polling shows that attacking Trump’s abuses along these lines resonates favorably for Mamdani. Research conducted this month found that a large majority of New York voters—65 percent—see messaging as “convincing” when it criticizes the prospect of Trump sabotaging the election for Cuomo and attacks his Justice Department’s dropping of corruption charges against Adams, also a Trump ally.

The adviser says this message particularly appeals to working-class voters across many nationalities and demographic groups. This counters the oft-suggested idea that focusing on Trump’s lawlessness is a “distraction” from issues that working people “really” care about.

Watch the Mamdani display below and ask yourself: Does this look like a candidate who is “pivoting” away from “cultural issues” and avoiding the “trap” of engaging with Trump’s authoritarianism?

If anything, Mamdani has run perhaps the most explicitly pro-immigrant and even pro-cosmopolitan campaign in recent memory. Mamdani’s innovation is not simply creative cost-of-living, take-on-the-elites politics. It’s also that he’s demonstrating how to do this without retreating from the defense of immigrants and of pluralism writ large, and without shirking the mission of centralizing Trump’s authoritarian lawlessness as an overarching fact of contemporary American public life.

Obviously Mamdani is running in a blue city that’s full of immigrants, so his precise immigration message might not work as well in swing areas. But the point is, if we’re going to talk about Mamdani’s political innovations, we should also discuss this one: He doesn’t allow that there’s a conflict between emphasizing economic populism and taking on Trump’s authoritarianism.

Indeed, Mamdani sometimes explicitly connects these things. “I will be a mayor who doesn’t bow down to corporate interests, doesn’t take his orders from billionaires, and sure as hell doesn’t let ICE steal our neighbors from their homes,” Mamdani said recently, emphasizing that last clause in a huge applause line. “There are no kings in America, whether that’s Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, or the Republican billionaires who fund both of their campaigns.”

All of this is about challenging power, whether economic or authoritarian. Those are of course frequently in tight alliance with one another, as we see with corporate oligarchs cravenly acquiescing to Trump’s autocratic takeover to protect their own perceived narrow interests. As Adam Serwer notes, Trump correctly diagnosed a deep rot afflicting some segments of elite society that left them vulnerable to divide-and-conquer authoritarian bullying.

To this I would add that the Democrats breaking through right now are those who recognize that patriotic resistance to Trump’s authoritarian abuses of power is the path to Democratic—and national—renewal. Governors JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, among others, treat it as an unavoidable reality that Trump is consolidating autocratic power at an alarming clip and that he is deliberately using it to subjugate or even terrorize blue America, which Trump and Stephen Miller quite consciously depict as an enemy nation within. Those Democrats are being heard across the country by getting creative in protecting their own people from exactly this—and by unflinchingly depicting it as the fundamental, existential challenge of our moment.

It remains to be seen whether Mamdani will win his race, of course. But when Trump threatens to inflict mass punishment on New Yorkers should they vote in Mamdani, he is setting up precisely the frame that makes it more likely to actually come to pass.