Fox News Accidentally Makes Great Case for Zohran Mamdani as NYC Mayor

Fox News’s efforts to make Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani seem like a bad influence for New York City are only making him more appealing.

Following Mamdani’s shock win during Tuesday’s primary, conservatives and far-right influencers worked overtime to frame Mamdani as a “Marxist,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” and a “Muslim jihadist.”

But Fox News’s angle on the 33-year-old Queens lawmaker didn’t seem so bad. On Wednesday, the network aired a full screen of Mamdani’s “socialist promises,” including that he supports “no cost childcare” for city residents, wants to provide “baby baskets to newborns,” and plans on expanding New York City’s minimum wage to $30 per hour.

“Nothing says ‘radical’ like being able to eat and have a kid without needing to live in a tent,” responded one X user.

“Up next on Fox & Friends: Why cribs are Marxist and bibs are a gateway to full communism,” quipped another.

Mamdani’s campaign platform offers details on how the prospective mayor plans to implement his policies.

The campaign has argued that offering publicly funded childcare solutions within the city is critical to keeping New Yorkers in New York: “New Yorkers with children under 6 are leaving at double the rate of all others” due to the exorbitant cost of childcare in the city, according to the Mamdani campaign.

The program would offer free childcare “for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years,” the campaign specified.

And Mamdani said he intends to base his “baby basket” policy on “more than 90 similar programs around the world.” His official platform claimed the investment would cost less than $20 million and would provide new parents and guardians “with a collection of essential goods and resources, free of charge, including items like diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, post-partum pads, swaddles, and books,” as well as a resource guide on the city’s newborn home visiting program that offers help with “breastfeeding, post-partum depression and more.”

Raising the minimum wage to $30 would be another goal for a potential Mamdani administration by 2030, which philosophically argued that “making the minimum wage shouldn’t mean living in poverty” and that poverty-level wages paid out by some of the world’s wealthiest corporations only end up costing the public more as social programs have to effectively “subsidize” these low-wage employers.

“When working people have more money in their pocket, the whole economy thrives,” the campaign pitched.

Reporting by Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s chief national security correspondent, underscores that the effectiveness of Trump’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday remains unclear.

A classified early report by the Defense Intelligence Agency made headlines on Wednesday, with one source telling CNN the assessment suggests the strike set Iran’s nuclear program “back maybe a few months, tops.”

Such reporting put a damper on Trump’s grandiose claims that the U.S. had “completely and totally obliterated” its targets in “one of the most successful military strikes in history.” The White House recognized the DIA report’s existence, but told CNN it was “flat-out wrong.”

On Wednesday, Trump argued that the available intelligence report was “very inconclusive,” but at the same time went so far as to compare the strikes to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

You may be surprised to hear that, of those two claims, the “inconclusive” remark is, for the time being, more on the mark.

Citing a “source familiar with the classified DIA intelligence report,” Griffin wrote on X that the preliminary report was issued with “low confidence,” and is based on just a “day’s worth of intelligence” that was available as of 9 p.m. EDT the day after the bombing.

Reportedly, the assessment was not conducted in coordination with other U.S. intelligence agencies, and it notes that it will take “days to weeks to accumulate necessary data” to compile a full battle damage assessment.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was once again chasing leaks out of the Pentagon Wednesday, after a leaked intelligence report disputed Donald Trump’s claim that his strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities had “completely and fully obliterated” them.

At a NATO summit in The Hague Wednesday, Hegseth fumed at the media after multiple outlets reported on an early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that found Trump’s strike had only delayed Iran’s nuclear program by a few months.

“The instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don’t care what the troops think, they don’t care what the world thinks, they want to spin it, to try and make him look bad, based on a leak,” Hegseth said.

“Of course, we’ve all seen plenty of leakers, and what do leakers do? They have agendas,” he continued. “And what do they do—do they share the whole information? Or just the part that they want to introduce?”

The Pentagon has descended into utter chaos under Hegseth, who reportedly spends half of his time investigating leaks, according to one former official who was fired as part of one of those investigations.

The secretary dismissed the report as “low assessment,” meaning there was low confidence in the data. Trump, who had also taken shots at the media over the report, said the intelligence had been “very inconclusive.”

Hegseth appeared furious at the suggestion that the strikes could’ve been anything other than a success, and went so far as to suggest that it would be impossible to actually determine the damage to nuclear enrichment facilities like Fordo, which is located deep inside of a mountain.

“So, if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel, and go really deep. Because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Hegseth announced that the Department of Defense would be coordinating on an investigation with the FBI to discover the mole, claiming that the report had been intended for “internal purposes, battle damage assessments.”

In response to a reporter seeking to demystify the status of Iranian oil sanctions under Trump, the president clarified little—instead opting to casually mention that he could have plundered Iran’s oil but opted not to.

Just days after Trump’s unilateral decision to bomb Iran in hopes of dealing a blow to its nuclear program, the president posted on Truth Social that “China can now continue to purchase Oil from Iran. Hopefully, they will be purchasing plenty from the U.S., also. It was my Great Honor to make this happen!”

Few were sure how to interpret the announcement, which seemed to many to suggest that Trump was lifting sanctions on Iran, thus departing from Washington’s long-standing policy against such trade and terminating the president’s “maximum pressure” campaign on the country.

A White House official sought to correct the record Tuesday evening, saying that Trump’s post did not indicate such an about-face. Per the Financial Times, the official said the U.S. stance remains that China and all countries should stick with U.S. oil “rather than import Iranian oil in violation of US sanctions.”

Trump’s Truth Social post, the official claimed, “was simply calling attention to the fact that, because of his decisive actions to obliterate Iran’s nuclear facilities and broker a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, the Strait of Hormuz”—a key shipping route for oil—“will not be impacted, which would have been devastating for China.”

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Trump was asked to clarify whether his Truth Social post had marked a reversal in his “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran. The president gave a response that was far from clear: “Look, they just had a war. The war was fought. They fought it bravely. I’m not giving up. They’re in the oil business. I mean, I could stop it, if I wanted. I could sell China the oil myself. I don’t want to do that. They’re going to need money to put that country back into shape. We want to see that happen.”

Trump then mused that the U.S. could have seized Iran’s oil, continuing, “If they’re going to sell oil, they’re going to sell oil. We’re not taking over the oil. We could’ve, you know? I used to say with Iraq, ‘Keep the oil.’ I could say it here too. We could’ve kept the oil.”

Indeed, going back to 2011, Donald Trump’s position on the Iraq War was that the U.S. should loot the country’s oil, which many observed would constitute a war crime.

Trump gave more noncommittal responses when asked about his current view on Russia’s war against Ukraine at Tuesday’s NATO Summit at The Hague.

“You once said that you would end the Ukraine war in 24 hours. You later said you said that sarcastically,” said Austrian reporter Johannes Petrov.

“Of course I said that sarcastically,” Trump replied.

“But you’ve been in office for five months and five days, why have you not been able to end the Ukraine war?”

“Because it’s more difficult than people would have any idea. Vladimir Putin has been more difficult. Frankly, I had some problems with Zelenskiy, you may have read about them. And it’s been more difficult than other wars,” Trump said, before listing the various wars he’s had an easier time “ending.”

“Will the United States contribute any more money to Ukraine’s defense this year, to the $5 billion that allies are giving?” Trump was asked next.

“As far as money going, we’ll see what happens. There’s a lot of spirit. Look, Vladimir Putin really has to end that war. People are dying at levels that people haven’t seen before in a long time.”

Trump was then questioned by a Ukrainian BBC News reporter whose husband is currently on the front lines fighting against the Russian invasion. The president took a clear interest in this reporter, asking her a laundry list of questions about where she was from and where her husband was. She then pivoted to ask Trump about Patriot missiles.

“My question to you is whether or not the U.S. is ready to sell Patriot missiles to Ukraine. We know that Russia has been pounding Ukraine really heavily right now.”

“Are you living yourself now in Ukraine?” Trump asked.

“My husband is there … and me with the kids, I’m in Warsaw actually.”

“Is your husband a soldier, no?”

“He is.”

“He’s there now?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow, that’s rough stuff, right?”

Trump eventually got to the question.

“So, let me just tell you, they do want to have the antimissile missiles, as they call them, the Patriots. And we’re gonna see if we can make some available, you know? They’re very hard to get; we need them too. We were supplying them to Israel, and they’re very effective. One-hundred-percent effective, hard to believe how effective,” he replied. “And they do want that more than any other thing.… I wish you a lot of luck; I can see it’s very upsetting to you. Say hello to your husband, OK?”

Trump finally seems to be realizing what the entire world knew months ago: Putin has no interest in ending the war on Ukraine, and the U.S. has much less leverage against him than Trump may have previously thought. Only time will tell if this minor change in tune will be enough to make a meaningful difference in Ukraine.