Trump Threatens Zohran Mamdani as He Cements NYC Mayoral Primary Win

Donald Trump threatened to arrest New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani Tuesday.

Speaking with reporters during a press conference at “Alligator Alcatraz” regarding the newly passed “big, beautiful bill,” the president said that he would cuff Mamdani if the New York politico followed through on defying ICE.

“Well then we’ll have to arrest him,” Trump said. “Look, we don’t need a Communist in this country. But if we have one, I’m going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation. We send him money, we send him all the things he needs to run a government.”

He then accused the Ugandan-born immigrant of being in the nation “illegally.”

“A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re going to look at everything,” Trump noted.

The 33-year-old democratic socialist has been repeatedly accused by conservatives of being a Communist, a badge that he has roundly rejected. Politifact, an independent fact-checking organization, said that the Queens lawmaker’s platform for free buses, subsidized day care, protected rent control, and city-owned grocery stores was not akin to communism, a system in which the government seizes and retains complete and total control over private property and industry. Instead, Politifact decried the cheap smear as a “red scare tactic that has existed in U.S. politics for decades.”

Mamdani clinched last week’s election with 56 percent of the vote once all the ranked-choice votes were tabulated and released Tuesday. He eclipsed former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits, beating out the establishment Democrat by 12 points.

But the threat of arrest is not the only backlash that Mamdani’s candidacy has received from the White House. Instead, in an incredible moralistic reversal for a conservative party that claims to advocate for states’ rights, Trump has further intervened in New York’s local elections by promising to cut off federal funding for the Big Apple if the citywide favorite wins Gracie Mansion in November.

The richest man in the world is processing the consequences of his own actions live on X.

Elon Musk, in the midst of condemning Trump’s budget bill, expressed regret Tuesday over his decision to wear sunglasses inside while waving a huge chain saw around with Argentinian President Javier Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have taken the chainsaw on stage and acted a fool,” an X user told Musk as he complained about Republicans’ budget increasing the debt ceiling. “Maybe you could have gotten more done if you weren’t so worried about looking cool.”

“Valid point,” Musk responded directly. “Milei gave me the chainsaw backstage and I ran with it, but, in retrospect, it lacked empathy.”

The chain saw incident in question happened during a strange, nearly incoherent interview Musk gave at the conservative conference that raises questions around his alleged drug use during and after the campaign.

It seems that Musk has come to regret quite a few of the decisions he made as a key Trump confidant just halfway into the president’s first year in office. He’s gone from living at Mar-a-Lago to insinuating the president is a pedophile, threatening to primary MAGA Republicans and start a third party, and now to excoriating the president’s marquee legislation. All while he complains about his “suffering” companies.

The budget bill has already passed the Senate, and will likely pass the House for a final vote, regardless of how much Musk tweets.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security have repeatedly cited an increase in assaults against federal agents conducting immigration enforcement to justify agents concealing their identities (and thereby conveniently avoiding accountability) while making arrests.

Newly reported data sheds clearer light on these figures.

On Tuesday, Bill Melugin of Fox News reported on X that DHS told him assaults against ICE and federal immigration enforcement are now up 690 percent from last year. While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.

For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).

It’s also worth noting that the increase comes at a time when, under Trump, the number of ICE encounters taking place has increased staggeringly—a fact that criminal justice journalist Jessica Pishko said makes the figures “uniquely unimpressive.”

And the increasingly common encounters have been accompanied by increasingly aggressive policing tactics.

According to USA Today, law enforcement experts say that, by employing “practices that many American police departments have largely disavowed,” immigration enforcement agents “are exacerbating tense situations” and “provoking unnecessarily dangerous encounters.” Regarding these tactics, retired law enforcement veteran Diane Goldstein told USA Today that immigration enforcement officers’ “direction and their leadership is directly putting them in a horrific situation.”

The practice of wearing masks and making arrests that are virtually indistinguishable from kidnappings also increases the likelihood of confusion and bystander intervention, according to former ICE acting Director John Sandweg.

Further, reckoning rationally with ICE’s data would require scrutinizing what constitutes an assault in ICE’s eyes, as the agency has done itself no favors by making dubious assault accusations. Take, for example, those it made against New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who was arrested “for assaulting law enforcement” earlier this month—a claim that The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump likened to a bully accusing his victim “of having gotten in the way of his fist.”

Donald Trump’s wildly unpopular “big, beautiful bill” just barely passed in the Senate Tuesday, and it’s all thanks to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.

The bill passed with a vote of 51–50, with Vice President JD Vance providing the tie-breaking vote. But it was Murkowski’s vote that ultimately tipped the scales so the bill could pass.

In order to win Murkowski’s support, Republicans had added several provisions that would sweeten the deal for her state. But at the very last second, the Senate parliamentarian struck a carve-out that would’ve expanded federal funding for Medicaid in Alaska.

All 47 Democrats voted against the bill, and they were joined by Senators Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins. Had Murkowski also voted “no,” the bill would have been defeated.

Murkowski told reporters that she hoped the House would send the bill back to the Senate so they could continue working on it. “My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” Murkowski said, revealing just how misguided her support actually was.

When asked why she voted to pass the bill if she thought it wasn’t ready, Murkowski said, “Kill it and it’s gone.”

“There is a tax impact coming forward. That’s gonna hurt the people in my state,” she added.

In return for supporting the gutting of Medicaid to fund tax breaks for the rich, and adding trillions of dollars to the national deficit over the next 10 years, Murkowski walked away with some nice cash prizes.

The Alaska Republican won an exemption for a provision shifting greater portions of the cost to administer the Supplemental National Assistance Program (SNAP) onto the states. The exemption would apply to 10 states with the highest payment error rates, including New York, Florida, and of course, Alaska. Trump’s budget bill directs nearly $300 billion to be cut from SNAP through 2034 to help fund tax cuts skewed for the very rich.

Murkowski also secured a tax break for Alaskan fishing villages and whaling captains. Hope it was worth it.

This story has been updated.

Only three Senate Republicans were brave enough to vote against Trump’s catastrophic budget, as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed through the Senate on Tuesday by the slimmest of margins, 51-50.

Republicans Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins—who each voiced their distaste for the bill due to the $3.3 trillion it adds to the debt and the millions of Americans it takes Medicaid away from—voted no, along with all 47 Democrats.

Every other Republican voted yes, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the 50-50 tie. The bill now heads back to the House of Representatives.

The Senate version of the bill contains the biggest Medicaid cuts in history, and 17 million people are expected to lose their health insurance by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Tillis warned about the dangers of the bill on Sunday night shortly after announcing his retirement at the end of this term. “Between the state-directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill—there’s a reduction of state-directed payments. And then there’s the reduction of the provider tax. They can’t find a hole in my estimate. So what they told me is that ‘yeah, it’s rough, but North Carolina’s used the system, they’re gonna have to make it work,’” Tillis said. “Alright, so what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys? The people in the White House advising the president … are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

The bill is likely to face some minor obstruction in the House.

This story has been updated.