Washington, November 4, 2025: U.S. President Donald Trump has endorsed Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral race, urging voters not to back the left-wing front-runner Zohran Mamdani.
“Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him and hope he does a fantastic job,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday evening. “He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”
Trump also warned that his administration would provide only “the very minimum” level of federal funding to New York if Mamdani were elected, repeating remarks from a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, where he labelled Mamdani a “communist”, a description Mamdani has rejected.
“It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York,” Trump said in the interview. “Because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there.”
Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and state assemblyman from Queens, responded sharply: “I will address that threat for what it is, a threat, not the law.” He has dismissed accusations of being a communist, joking in an interview that he is “kind of like a Scandinavian politician, only browner.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to reduce federal funding for Democrat-led cities. This fiscal year, New York City received $7.4 billion in federal aid.
Cuomo, a former Democratic governor running as an Independent, said Trump’s endorsement was less about support and more about opposition to Mamdani. “He’s not endorsing me,” Cuomo told reporters. “He’s opposing Mamdani.”
Trump, a Republican, notably declined to endorse his party’s candidate Curtis Sliwa, instead writing, “A vote for Curtis Sliwa … is a vote for Mamdani.”
Opinion polls suggest Mamdani leads the race, followed by Cuomo, with Sliwa trailing behind.
Mamdani fired back, saying: “The MAGA movement’s embrace of Andrew Cuomo shows that Donald Trump knows Cuomo would be the best mayor for him — not for New York.”
During the CBS interview, Trump compared Mamdani unfavourably to former mayor Bill de Blasio, saying, “This man will do a worse job than de Blasio by far.”
If elected, Mamdani, 34, would become New York City’s first Muslim mayor and its youngest in over a century.
Cuomo, highlighting his experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, said he’s the only candidate capable of confronting Trump’s policies. “I fought Donald Trump,” Cuomo said in a recent debate. “When I’m fighting for New York, I am not going to stop.”
