Zohran Mamdani Knows He Has Political Capital. And He Intends to Spend It.

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**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (0:34)
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and today I'm talking to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
In his first six months in office, Mayor Mamdani has been riding high and has begun delivering on the issue that defined his campaign, affordability. He's frozen the rent on nearly a million apartments, and he's made progress on universal childcare. What's more, he's recently endorsed a slate of progressive congressional candidates who swept their New York primaries to the dismay of the Democratic political establishment. Of course, Mamdani has many, many critics, but he's now undeniably a national political force. So just how does he plan on using all this power? Here's my conversation with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Welcome to the interview. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you coming here today.

**Zohran Mamdani** (1:29)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (1:31)
On a day of the World Cup, I don't know if you heard some of my colleagues cheering.

**Zohran Mamdani** (1:37)
Yes. I think there's about 20 minutes left in the France-Spain game.

**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (1:42)
Yeah. So sorry that we're interrupting perhaps your viewing of this.

**Zohran Mamdani** (1:46)
Not at all.

**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (1:47)
But yeah, I appreciate the time. I was going to do this whole interview without mentioning President Trump. But as often happens, he tends to enter the chat regardless of one's intentions.
President Trump recently shared a video by Michael Savage, who's a pro-Trump pundit calling for you to be criminalized and deported. My question is, what does it mean when the President of the United States shares a sentiment like that and how do you deal with it?

**Zohran Mamdani** (2:19)
I think that it's part of the corrosion of political and public life, that this is frankly something that I don't even blink at anymore, because it's become in many ways a norm over the last few years. And I also think that Americans are hungry for a very different kind of politics, one where disagreement is a part of it, deportation and demonization is not.

**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (2:47)
Does it worry you that it is normal and that by not reacting, it normalizes it more? Or do you worry that he's trying to goad you into reacting? I don't want to be part of the sort of cycle of that. I'm just wondering how you calculate it.

**Zohran Mamdani** (3:04)
I think that for all of the fear mongering around democratic socialism, the best response is to show what it actually means. And what we've shown over the last six months is exactly that. We've shown that a city with a democratic socialist vision is one that paves more than 170,000 potholes, 50,000 more than the prior administration by this point. It's a city that has delivered the lowest recorded number of shootings, shooting victims and murders in New York City's history. It is a city that is on a pathway to universal child care, saving thousands of parents more than $20,000 a year. And it's a city that is doing all of these things while fighting for the people who are often left behind. Workers, who we've secured more than $10 million for tenants, more than $64 million.
These are all indicators of what is so scary to a right wing that has built its entire power and framework on the idea of debating who should be left behind.

**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (4:05)
One last question on this. When these kinds of attacks against you, and I can hear you deliberately not trying to personalize it, not trying to respond to it, but does it impact you and your security, for example? I mean, we've seen other people who get targeted like this verbally.
It has an actual impact. There's more threats, there's more focus.

**Zohran Mamdani** (4:31)
There are threats, the kinds of which that sadly became familiar over the course of the campaign. I am lucky in that I'm protected by the best of the best in our NYPD.
And I'm also concerned because if these threats have changed my life and have changed the lives of those that I love, I often wonder about the threats to those whose names we don't even know. Because what is so terrifying about the normalization of political violence is not even just those to whom it's directed towards, but what it makes acceptable towards any other in this city, in this country. And that is a real fear that I have as we try and show what a city can look like where everyone belongs, that there are those firmly invested in a kind of division that is at odds with that.