Mamdani and Brad Lander prove they know how to say “no” to a lawless president and his war—while rival Andrew Cuomo stumbles.
Zohran Mamdani attends a campaign rally in Queens.(Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images)
After President Trump ordered a US military assault on Iran Saturday night, the outcry from Democrats and a handful of Republicans in Washington was immediate. US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced, “The President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers. He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.” Former House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said, “The President’s decision to bomb Iran was grossly unconstitutional, since only Congress has the power to declare war. The President’s action will without a doubt lead to many American, Israeli and Iranian deaths and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.” Even New York’s Hakeem Jeffries, the usually cautious Democratic minority leader in the House, objected that “President Trump misled the country about his intentions, failed to seek congressional authorization for the use of military force and risks American entanglement in a potentially disastrous war in the Middle East.”
Ocasio-Cortez, Nadler, and Jeffries were not the only New York City Democrats who spoke up. Two leading contenders in Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander, delivered robust condemnations of Trump’s move, signaling their determination to push back against a lawless president. But the embattled front-runner in the race, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, failed to respond initially and then sent mixed signals that reinforced a sense that he lacks the political independence and integrity to stand up to Trump.
Mamdani, a state legislator who has shaken up the race with his spirited progressive candidacy, surged in the final days before Tuesday’s election—with an Emerson College poll released Monday even suggesting that he could narrowly defeat Cuomo in the final round of ranked-choice voting. Someone pursuing a seismic victory of such consequence for the city and the nation might be expected to choose caution when responding to so immediate and serious a move by the president of the United States. But Mamdani pulled no punches when Trump attacked. On Saturday night, he declared, “Donald Trump ran for president promising to end wars, not start new ones. Today’s unconstitutional military action represents a dark, new chapter in his endless betrayals that now threaten to plunge the world deeper into chaos.”
Mamdani, an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in the Middle East—especially American support for the Israeli assault on Gaza—argued that the attack on Iran would have consequences for New Yorkers. “In a city as global as ours, the impacts of war are felt deeply here at home. I am thinking of the New Yorkers with loved ones in harm’s way,” he explained, at a point when bombs were falling throughout the Middle East. “While Donald Trump bears immediate responsibility for this illegal escalation, these actions are the result of a political establishment that would rather spend trillions of dollars on weapons than lift millions out of poverty, launch endless wars while silencing calls for peace, and fearmonger about outsiders while billionaires hollow out our democracy from within. For Americans middle aged and younger, this is all we have known. We cannot accept it any longer.”
Mamdani’s powerful message was echoed by Lander, the New York City comptroller who has formed a late-stage tag team with Mamdani in the waning weeks of the mayoral race. Lander said, “Trump’s reckless and unconstitutional strikes against Iran are a dangerous escalation of war—and threaten countless Iranian, Israeli and American lives. My thoughts are with families fearing for their safety, and the thousands of New Yorkers worrying tonight about loved ones in Iran.”
And what of Cuomo? In the hours after the attack, his campaign was busy posting pictures of the candidate riding in a truck. Then, he was touting an endorsement from the ultimate establishment Democrat, former president Bill Clinton. Regarding the administration’s bombing of Iran, the Cuomo-friendly New York Post announced on Sunday morning, “The Cuomo campaign had no immediate comment on the US airstrikes.”
When the former governor finally spoke up on Sunday afternoon, Politico reported, “Cuomo told reporters Sunday he supported taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities.” While he suggested that he wished the president had consulted Congress, Cuomo echoed talking points from the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming that the attack made the world a “safer place.”
Cuomo’s failure to call out Trump with the clarity or energy employed by Mamdani and Lander sparked fresh criticism of both the Cuomo campaign and the many billionaire Trump backers who are supporting Cuomo’s candidacy. Mamdani tweeted on Sunday, “Cuomo’s biggest donors are cheering Trump on. These are the MAGA warmongers who would have his ear in City Hall.”
There will be those who suggest that Trump’s war is not an appropriate issue for discussion in the New York mayoral race. But they would be wrong. In addition to the humane considerations cited by Mamdani and Lander—and New York’s status as the ultimate international city—there is the fundamental reality that an already bloated Pentagon budget is growing at an exponential rate under Trump, all while funding for healthcare, education, and transportation gets squeezed.
Progressives have long argued that New York City needs a mayor who recognizes that the exponential growth of the military-industrial complex comes at a cost for taxpayers and the citizens of great American cities—and who is willing to call out that cost on behalf of working-class families.
The city had such a mayor in the 1960s: John Lindsay.
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When Lindsay first ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, he made no secret of his opposition to the war in Vietnam, decrying US involvement in the conflict in moral and practical terms. “We are fighting in Vietnam what is very probably the most unwanted war in this country’s history,” said the liberal Republican, who had earned a reputation for standing well to the left of his party—and much of the Democratic Party—on domestic and international issues. “We cannot solve the problems by unlimited military escalation.”
He won that race, but the war raged on. So, as Lindsay sought reelection in 1969 in what may well have been the most intensely contested mayoral race in New York City history, he made his opposition to the war—which was, by then, being waged by Republican President Richard Nixon—central to his bid. His stance was one of the factors that cost him the Republican nomination that year. Yet he fought on, running as an independent and on the old Liberal Party line, against a conservative Republican and an only slightly less conservative Democrat.
As the fall race heated up, Lindsay’s rivals complained that the mayor’s amplifying of his anti-war stance was a “diversionary tactic” that drew attention away from municipal issues. Yet, as a Harvard Crimson assessment of the 1969 contest noted, “Lindsay’s anti-Vietnam statements were not produced solely for the occasion of the campaign; he alone of the nation’s big-city mayors has taken a steady and unhedging stand against the war. His argument is well-rounded, furthermore: Vietnam not only deprives New York of needed funds, but it makes most partisan scrapping meaningless since all new programs, those proposed by Lindsay and his critics, must have the same money.”
Lindsay’s rivals kept complaining about the mayor’s moves to make the war an issue in the race. “But,” wrote The New York Times, “they lost that argument.”
When Lindsay addressed mass demonstrations against the war—including the October 15, 1969, Vietnam Moratorium rally—the Times reported that “the Mayor got the most enthusiastic receptions of his 11-year public career—just as he has been receiving the heaviest applause during the campaign when he denounces the war.”
The Times explained that the applause came especially from young voters—the same group most fervently supporting Mamdani now. “But,” the paper asked, “will the applause translate into votes?”
It did. With overwhelming support from young voters and anti-war New Yorkers of all ages, John Lindsay swept to reelection, finishing eight points ahead of his nearest rival. The Vietnam War was certainly not the only issue in 1969’s mayoral race, just as Trump’s unconstitutional actions are not the only issue in Tuesday’s primary. But issues of war and peace, and questions of how to oppose a dangerously wrong president, mattered in the politics of the city in 1969. And they matter now.
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is the executive editor of The Nation. He previously served as the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.