Why Trump’s battle with U.S. mayors might hurt everyone, even him

If the flaming triumph speech communication delivered by young house of york mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday is any indication, a smooth working relationship with the president of the United States may not be in the cards any time soon.

Mamdani warned Donald Trump to “turn the volume up” as he laid out a list of criticisms against the president. 

It was not a surprising admonishment, considering the president has been an outspoken critic of Mamdani, having called the self-described democratic socialist a “100% Communist Lunatic.” 

Trump, on Tuesday, also repeated his previous warnings about cutting federal funding to the city in the event of a Mamdani victory. 

Mamdani might appear to be just another Democratic mayor stuck in an acrimonious relationship with the Republican president, but observers say these relationships matter and can impact both those mayors' cities and Trump's political ambitions.

“At a minimum, there are a wide number of things that the federal government can choose to do or not do that directly affects the quality of life in cities,” said Aaron Saiger, a law professor and faculty director of the Fordham Urban Law Center.

Such things "would affect the residents quite dramatically.”

Cities depend on the federal government to fund a number of initiatives. New York, for example, for the current fiscal year, is expected to receive $7.4 billion US of its $115 billion US budget, about 6.5 per cent, from Washington.

As noted by Axios, New York's Department of Housing Preservation & Development — tasked with creating and preserving affordable housing in a city where hundreds of thousands struggle with housing costs — gets 50 per cent of its budget from the federal government.

Yet some observers have questioned Trump’s legal authority to take some of these actions against the city. Congress, not the executive branch, is tasked with federal spending under the Constitution, for example. 

But withholding funding is only one potential tool Trump has to punish cities. He has also used his executive power to send in National Guard troops to quell supposed unrest and ICE agents to crack down on alleged illegal immigrants.

“Immigration enforcement, I think, is the one on most people's minds, at the top of their list,” Saiger said, noting it is "clearly within federal power … up to the discretion of the executive branch and arguably of the president.”

Trump has also warred with Chicago's mayor, saying last month that Brandon Johnson should be jailed for failing to protect ICE officers. And he has been in a long-standing feud with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Meanwhile, both cities have been flooded with National Guard troops and seen a surge of ICE agents.

Trump has also threatened Boston, saying last month he'd relocate World Cup matches set to be played in its suburbs next year because the city had been "taken over" by unrest.

"I love the people of Boston and I know the games are sold out. But your mayor is not good,” Trump said.

(Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu certainly didn’t endear herself to the president when she characterized her own election as a question about “whether we will bow to a criminal who acts like a king." )

However, the president has shown he will stand down after conversations with city leaders. Trump backed off on a planned surge of federal agents into San Francisco after speaking to Mayor Daniel Lurie, who told Trump the city was making progress on crime.

But Saiger says mayors shouldn’t just automatically conciliate and try to stay on Trump’s good side.

Zohran Mamdani elected next mayor of New York

“There have been mayors that have tried to stay on the president's good side and there have been mayors that have been more confrontational. Neither of those is necessarily a foolish strategy on its face.”

John Mollenkopf, a political science professor and director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, says an important constituency for Trump are the "economic elites" who are based in these Democratic-controlled cities. Those elites, he says, might temper Trump's inclination to take more aggressive actions.

If Trump threatens to cut off funding, they will tell him, that's "a really stupid, bad, counterproductive, dysfunctional idea.”

Trump will have two choices, Mollenkopf says.

“He'll hear a lot of negativity from his elite friends and he'll just quietly change his mind, or he'll stick with it and piss off a lot of really important economic constituencies.”

When presidents, like Trump, are in their second terms and re-election isn't a goal, they will likely be looking to enact an agenda that moves the country in the direction they want.

"That's much more effectively done if you have co-operative partners and citizens," Saiger said. "So writing people off is not necessarily the way to get to where you want to go."

To those points, just a day after Mamdani’s victory, Trump appeared to be walking back some of his threats.

Newsweek reported that the president, speaking in Miami at a forum of business leaders and global athletes said about Mamdani: “We’ll help him.”

“We want New York to be successful. We'll help him. A little bit, maybe."

Senior Reporter

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