Trump says it will be “difficult” for me to fund New York if Mamdani becomes mayor

US President Donald Trump said he would be reluctant to send federal funding to his hometown of New York if left-leaning front-runner Zoran Mamdani is elected mayor of America’s largest city this week.

“It’s going to be hard for me as president to give a lot of money to New York because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money that you send there,” Trump said in a televised interview.

The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to cut federal grants and funding for projects located primarily in Democratic-controlled areas.

Opinion polls show Mamdani ahead of his primary rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

Trump did not elaborate on his remark about funding if Mamdani wins. New York received $7.4 billion (£5.7 billion) in federal funding this fiscal year.

In a wide-ranging interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, Trump said a Mayor Mamdani would make left-leaning former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “look great.”

“I got to see de Blasio, how bad of a mayor he was, and this guy is going to do a much worse job than de Blasio,” the president said of Mamdani.

Trump, who grew up in the New York borough of Queens, also effectively endorsed Cuomo, a Democrat, in the interview.

“I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you,” the Republican president said.

Mamdani, who would run a global financial center, is a self-described democratic socialist, although he has rejected accusations that he is a communist, joking in a television interview that he is “kind of like a Scandinavian politician”, only browner.

Mamdani won the Democratic primary, while Cuomo came in second. The 34-year-old state assemblyman called the former New York governor a Trump puppet and parrot.

“The answer to Donald Trump’s presidency is not to create a mirror image of him here at City Hall,” Mamdani said Monday.

“It’s about creating an alternative that can speak to what New Yorkers so desperately want to see in their own city and what they find in themselves and in their neighbors every day — a city that believes in the dignity of everyone who calls this place home.”

Cuomo tried to parry that line of attack by presenting himself as the only candidate with enough experience to deal with the Trump administration.

He was governor of New York during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many states clashed with the Trump administration, although Cuomo himself came under scrutiny after state investigators found that deaths in nursing homes were significantly underestimated during the outbreak.

“I fought Donald Trump,” Cuomo said during a debate. “When I fight for New York, I won’t stop.”

Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities as part of a crackdown on crime while seeking to cut funding from jurisdictions that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.