Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House aide during President Trump’s first term, said New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech resembled the style of Trump.
“To be honest with you, it felt Trumpian. He started by saying he dare not say the name of [former New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo again, saying he’s not even going to say his name again,” she said during an appearance on CNN’s Election Night coverage.
“Juxtapose that to Abigail Spanberger, who took a moment to acknowledge Winsome [Earle-Sears’s] service and to thank her for running a good race. There’s a moment to rise to the occasion he did not choose.”
During his acceptance speech, Mamdani urged Cuomo to retreat to private life away from political clamor while lauding his own campaign’s success fueled by a voter base of immigrants, people of color and working-class Americans.
He invoked Trump eight times during his remarks after the president endorsed Cuomo a day before the election.
“Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up. We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks,” he said.
“Indeed, New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, a city powered by immigrants. And as of tonight, a city led by an immigrant.”
Critics have railed against Mamdani’s speech as a boastful start to his mayorship, which Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has tied to that of an “extremist” agenda.
“We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible, and we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us now, it is something that we do,” Mamdani told a crowd at Brooklyn Paramount Theater, invoking the names of socialists and social democrats in his remarks.
“Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new when an age ends and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.’ Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new,” he added.
Throughout the campaign, Mamdani shared plans to create city-run grocery stores, rent freezes and free transportation as a democratic socialist despite strong objections from establishment politicians.
However, many politicians, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) backed Mamdani’s campaign to rewire New York’s City Hall.
“Starting at 1% in the polls, @ZohranKMamdani pulled off one of the great political upsets in modern American history,” Sanders wrote in a post on the social platform X, with a photo of him and Mamdani.
“Yes. We CAN create a government that represents working people and not the 1%. I look forward to working with Zohran as he builds a city that works for all,” he continued.
