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After Hochul’s Mamdani Endorsement, Trump Threatens New York Federal Funding
"Donald Trump is threatening to withhold money from NYC if they elect Zohran Mamdani, who [is] standing up to his billionaire donor buddies, instead of his friend Andrew Cuomo who will roll over for them," said one organizer.
Sep 15, 2025
"Threatening voters and cities over their elections is what authoritarians do," said one progressive organizer Monday after US President Donald Trump did just that—suggesting he would rip federal funding away from New York City, and possibly the state, if democratic socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the November election.
The president's threat came after New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, announced her endorsement of Mamdani in an op-ed in The New York Times, after months of pressure from progressives.
Trump said Hochul had "Endorsed the 'Liddle Communist'" and called the governor's support "a rather shocking development."
"How can such a thing happen?" Trump asked of Hochul's endorsement of her own party's popular and charismatic nominee. "Washington will be watching this situation very closely. No reason to be sending good money after bad!"
The comments appeared to be a threat to state or city funding, said critics including Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health.
"Donald Trump is threatening to withhold money from NYC if they elect Zohran Mamdani, who [is] standing up to his billionaire donor buddies, instead of his friend [former Gov.] Andrew Cuomo who will roll over for them," said D'Arrigo, referring to reports that Trump has considered helping Cuomo, who lost the primary to Mamdani in June but is running as an independent in the general election, and to Cuomo's own comments about the positive relationship he would have with the president if elected mayor.
Another observer accused Trump of "using taxpayer money as a gun to voters' heads."
Mamdani, a Democratic member of the state Assembly, won the primary in June, decisively beating Cuomo—who had rapidly plummeted in the polls leading up to the primary vote as Mamdani promoted a policy agenda laser-focused on making the city more affordable and engaged directly with New Yorkers across the five boroughs.
Despite Mamdani's victory, Hochul has been among a number of powerful Democratic politicians who refused to endorse the party's nominee to lead the nation's largest city following the primary, leading to condemnation from progressive organizers and lawmakers including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).
New York Democrats House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand have all declined to endorse Mamdani thus far, with Jeffries falsely claiming Mamdani has not won over voters in the House leader's district and Gillibrand suggesting as recently as last week that Mamdani has fueled antisemitism by not condemning phrases associated with Palestinian resistance.
Hochul relented on Sunday, writing that she has had "disagreements" with Mamdani in conversations they've had in recent weeks, but that in their talks she has "heard a leader who shares my commitment to a New York where children can grow up safe in their neighborhoods and where opportunity is within reach for every family."
"I heard a leader who is focused on making New York City affordable—a goal I enthusiastically support," she added.
Trump also ran his reelection campaign last year on promises of lowering the cost of living for Americans—but while Mamdani has backed up his pledge of improving affordability with policy proposals like fare-free buses, a network of city-owned grocery stores, and no-cost universal childcare, the president has pushed a spending bill that's expected to increase the number of uninsured people by 14.2 million and has restarted student debt collection, ending a Biden-era program to make payments more affordable and threatening to garnish the wages of struggling borrowers.
The president previously threatened New York City's funding in June and said in July that his administration could take over the city's government if Mamdani wins the November election and enacts policies Trump doesn't support.
"If he does get in, I’m gonna be president and he’s gonna have to do the right thing or they’re not getting any money. He’s gotta do the right thing,” Trump said on Fox News. “If a communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same... We have tremendous power at the White House to run places when we have to."
At The New Republic last week, Alex Shephard wrote that by refusing to throw their considerable influence behind Mamdani, Schumer, Jeffries, and Gillibrand are "suggesting that they will throw him—and the city he represents—to the wolves come 2026."
"Trump has made it clear that he hopes to target New York City just as he's done to Los Angeles and Washington, DC—with deployed National Guard troops and ICE agents running rampant," wrote Shephard.
Democrats including Schumer and Jeffries, he added, "are shooting their party in the foot... Predominantly renters, Mamdani’s voters were also disproportionately young, Asian, and Hispanic—all groups that moved toward Trump in last year’s election, and that Democrats will need if they want to take back Congress and the White House."
"Democrats say they are determined to be a big-tent party," Shephard continued. "But somehow there’s no room in it for the politicians who can actually help fill it?"
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Mamdani Holds Huge Lead in NYC Mayor's Race, But Top Dems Still Won't Back Him
Voters trust Mamdani more on issues from affordability to crime to Israel-Palestine, but one strategist says party leadership is likely still refusing to back him due to "donor pressure."
Sep 09, 2025
Progressive state lawmaker Zohran Mamdani holds a "commanding" lead in New York's upcoming mayoral election, according to the latest polling. But his continued momentum is still not enough for some top Democrats to get behind him, even as President Donald Trump openly colludes with his rivals.
A New York Times/Siena poll published Monday has Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblyman, 22 points north of his nearest challenger, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom he soundly defeated in the Democratic primary earlier this year.
Last week, several outlets reported that the Trump administration has been working behind the scenes to clear the field for Cuomo by offering administration posts to other mayoral candidates, including Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, and Republican contender Curtis Sliwa in exchange for them dropping out of the race.
Cuomo's identity as Trump's horse has ratcheted up the pressure for top Democratic leaders—namely the Empire state duo of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—to throw their weight behind Mamdani. But with the election now less than two months away, they have still refused to budge, to the increasing frustration of the party's base and its progressive leaders.
Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called out these leaders directly, asking on the steps of the Capitol: "Are we a party who rallies behind our nominee or not?"
"I am very concerned about the example that is being set by anybody in our party," she continued. "If an individual doesn't want to support the party's nominee now, it complicates their ability to ask voters to support any nominee later."
During a stop on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a Brooklyn native, said New York Democrats should be "jumping up and down" to support a candidate who has galvanized young voters like Mamdani.
Speaking of party leadership, Sanders said: "It's no great secret that they're way out of touch with grassroots America, with the working families of this country, not only in New York City, but all over this country."
That sentiment was shared by the liberal tastemakers on the popular podcast Pod Save America. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau called out leadership by name, saying their hesitancy to endorse Mamdani was "pathetic."
"Donald Trump's going to try to get Eric Adams out of the race so he can help Andrew Cuomo," Favreau said. "Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have not yet endorsed the candidate who won the Democratic primary in New York City, the choice of the Democratic voters. Because why, because they don't want to get involved in a primary in a city, in the state they represent?"
Favreau questioned what happened to the "rule that when a Democrat wins the primary, we've all got to unite behind the nominee... because we are facing an authoritarian threat."
Cuomo, he said, "is basically participating" in that threat by being "on Donald Trump's side."
According to CNN, this reluctance is widespread across New York Democrats:
Reps. Yvette Clarke, Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres have not said they plan to support Mamdani. Rep. Gregory Meeks, who endorsed Cuomo in the primary, has also remained silent along with Rep. Grace Meng, who represents parts of Queens.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mamdani have had "a number of conversations," Hochul said recently, and the two have met in person. Speaking separately to a Politico reporter, Hochul dismissed the talks between Adams and Trump aides with a profanity. Still, she has not made an endorsement.
Sources told CNN that the reticence stems in some part from the "public threat by Mamdani's democratic socialist allies to primary Jeffries and other congressmen" as well as Mamdani's "ties to democratic socialists and his criticism of Israel."
Sanders countered that Mamdani's were "not radical ideas."
"We're the richest country in the history of the world," he said. "There's no excuse for people not having affordable housing, good quality, affordable, decent transportation, free transportation."
Not only did the Times/Siena poll find Mamdani leading in the coming election, but voters also said they trusted him most on issues across the board, including ones that party grandees fear will be liabilities.
He holds leads over all comers, not only on his bread and butter issues of affordability and housing, but also on crime, taxation, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In an interview on CNN, former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod suggested that the refusal to back Mamdani was probably the result of "donor pressure."
Though Mamdani has surged in recent months with small-dollar donors, big money in the city has been behind Cuomo and other centrist candidates.
The biggest of these is the billionaire-funded Fix the City PAC, which received an $8.3 million donation from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and as of late August had dropped more than $15 million to keep Cuomo afloat.
Another fund, called New Yorkers for a Better Future Mayor '25 has yet to declare a favorite, but has both barrels locked on Mamdani. Under a similar name, this PAC marshalled support for more than a dozen corporate-friendly city council candidates early this year, with support from the pro-Israel hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and several major players in New York's real estate industry. It has announced a goal of raising $25 million to defeat Mamdani in November.
Axelrod said that the party leadership's fealty to these donors over the groundswell of support for Mamdani was "a mistake."
"He ran on the issue of affordability and on a kind of positive politics that got—as Bernie said—many, many young people in that city to involve themselves in the process," he said.
Axelrod also added that, despite Jeffries' claim that Mamdani has yet to win over voters in the House leader's district, the insurgent candidate, in fact, "carried Hakeem Jeffries' district" by a 12-point margin.
Former Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss said that Axelrod's diagnosis of "donor pressure" was "correct."
"But," he said, "we should also be completely clear that 'donor pressure' is just a polite way of saying 'political corruption.'"
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Oklahoma Screening Teachers From California, New York for 'Radical Leftist Ideology'
"This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage," said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
Aug 20, 2025
Teachers from California and New York seeking work in Oklahoma will be required to pass an "America First Test" designed to weed out applicants espousing "radical leftist ideology," the state's public schools chief affirmed Monday.
Oklahoma—which has a severe teacher shortage, persistently high turnover, and some of the nation's worst educational outcomes—will compel prospective public school educators from the nation's two largest "blue" states to submit to the exam in a bid to combat what Superintendent for Public Instruction Ryan Walters calls "woke indoctrination."
"As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York," Walters said in a statement Monday.
Walters told USA Today that the test is necessary to vet teachers from states where educators "are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" and ensure they "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids."
However, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten warned in a statement Monday that "this MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage."
The exam will be administered by Prager University—also known as PragerU—a right-wing nonprofit group which, despite its name, is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
While all of the test's 50 questions have not been made public, the ones that have been published run the gamut from insultingly basic—such as, "What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?"—to ideologically fraught queries regarding the "biological differences between females and males."
PragerU's "educational" materials are rife with false or misleading information regarding slavery, racism, immigration, the history of fascism, and the climate emergency. Critics note that the nonprofit has received millions of dollars in funding from fossil fuel billionaires.
PragerU materials also promote creation mythology over scientific evolution and attack LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender individuals, calling lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare "barbaric" while likening its proponents to "monsters."
In one animated PragerU video, two children travel back in time to ask the genocidal explorer Christopher Columbus why he is so hated today. Columbus replies by asserting the superiority of Europeans over Indigenous "cannibals" and attempting to justify the enslavement of Native Americans by arguing that "being taken as a slave is better than being killed."
Closer to home, PragerU's curriculum aligns with so-called "white discomfort" legislation passed in Oklahoma and other Republican-controlled states that critics say prevents honest lessons on slavery, the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and enduring systemic racism.
The law has had a chilling effect on teachers' lessons on historical topics including the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white supremacist mob backed armed by city officials destroyed more than 35 city blocks of Greenwood, the "Black Wall Street," murdering hundreds of Black men, women, and children in what the US Justice Department this year called a "coordinated, military-style attack."
Responding to Oklahoma's new policy, University of Pennsylvania history professor Jonathan Zimmerman told The Associated Press that "instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system."
"There's no other way to describe it," he said, adding, "I think what we're now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers."
Oklahoma is not the only state incorporating PragerU materials into its curriculum. Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Texas have also done so to varying degrees.
Weingarten noted Walters' previous push to revise Oklahoma's curriculum standards to include baseless conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Walters also ordered all public schools to teach the Bible, a directive temporarily blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in March. The court also recently ruled against the establishment of the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school.
"His priority should be educating students, but instead, it's getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him," Weingrarten said in her statement.
Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, called the new testing requirement "a political stunt to grab attention" and a distraction "from real issues in Oklahoma."
"When political ideology plays into whether or not you can teach in any place, that might be a deterrent to quality educators attempting to get a job," she added. "We think it's intentional to make educators fearful and confused."
California Teachers' Association president David Goldberg told USA Today that "this almost seems like satire and so far removed from my research around what Oklahoma educators need and deserve."
"I can't see how this isn't some kind of hyper-political grandstanding that doesn't serve any of those needs," he added.
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