{"id":617,"date":"2026-07-15T14:08:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T14:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=617"},"modified":"2026-07-15T14:08:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T14:08:08","slug":"mayor-mamdani-vs-the-new-york-post-and-its-ilk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=617","title":{"rendered":"Mayor Mamdani vs. the \u201cNew York Post\u201d (and Its Ilk)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

More than half a year into his unprecedented tenure as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, has encountered his fair of challenges. There were the homeless deaths during a brutally cold winter. There was a budget gap that threatened to damage the city\u2019s finances. There were squabbles over how to close it\u2014Mamdani, at one point, floated a deeply unpopular property tax hike\u2014and tussles with the City Council over how generously to fund an ambitious and very expensive housing voucher program. Later on, Mamdani\u2019s decision to endorse two DSA members running for Congress alienated senior members of the House delegation. Through it all, his rivals and ideological enemies stood ready to pounce on just about every misstep, real or perceived.<\/p>\n

Read more The Genocide of South Lebanon<\/a><\/p>\n

What\u2019s made the Mamdani mayoralty fascinating is how, for now at least, it\u2019s overcome powerful and entrenched opposition. Never before was a mayor elected who was despised by so many<\/em> wealthy New Yorkers. Plenty of elites disliked Bill de Blasio, the last mayor who identified as a progressive, but even he was a career politician who had forged close relationships with the major real estate developers in the five boroughs. Mamdani, from the jump, was an enemy of capital, even as he\u2019s sought to smooth over relationships with the business community. His battle with Ken Griffin, a right-wing billionaire, over his support for a tax on luxury second homes\u2014Mamdani cut a video singling Griffin out\u2014was a reminder of where the mayor stood.<\/p>\n

(Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)<\/p>\n

The broad swath of centrist Democrats and conservatives who have hoped to wound Mamdani enough to sap him of political capital are still figuring out, all these months later, how to land real blows. Mamdani, to them, is almost like a rope-a-dope fighter, ducking and dodging whenever they feel they\u2019re close, slowly wearing them down. Emblematic of this dynamic has been Mamdani\u2019s relationship with the New York Post<\/em>. The Murdoch-owned tabloid delighted in flaying de Blasio for eight years before, for a period, evolving into an Eric Adams propaganda organ. The Post<\/em> is powerful because it regularly provides granular local coverage that even The New York Times<\/em> has backed away from, and it has the ability, with a large circulation and highly trafficked website, to influence other outlets, whether it\u2019s television, radio, print media, or the conversation on social media. Even with the Post<\/em> lambasting him almost every day, de Blasio did win reelection, but he steadily lost popularity and never quite regained the political momentum he enjoyed in his very first year, when he began building up his universal prekindergarten program. The Post<\/em> bashed him for the homeless in the streets\u2014the problem, of course, predated him\u2014and for hating the police, though he had hired a law-and-order police commissioner and supported budgets to grow the NYPD headcount. When de Blasio attended funerals for two officers assassinated in late 2014, police turned their backs on him.<\/p>\n

What made the Post<\/em>\u2019s attacks on de Blasio so effective was that they were able to create a narrative about his tenure that hardened rather quickly. De Blasio was portrayed as feckless, inattentive, and even vain, the caricature of the lazy, professorial liberal condescending to everyday New Yorkers. Much of this was unfair, but de Blasio did feed the beast in his own way, often showing up late for events and straining, with little success, to build a national profile. His run for the presidency, in 2019, was a disaster, and his endorsements in 2016 and 2020 caused him more agita than anything else. A Hillary Clinton supporter when many progressives went for Bernie Sanders, de Blasio nevertheless wasn\u2019t beloved in Clintonworld and was mocked for his lonely door-knocking in Iowa. Meanwhile, he backed Sanders in 2020, but the support felt belated and he wasn\u2019t taken seriously as a surrogate. Minor controversies, ginned up by his enemies, dogged him, too. There was eating pizza with a fork. Dropping the groundhog. Getting blamed, stupidly, for not plowing the Upper East Side after a snowstorm as a form of political retribution. When he found himself in highly pitched political fights, like Uber\u2019s incursion into New York City, he saw his success rate drop.<\/p>\n

With Mamdani, the Post<\/em> and its allies have largely tried to run the same playbook. Virtually every day, there is an attack lodged, a controversy inflated. Mamdani is anti-police, antisemitic, overly woke, the boy with the silver spoon in his mouth. Sometimes, they bash Mamdani\u2019s wife, Rama Duwaji, who has no role in the administration. Of late, the Post<\/em> has been on the warpath because a map of immigrant enclaves left out Little Italy, even though it\u2019s been many decades since any actual Italian immigrants lived there. Duwaji, meanwhile, is taking heat for traveling abroad during the Fourth of July; it doesn\u2019t matter that she doesn\u2019t collect a public salary and therefore is free to go wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Not all these controversies are irrelevant\u2014given the Graham Platner fiasco, it\u2019s fine to raise questions about Mamdani\u2019s close association with Morris Katz\u2014but the right wing threatens, with Mamdani, to become the boy who cried wolf. Complain every day, and nothing matters.<\/p>\n

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Mamdani has retained strong poll numbers because he is a rare political talent, a global celebrity who is also very attuned to the performative nature of being mayor of New York. He plainly relishes the job in a way de Blasio did not. He visits night clubs, plays soccer in the park, fanatically cheers on the Knicks, and documents all of it on social media, where he enjoys a massive following. Uganda-born, he can\u2019t run for president, so he\u2019s rooted in the five boroughs. He is helped, too, by the ineffectual nature of the attacks against him. The problem for conservatives is they haven\u2019t settled on a consistent narrative, one that makes sense and can resonate with the broader electorate. Either Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor, is bringing Shariah law to New York or he\u2019s too socially liberal, too supportive of trans rights. He hates the police, but crime is low so only<\/em> his police commissioner can get credit\u2014but he and Jessica Tisch, a billionaire friendly with the Post<\/em>, have a decent working relationship. He\u2019s a Marxist radical or he\u2019s disappointing the left because buses aren\u2019t free yet and he hasn\u2019t been able to hike income taxes on millionaires.<\/p>\n

In some ways, the pro-Trump conservatives who are angered most by Mamdani are learning, at last, what it has felt like for liberals to attempt to weaken Trump throughout the 2010s and early \u201920s. Trump, now, is failing, but that has less to do with the left and a lot more to do with his shambolic, disastrous presidency. When Trump was stronger, Democrats would latch on to endless streams of mini-controversies that were less about substance and more about an inane tweet or utterance Trump made. Eventually, they learned that it was best to focus on what Trump was actually doing, the tangible wreckage. The affordability attacks work because Trump\u2019s Iran War has driven up the cost of gasoline.<\/p>\n

With Mamdani, the Post <\/em>and their ilk find themselves with an opponent who isn\u2019t easily rattled, who won\u2019t bend at the slightest provocation. There are many substantive critiques to make of the Mamdani administration\u2014can they balance the budget next<\/em> year?\u2014but his enemies can\u2019t discipline themselves enough to stick to them. For now, they\u2019re punching air and little else.<\/p>\n

Read more This Week in \u2018Nation\u2019 History: Debating the JFK Legacy, in Real Time<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":616,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nMayor Mamdani vs. the \u201cNew York Post\u201d (and Its Ilk) - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=617\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mayor Mamdani vs. the \u201cNew York Post\u201d (and Its Ilk) - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=617\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-15T14:08:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=617#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=617\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Mayor Mamdani vs. the \u201cNew York Post\u201d (and Its Ilk)\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-15T14:08:08+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=617\"},\"wordCount\":1328,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=617#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/8dabd85df57430fefd3e2892806e8d23.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=617#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=617\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=617\",\"name\":\"Mayor Mamdani vs. the \u201cNew York Post\u201d (and Its Ilk) - 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