An anti-Mamdani pact among pols is problematic
President Donald Trump, from left, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, NYC Mayor Eric Adams, and Curtis Sliwa. Credit: AP, Bloomberg
The general election campaign for New York City mayor opened in earnest this week with fingerprint-free accounts of what sounded like an unlikely but not entirely impossible scenario.
Two months out, with Democratic nominee Assemb. Zohran Mamdani leading in polls as expected, scandal-scarred Mayor Eric Adams would accept an offer of a federal post from President Donald Trump. The president famously got Adams off the hook on felony charges earlier this year by getting his newly politicized Justice Department to drop a pending felony corruption case against the mayor in exchange for help with ICE operations.
But there’s more. With Adams out of the race, Trump would supposedly try to lure Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa out of campaigning to "clear the field" so that ex-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who lost the June primary, would have a better chance of defeating the young, left-wing Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist.
Billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis, a longtime friend of Sliwa and owner of WABC-AM on which the former Guardian Angel has had a show for years, was in touch with Trump about the race, The New York Times reported.
Adams on Wednesday said he’s staying in and Sliwa has already said so.
Even if it’s real, such a murky deal would be an iffy proposition. "If this is accurate, it would be perceived as making Cuomo beholden to Trump — and help elect Mamdani," said one Democratic operative.
But the effort to get other candidates to step aside for him has been a Cuomo mission for weeks. On Tuesday, longtime Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi praised lawyer Jim Walden for having dropped his long-shot mayoral bid.
"Jim Walden put ego and ambition aside for the good of New York City," Azzopardi said. "His decision underscores the existential threat our city faces in Zohran Mamdani — a dangerously inexperienced 33-year-old socialist with no meaningful work experience, no record of governing or accomplishment, and a reckless ideology that would jeopardize public safety, economic growth, and the very future of New York City." he said.
An important factor has been Cuomo’s alienation from the state Democratic Party he once ruled, and his often cordial relationship with the Republican Party in Albany. Cuomo also was friendly with Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano before the latter’s 2016 indictment on fraud and corruption charges and later imprisonment.
And unusually, for New York City Democrats, neither Andrew Cuomo nor his father, the late Gov. Mario Cuomo, ever fell out with ex-GOP Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In 1994, Giuliani even crossed party lines to endorse the elder Cuomo against George Pataki, who unseated him. That was long before Giuliani was disbarred and successfully sued for lying, as a Trump confidant, on behalf of the latter’s losing 2020 campaign.
Trump and Cuomo knew each other for decades as politically connected "Queens boys" with up-and-down relations. But if they are simpatico now, it comes at a clumsy moment as Trump seeks to exert questionable authority over public safety policies in Democratic-run cities like New York.
Sliwa recently said: "Every day it’s Trump versus Zohran Mamdani, it’s a good day for Zohran Mamdani ... In this situation, it doesn’t help if [Trump] intervenes in New York City."
Are we seeing an unlikely last-ditch strategy here? Wait and see. A spokeswoman for Cuomo was not commenting on Wednesday.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
