DSA Mayor Mamdani Embraces Establishment After 8 Months in Office

Eight months into his tenure as New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani stood at a 9/11 memorial on a Friday morning and shook hands with Rudy Giuliani—the same man who had spent the previous days denouncing him in explicitly Islamophobic language and demanding he stay away from the event. The handshake was deliberate. It was meant to signal something.

Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had run for office on a platform of rupture. Over a million New Yorkers voted for him. Tens of thousands volunteered. They were angry about inequality so severe that Wall Street bonuses had reached $49.2 billion while the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment exceeded $4,000 a month. His own administration's Office of Equity and Racial Justice reported in April that 61.8 percent of city residents—5.04 million people—lacked the resources to meet basic living costs. Mamdani promised free childcare, free buses, frozen rents. He presented himself as an antidote to both Trump and the corporate Democratic establishment.

What he delivered instead was a cabinet designed to reassure the very forces he had run against. He retained police commissioner Jessica Tisch, a billionaire whose retention had been demanded by corporate executives and pro-Israel organizations. His first deputy mayor was Dean Fuleihan, a longtime party operative whom the president of the Partnership for New York City—the city's most prominent business association—praised for knowing "where all the bodies are buried." He appointed several former Biden administration officials and established a business advisory council of corporate executives from finance, real estate, healthcare and retail. The message was clear: continuity, not change.

That continuity extended to policing. Mamdani maintained the "broken windows" strategy introduced by Giuliani decades earlier, kept the vast NYPD surveillance apparatus intact, and left untouched the Strategic Response Group—the unaccountable unit he had pledged during his campaign to disband. When police killed Pamela Cisneros, a 49-year-old woman in mental health crisis, in Times Square on August 31, Mamdani rushed to defend the officers. Four days later, when officers shot and killed Chaun Bottom, 41, who had climbed the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, Mamdani issued a statement thanking the NYPD for preventing "a horrific attack from becoming even worse."

The confrontation with workers came swiftly. In January, nearly 15,000 nurses struck at three large hospital systems. Governor Kathy Hochul had already signed an emergency order permitting out-of-state nurses to staff the struck hospitals before the walkout even began—a strikebreaking operation authorized in advance. Mamdani appeared on picket lines twice, calling for negotiations and urging "both sides" to reach a deal that "honors our nurses." On February 5, the 25th day of the strike, he endorsed Hochul for re-election. He worked behind the scenes with the union president to shut down the strike, triggering a near revolt among nurses at NewYork Presbyterian.

When the Long Island Rail Road workers walked out in May, Mamdani refused to appear anywhere near the picket lines. He said only that he was "hopeful that both sides will be able to reach a fair deal." The state's strikebreaking contingency plan—shuttle buses to partially replace LIRR service—was publicized by the administration itself. The calculation was transparent: avoid setting a precedent for significant wage increases that might encourage militancy among subway and bus workers, whose contract expired the same night the LIRR walkout began.

Over the summer, the confrontation took on a sharper edge. In August, Mamdani fired Haitian municipal workers—at least dozens by the city's own account, possibly hundreds—after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration's revocation of Temporary Protected Status. More significantly, when the City Council unanimously passed a $10,000 bonus for school paraprofessionals, some of the lowest-paid public sector workers earning in the low $30,000s, Mamdani's administration went to court to overturn it. They invoked New York's Taylor Law, a reactionary anti-worker statute that prevents public workers from striking. "We will not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table," the administration declared—meaning that whatever laws exist cannot interfere with the ability of the trade union apparatus, working with the state, to sell workers out. The mayor elected on a promise to defend immigrants and raise up the lowest paid had invoked federal law to fire immigrant workers and an anti-strike statute to block the raise for the lowest paid.

On September 3, Moet McCullum, a 41-year-old mother of three with eleven months on the job, was struck and killed by a D train at the 161st Street–Yankee Stadium station while setting up flagging lights for overnight construction. The train operator reported seeing no warning lights. Over decades, the city, state and federal governments have refused to make the infrastructure investments needed to prevent such tragedies, which have become routine. The roughly 90,000 city workers covered by DC 37's citywide contract face expiration on November 6. Forty thousand transit workers have been without a contract since May. The stage is set for escalation.